Category Archives: windows

.net, microsoft, software development, windows

Microsoft’s cloud platform, multi-touch Windows 7: mining the PDC schedule

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I’ve been looking at the PDC Session schedule, as posted so far. Microsoft is serious about its new cloud computing platform. For a start, count the sessions.

Out of 180 posted so far, here are the subjects with 10 or more sessions:

  1. Cloud services [33]
  2. Windows 7 [22]
  3. SQL Server [16]
  4. Visual Studio [16]
  5. Silverlight [13]
  6. Live Platform [11]
  7. ASP.NET [10]
  8. Languages [10]

That’s a huge focus on the cloud. Microsoft’s problem: the company is not perceived as a leader in cloud computing. It has two distinct challenges: first, getting the technology in place, and second, winning developers to its new platform. In mitigation, it is in theory well placed to migrate users from on-premise Windows and Office to cloud equivalents.

Here’s a few snippets about Microsoft’s cloud platform:

A lap around Cloud Services: … Learn about the pillars of the platform, its service lifecycle, and see how they fit with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Also, hear about the services roadmap over the next few years.

Cloud Computing: Economics and Service Level Agreements: … Topics include the pricing model for the cloud computing platform, how to monetize a service, and how to reduce the total cost of ownership.

Connecting Active Directory to Microsoft Cloud Services: … Manage and secure end user access to cloud services using your existing investment in Active Directory. Enable end users to access cloud services through existing Active Directory accounts, the same way they access your intranet-hosted software today. Hear how to enable existing software to use new service capabilities without re-writes, and do it all through the use of open and standard protocols.

That last item is a big deal. Managing separate user identities for local and cloud services is horrible.

What else can we glean from the PDC schedule. Here’s a few items that intrigued me:

Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code … Windows 7 introduces a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code.

Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications … This session highlights the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explains how you can leverage them in your applications.

Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit … a toolkit from the MIX Online Team, that is aimed at web developers and designers to make it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats on the web. See also here.

Concurrent programming: Microsoft Visual Studio: Bringing out the Best in Multicore Systems … demonstrations of the parallel performance analysis and optimization tools in the next release of Microsoft Visual Studio. .

Oslo of course: A Lap around "Oslo" … “Oslo" is the family of new technologies that enable data-driven development and execution of services and applications. Come and learn how to capture all aspects of an application schematized in the "Oslo" repository and use "Oslo" directly to drive the execution of deployed applications.

Generics and constructors in XAML: Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative Programming Using XAML … Learn about XAML additions like: support for generics, object references, non-default constructors, and more.

Instant cloud apps: Research: BAM, AjaxScope, and Doloto … Hear how BAM can turn a simple specification into a web-based cloud application with the click of a button. Learn how AjaxScope and Doloto automatically instrument and rewrite your web applications’ JavaScript code for end-to-end monitoring and optimization.

Office, a big feature of PDC 2005 when the ribbon was introduced, only has 3 sessions posted so far, though there may be more to come. Normally a new version of Office accompanies each new version of the Windows client.

Another question: what is in .NET Framework 4.0, to merit a full new version number? There is surprisingly little mention of it so far.

.net, microsoft, open source, software development, windows

Microsoft’s open source breakthrough

Microsoft’s integration of jQuery and Visual Studio/ASP.NET is significant and I wrote about it on the ITJobBlog. I’ve included some comments from Scott Guthrie about ASP.Net AJAX vs jQuery.

Miguel de Icaza, who works on open source versions of .NET, also says it is a “first time for Microsoft”.

Rick Strahl, who is an ASP.NET MVP and writes an excellent technical blog, says in a comment to Guthrie’s original post:

To me jQuery has easily  the most game changing component in Web Development since ASP.NET originally was released.

