Category Archives: windows

internet, microsoft, software, Uncategorized, web authoring, windows

New Live Writer is out

Beta, of course. But since this is my favourite offline blog authoring tool, I’m taking a break from Google posts to mention it here. You can download it here – I’m using it to write this post. The official blog has a list of new features.

Do they amount to much? Inline spell checking (wiggly underlines) is great, except that it still seems to be hard-wired to US English. I like Paste Special, particularly as I’ve had problems pasting from Word in the past, with Writer inserting annoying font tags (something to do with using the embedded IE editor, no doubt). That said, I’ve just tried a paste from Word and it worked fine, so perhaps this is fixed too. Synch between local and online edits is neat – when you retrieve a post from Live Writer’s local cache, it updates it from the online version, so that it is now safe to edit in either location. Writer also exposes a richer set of properties, including Excerpt. There are a bunch of other changes that don’t matter much to me, such as Sharepoint support. Table editing? I don’t generally use tables in blog posts, but it could be useful.

On the minus side, Writer has sprouted an odd extra toolbar so that you now have three rows above the working area: menu, toolbar, and editing toolbar. That looks cluttered and unnecessary. There’s the spelling problem mentioned above. And as for this, words fail me:

 

Overall, a useful but low-key upgrade.

Update: Graham Chastney has a hack to fix the US spelling.

security, software, windows

Microsoft: .doc and .xls are dangerous

A common phenomenon in the tech world is when vendors trash their own past products in an effort to convince you of the value of shiny new ones.

Here is an example. Microsoft’s security advisory 937696 and the related KB 935865 tells us of the dangers posed by Office binary formats including .doc, .xls and .ppt:

MOICE uses the 2007 Microsoft Office system converters to convert the Office binary format files into the Office Open XML format. This process helps remove the potential threat that may exist if the document is opened in the binary format. Additionally, MOICE converts incoming files in an isolated environment. This helps protect the computer from a potential threat.

What’s MOICE? It’s the Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment, proving that even after Silverlight, the department of verbose and meaningless names is alive and well in Redmond. It is an add-on to Office 2003 or 2007 that automatically converts Office binary formats to Office Open XML (OOXML). Further, administrators can now choose to implement File Block, which prevents users from opening specified binary document types without first converting them.

The presumption here is that OOXML documents are safer. Probably true, especially since documents containing macros now require a different extension (.docm, .xlm) to flag the fact that they contain macros.

A side effect is that MOICE spreads the adoption of OOXML. Like Joe Wilcox, I can’t help wondering whether it was this, rather than security, which has prompted this release.

OOXML has real advantages, yet it can also be tiresome. Users install Office 2007, email a Word document to someone, then get a perplexed reply saying that the document won’t open. I’ve been known to show people how to set the default back to the old binary formats to avoid this problem – I would love to know how many Office 2007 rollouts do this as a matter of course.

After all, it is late in the day for Microsoft to consider blocking these formats. The Sophos web site has a Top Ten Viruses page with a neat feature: you can see stats for the last 10 years. These confirm my hunch. Back in 1999, there were 9 office macro viruses in the top 10 (Sophos prefixes these with WM or XM). Today? None. Further, note that the top 10, according to Sophos, account for 94.6% of all viruses in the wild.

The reason is that in the intervening years Microsoft has built reasonably good macro protection into Office. A factor here is that emailed documents rarely need to contain macros, so if you double-click an attachment and it wants to run a macro, that’s a big clue that something is awry.

That said, there is clearly still some risk from macro viruses, or from documents with crafted corruptions that infect a PC. Recently, Open Office has also been shown to be vulnerable. So MOICE has a value, but is it enough to compensate for the cost in terms of inconvenience? After all, while Office binary formats are almost universally readable, that’s not the case for OOXML. If you run Windows, and have Office 2000 or higher, and broadband Internet, and sufficient rights to install the converter, then the process is reasonably smooth; but that is a long way from universal.

MOICE strikes me as low priority in security terms, but nevertheless an intriguing development in the battle for XML office format adoption.

 

software, software development, windows

Adobe CS3 won’t install

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Users are complaining that Adobe Creative Suite 3 simply won’t install. I’m one of them, running 32-bit Vista Professional. Pop the DVD in, click Install CS3 Web Premium, setup starts running, then silently closes. No error message, no install either.

Of course I have tried a few things. I’m not the only one struggling: the Adobe user forums are full of similar problems. Note: similar but not identical. There appear to be multiple issues, and not just on Vista but on XP as well. Here are some popular solutions:

I’ve tried the first two without success so far, on two different machines. Next stop tech support.

It looks to me as if Adobe is having Windows Installer issues. Perhaps nobody had time to read and observe the Tao of the Windows Installer. Still, I reckon Adobe could do a better job with the error logging and reporting. There are installer logs by default in \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Installers\, but mine have nothing helpful; no errors are reported. The Windows installer supports a detailed logging mode, but it seems difficult to enable with this particular installer. The calls to the installer itself are wrapped by some kind of Adobe package manager, and the .msi files are designed to prevent you from opening them directly.

Here’s what I get if I run setup from a command prompt:

Begin Adobe Setup
UI mode: Full GUI
End Adobe Setup. Exit code: 4

Hardly illuminating. If I do the silent mode, I get Exit code: 7 instead.

The bottom line is that I have no clue what is going wrong. Perhaps it is a campaign to promote the Mac version. I’ll keep you posted.

Update

I fixed it. First, the logging was more helpful than I realised at first. In the Installers folder mentioned above, there is a file called:

Add or Remove Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium 1.0.log.gz

I’d not looked at this because I also had a file called:

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium 1.0.log

It turns out that the former is more useful than the latter. Of course it is compressed in .gz format, which Vista does not understand, but the open source 7-zip archiver takes care of that. So I extracted the log and found this entry:

DEBUG: Error 2739: Could not access JavaScript runtime for custom action Internal Error 2739.

That gave me something to troubleshoot. I soon found this article which says to re-register JScript:

regsvr32 jscript.dll

from an administrator command prompt. I was away; the setup ran fine after that.

Incidentally I did call tech support, but the techie didn’t help directly; he asked me to email the log though, and it was looking at that which gave me the answer. Now I can get on with the review…

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software, windows

Microsoft has “no plans to litigate”

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According to Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy, Microsoft is not planning to litigate against open source after all. In an interview for Infoworld he says:

Our strategy from everyone in the company — from [Steve] Ballmer to Brad Smith to me and everyone in between — has always been to license and not litigate as it relates to our intellectual property. So we have no plans to litigate. You can never say we’ll never do anything in the future, but that’s not our strategy.

I am not surprised – for the reasons I stated earlier. Of course, the other side of the coin is that if Microsoft doesn’t intend to enforce its patents, then all this patent waving is little more than bluster. It is shadow-boxing. We will see plenty more of it on both sides.

 

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internet, windows

A bad experience with Windows Live

The main problem I have with Windows Live is lack of confidence that it will actually work as advertised. There is a rational explanation for this kind of hunch. It is formed from previous experiences, and once formed, it hard to shake off.

Here’s what happened today. I wanted to contact a Microsoft blogger who hosts his blog on http://spaces.live.com. I couldn’t see an email address (understandably), so I clicked on the button that said Send a message. I was prompted to sign into Windows Live, which I did, and then after a bit of screen flashing and approving of ActiveX controls I had a form into which I could type.

I typed the message. Then I did something which reflects my lack of confidence: I copied the message to the clipboard, in case something went wrong and I had to type it again. Finally, I clicked Send. This is what I got:

Note that all my text was zapped. I closed the browser, restarted it, signed in again, returned to the message form, pasted in my text, and clicked Send again. Same result.