It is a breakthrough; but note that it comes from the developer division, which is more inclined towards open source than other divisions running Windows and Office.

amazon, virtualization, windows

Windows comes to Amazon’s cloud

You will soon be able to run Windows on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), in a fully supported manner. Jeff Barr says this is scheduled for public release by the end of 2008:

The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.

This opens up EC2 to a substantial new group of potential customers. They will be asking, of course, if the cloud can be made reliable.

Now, how about integrating with Hyper-V and/or VMware so you could easily move your servers in and out of the cloud?

adobe, multimedia, windows

Adobe Media Player adding to Windows bloat

I allowed Adobe Media Player to auto-update yesterday, and noticed that it added itself to the list of applications that run automatically on startup (without asking, as I recall).

This is an AIR application and has a relatively large memory footprint even when inactive, according to Task Manager. It is also currently of little use as far as I can tell; Adobe no doubt plans for it to be the next iTunes, but right now there’s only a tiny selection of videos on offer, some of which report “not available in your territory” if you try to play them.

You can stop this software from impacting Windows performance by going to Options – Automatic notifications and unchecking Automatically launch on startup and Close Adobe Media Player to the taskbar.

The Windows utility msconfig is great for identifying startup applications and shows you where they can be disabled. Stripping these down to a minimum can have a marked affect on performance.

internet, microsoft, web authoring, windows

Internet Explorer no longer the de facto Web standard

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Following Scott Guthrie’s remarkable announcement about jQuery getting integrated into Visual Studio and ASP.NET, I took a look at the jQuery site and blog. I mix and match with my browser usage, and on this occasion was using IE7. The page was badly scrambled:

It is meant to look like this, as it does in IE8:

I tried the site with IE7 on another machine and it was fine, so this is not a problem with all IE7 installations, though it is fully repeatable on this particular box. I don’t know what is causing the issue.

Still, it reminded me of a significant change on the Web, which is that IE is no longer the safest choice if you are pragmatic and simply want sites to look right. In fact, there are more occasions when I have to close IE and use Firefox or Chrome to view a site properly, than the other way round.

I also notice a sharp decline in IE usage in my browser stats. 80% of visitors run Windows, but only 40% use IE in this month’s figures. A year ago that was 82% and 58%.

My stats are not representative of the web as a whole, which gives IE a larger share, but everyone seems to be reporting a decline. IE8 may slow the decline, but I doubt it will reverse it.

microsoft, windows

Fixing slow Windows Vista: yet again, it’s a third-party problem

Great post from Mark Russinovitch on fixing a slow Vista system, belonging to his wife.

The fact that was in the family suggests that this kind of incident is common. My reasoning: if Russinovitch were blogging about an unusually slow PC identified in Alaska and sent to Redmond for examination, that would suggest that this stuff is rare. If it happens to the person next to you, it is more likely to be commonplace.

So Vista is “not responding to her typing or mouse clicks”. What’s the problem? Not at all obvious. Russinovitch fires up his Process Explorer (no, Task Manager would not do) and has a look. Still not obvious. Iexplore.exe and Dllhost.exe are the culprits – except they are not. The problem turns out to be a buggy Flash player or application (he still doesn’t know which), and a third-party MP4 demultiplexer. The Flash problem remains unsolved; the only solution when it turns up is to terminate Iexplore.exe. The demultiplexer is now disabled with no ill-effects.

The specifics are only interesting to geeks, but there is a wider point. Most people:

  • Would have blamed Windows and Microsoft
  • Would not have been able to discover the cause of the problem
  • Would have shrugged and rebooted – which would work for a while

That “most people” includes many professionals. Be honest: how many tech professionals, whether in internal or external support, or PC repair experts, would have both known enough and cared enough to identify this kind of issue? A lot will say, “just reboot and hope it doesn’t happen again soon.” I’m not even sure that they are wrong. Look at the economics: if a reboot is a quick fix, how much time and expense does the problem merit?