I’d noticed during the process that this messaging system has some relationship with Live Messenger. I figured therefore that upgrading Messenger to the latest version might help, especially since Messenger nags me on this subject whenever I start it up. So I fired up Messenger and allowed it to update itself. During the install I got this dialog:

Frankly, I will not take anything Microsoft says about user experience seriously until the company stops inflicting this kind of dialog on its users. Look at it. It recommends that I close some open programs, but does not say what the consequences will be if I do not. It is a vague threat that something might not work right. But that’s not all. Internet Explorer was not visibly open at the time. I had to go into Task Manager and end the process. Many users would not make it that far.

It gets worse. I’m being asked to close Windows Explorer. This is the application that forms the Windows desktop. If you close it, you lose the Start menu, taskbar, desktop icons, pretty much everything except the background.

Still, I didn’t want to risk a bad install. I went into Task Manager and ended the explorer.exe process. No more desktop. Then I continued the Messenger setup. It went through fine (except that no, I don’t want msn.com as my home page, but thanks for asking). Finally, I restarted Explorer. Task Manager – New Task – type Explorer – hit Enter. Yes, I’ve been here before. Zing! back comes my desktop.

Back to Live Spaces, paste in message, click send, and … you’ve guessed it.  “An error occurred loading this module”. Never mind.

 

software, windows

Microsoft vs Open Source: only one loser

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Microsoft, of course. Fortune reports that Microsoft will seek to extract royalties from users of open-source software. That would be monumental folly. Here’s why.

First, the company already has an image problem. It’s the “Evil Empire”, the vendor we love to hate. Litigating against free software would be appalling PR.

Second, let’s consider who would lose out if Microsoft succeeded in making widely used open source operating systems or applications illegal. Clearly, it would be the users of that software. But these users are in many cases also Microsoft’s customers. Windows on the desktop, Linux and Apache on the server, for example. Anyone who uses the internet uses open source software. If Microsoft litigates against open source, it will be litigating against its own customers.

Third, Microsoft won’t succeed. I don’t find it difficult to believe that:

…FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents.

as Fortune reports. But what if big patent holders like IBM decide to trawl their files looking for ways in which Windows or Office might infringe a patent or two? I’d be astonished if they came back empty-handed. This is not a game that Microsoft can win.

Fourth, the free and open source software movement is good for all of us. It’s lowered prices and fostered innovation. That’s a problem for a company that decides to attack it, because everyone will want it to fail.

Fifth, Microsoft has a dismal record in the courtroom.

Sixth, major legal confrontations are a huge distraction. They drain productivity. They divert energy and attention away from what the company is good at.

If Fortune is to be believed, Microsoft has been listening too much to its lawyers, and not enough to its customers.

Microsoft can thrive alongside open source. The way to do so is to create great software like Silverlight. Not by embarking on unwinnable legal contests.

Despite the above, I can understand (though not approve) that Microsoft may wish to mutter about its patents now and again, to spread a little FUD and dissuade customers from a switch to Linux. This may be no more than that. Otherwise, it is making a costly mistake.

 

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software development, windows

Office Open XML needs wrapper classes

I’ve been writing a hands-on style article on using the Packaging API and Office Open XML. It all works smoothly, but its glaringly apparent that Microsoft needs to provide some wrapper classes for Open XML documents to make the API more usable. You can download some code snippets, which is a start, but these only scratch the surface. After all, Office developers are used to the COM automation API which makes it relatively easy to create and manipulate documents. By contrast, to get anywhere with Open XML you have to understand the raw XML. It is still miles better than working with RTF, or with the binary Office formats, but more difficult than it should be.

By way of illustration, look no further than the official code snippet for XLInsertStringIntoCell, which does what its name suggests: writes a string into the specified cell of an Excel spreadsheet. It is over 200 lines of code and comment (in fairness, more comment than code). That would be just 2 or 3 lines in VBA. Of course, once you have the wrapper function, it is just as easy. Unfortuntely there is a lot to wrap, but it is not necessary to be comprehensive. A simplified DOM that enabled the creation of basic formatted documents and spreadsheets without having to write thousands of lines of code would meet most needs.

I realise that you can write a “Hello world” document fairly easily; I’ve done it myself. But “Hello World” is not particularly useful. After all, you could output plain text or CSV, and Word and Excel will open them happily enough. The point of Open XML is to enable documents that have a little more to them: headers and footers, specified margins, rich formatting with fonts and paragraph styles, tables and graphics. Doing all that in Open XML is not trivial.

I am not the first to think along these lines. For example, here’s some code posted to CodePlex for working with Excel. Good stuff, but personally I’d like to see some official libraries, or even a well-run (WIX-style) officially endorsed open source project for this. It’s badly needed.

 

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software development, windows

Developers still miss VB6

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A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on why Visual Basic 6 was frozen.

The topic is still of interest, and some reason reddit.com picked this link up recently, so the article has thousands of new readers.

If nothing else, it proves that developers still miss the old Visual Basic. Perhaps not so surprising; as I pointed out, it once had a reasonable claim to be the most popular programming language. That would not be true now; C# seems to be more popular than VB.NET, certainly among professionals, and I suspect Java is the number one overall (though these things are hard to measure intelligently).

Would I write the same article today? More or less, though the arrival of Vista and Office 2007 would make me state more forcibly that neither COM nor the Win32 API is dead. I still think that maintaining old-style VB would not have been feasible for Microsoft, except like FoxPro as a legacy thing and sadly now a dead end.

It’s also worth noting that VBA lives on, even though Microsoft is focusing on VSTO in its place. Except on the Mac, which is another story.

PS: I’ve fixed the comment feature on the article, so you can now have your say.

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security, software, windows

Why you should keep UAC enabled on Vista

Ian Griffiths has a nice post on why you should not disable UAC, even if you are are a developer.

I’ve followed that advice and it works for me, though there are still one or two apps where I have to Run As Administrator.

That does not include Visual Studio 2005. Despite the warning which it issues, I find it works for me without it (I realise there are scenarios where this won’t be the case).

The intriguing thing is that (as Griffiths notes) even Microsoft is not solidly behind UAC. I’ve commented on this before.

Since there is still a myth that running Vista with UAC enabled results in an avalanche of intrusive dialogs, it’s worth popping up from time to time to say that it is not so.

Windows security affects all of us, even if you do not like Windows or use it. UAC (and IE7’s protected mode, which depends on it) is a step forward and worth supporting.

 

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software, windows

Hi, got a Dell? Outlook slow? Let me fix it

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I enjoyed this comment from Thad Leingang who found one of my posts on Outlook 2007 performance problems. He is one of many to suffer from a Dell add-in installed by default called Media Direct; I’m not sure what this is meant to do, but as a side-effect it apparently slows Outlook 2007 to a crawl. Leingang fixed the issue thanks to an earlier comment here, but for him that was not enough:

I have made it a personal mission to seek out every DELL XPS1210 customer and tell him to ditch Media Direct. I am in sales and travel quite a bit. So in the past 3 weeks, I have interacted with 7 M1210 users. For instance, in Airports it is easy to spot the other Business travelers and it is customary to size-up each other’s package (PC that it). “Hi there, I see you have a M1210. Are you having a performance problem with your Outlook?” At first, I often get this “who the heck are you” look but after I explain more, I see tears form in their eyes. Tears of gratitude! Last Sunday in salt Lake airport, I help a guy named Dave delete Media Direct from his Dell. I was rewarded with free beer until I could drink no more (I had to catch my flight.) I even receive an unsolicited hug from a lovely lady in Irvine.

But why are users resorting to peer-to-peer support in airport lounges? Mainly because of the failure of the official alternative:

After I fixed my PC, My IT guy (Charlie) called Dell support and they said, “Oh yea, we are aware of this issue.” THEN WHY THE #@&K did you not tell us in the last 6 support emails we entered? “I am sorry sir, I will report this to my manager” BULL. This is undoubtedly a Dell problem!

I would be interested to know, first, whether Dell has fixed the issue with this add-in; and second, whether it has bothered to email its registered customers with the information Leingang is dispensing on his travels.

 

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