Further, is Microsoft really innocent? Surely the OS could do a better job of identifying rogue processes and threads, and curbing the extent to which they can grab too much CPU. My experience of the troubleshooting wizards and self-healing capabilities in Vista is dismal; there are examples on this blog. Why isn’t there an automated tool that could follow the kinds of steps Russinovitch follows and identify the actual component that is causing problems?

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microsoft, vista, windows

Windows 7 screenshots hit the web

Windows 7 screenshots are showing up, for example on thinknext.net and windowsvienna.com. Much to see? Well, ribbon UI in WordPad and Paint; a much-enhanced Calculator with Standard, Scientific, Programmer, Statistics and Date Calculation modes; and an IDE, sorry ISE (Integrated Script Environment) for PowerShell.

Presuming these are genuine, they don’t tell us a lot about Windows 7 except that, as widely predicted, it looks more like a refined version of Vista than something boldly different. Given that Server 2008 turned out nicely, I’d say that’s no bad thing.

For the official word on Windows 7, see the Engineering Blog.

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apple, google, software development, web authoring, windows

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux will be a long while coming

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When I looked at the Chromium source code and did a build, I noticed how much of it was Windows-specific. Although the WebKit rendering component is already cross-platform, it seems that the Mac and Linux versions of Chromium and therefore Chrome are a long way from ready. This is from the build notes for Mac OS X:

Right now, the Mac build is a work in progress that is much closer to the start than the finish. No application that renders web pages is generated at the end of these instructions!

Cross-platform work usually involves compromises, and it looks like the Google team pointed the dial more towards optimising for Windows than towards ease of porting. That surprises me, since it likely means more work maintaining the application for several platforms as well as delays now.

Chrome’s ambitions as an application platform cannot be realised until it runs on the Mac. Further, a disproportionate number of web designers and developers use Apple.

How long is a long while? Good question. I’ll be seeing some Google folk tomorrow; I’ll let you know what they say.

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microsoft, software, software development, windows

Microsoft Oslo: a tool, a language, a repository

A couple of Microsofties are talking up the Oslo launch at the forthcoming PDC. “Oslo” is what Microsoft sees as the next generation of software development – I think.

Don Box and Douglas Purdy have just posted their own definitions. They should know, they’re working on it.

Box says:

With Oslo, we’re doing two things:

1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.

2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

Purdy:

we have boiled down Oslo to three very simple things:

  • A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner
  • A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models
  • A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

There will be a CTP for us all to try at PDC.

The last time the industry tried this I believe it was called UML 2.0; it excited a lot of theoreticians but made little impact on real-world application development. I’m sceptical about Oslo too; but let’s acknowledge at least that the goal is a worthy one.

Having said that, what do you think about this remark from Purdy:

For me personally, Oslo is the first step in my vision “to make everyone a programmer (even if they don’t know it)”.

I’m sorry, that “everyone a programmer” line brings to mind spaghetti-macros in Excel or some of those unmaintainable Access and Visual Basic applications which you still see sometimes if you hang around small businesses.

Still, there is a costly divide in development, which is to do with the fact that A is an expert is some particular field, B is a programmer; and somehow A’s expertise has to be expressed in B’s code. I think this is about bridging that gap.

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google, software, windows

What does not a valid win32 application mean? Say, with Chrome setup?

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Browsing through my logs I see a ton of searches like this:

chrome setup.exe not valid win32

I’m not sure which part of this site they are hitting. Anyway, this is for you.

In my experience “not a valid win32 application” invariably means a corrupt executable. I’d guess that what has happened here is that your web browser did not download the entire setup file, but stopped half way. Internet Explorer is particularly bad in this respect: it tells you that a download is complete, when you can see that it is not because the download size is not what it should be. It usually happens when the connection is poor, either at your end, or because of a busy server. It beats me why browsers don’t make a basic check on the file size after download.

It can also happen with a CD or DVD install, if the disk is corrupt or the drive is failing; or if your hard drive is failing.

The usual solution is to re-download the file.

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