Category Archives: windows

software development, windows

Installing Delphi 2006 on Vista

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This was a major struggle on the pre-release versions of Vista. I’m happy to say it is much easier on the final release, though I haven’t done extensive testing as yet. I ran the install, which seemed to hang until I realised there was a dialog behind the master setup screen which was waiting for an OK. It installed .NET Framework 1.1, then appeared to hang again. I actually clicked Cancel on the master setup, and bizarrely that seemed to kick into life the next stage of pre-requisites (.NET service pack, Visual J# etc).

I applied BDS2006 Update 2, which at first wouldn’t recognize my BDS 2006 edition. I then realised the update was not being elevated. Update 2 is a Windows installer patch, so I opened an admin command prompt, and applied the patch with msiexec /update. That worked fine. Finally, the hotfix rollup went on smoothly when run as administrator.

My aim is to discover if there is any need still to run XP. My second aim is to keep UAC fully enabled. It’s going OK so far.

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software, software development, windows

Vista hyperbole and reality – and what happened to the pillars of Longhorn?

At the official Vista launch yesterday (UK version) Microsoft’s UK Managing Director Gordon Frazer called the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 Microsoft’s “biggest launch to business ever,” following up with further extravagances such as “a new era in business computing.”

Clearly these launches are exceedingly important to Microsoft, but I doubt they will prove the most significant in its history. Maybe that honour should go to Windows 95, which saw off the threat from OS/2, or maybe Excel 5.0 and Word 6.0 in 1994, which as I recall was the end of serious competition in spreadsheets and word processors until the Sun-sponsored Open Office in 2002. Or maybe the arrival of Microsoft .NET in late 2001, which has proved a remarkably successful answer to Java for server-side computing.

Success for Vista will be more about maintenance than breaking new ground. Success will be persuading businesses to upgrade from XP, or dissuading those with Windows fatigue from switching to the Mac. Office is the same. I mostly like the bold new user interface in Office 2007, though I’m suspicious of Microsoft’s motives, but where can you go when you already dominate the market? Staying still will be a big achievement.

That said, I am impressed with what Microsoft is doing with SharePoint, its portal technology. At the launch we were shown how this can aggregate diverse sources of information. I consider business mashups behind the firewall to be a big growth area, and SharePoint is well-placed to benefit.

What about Vista? It’s a decent product, but I’m anticipating much anguish in the first months after its launch. Two reasons: drivers, and UAC. Many drivers for Vista are not yet done, many will never be done. Users will try to upgrade and find stuff does not work, or even worse their systems will not be stable. They will blame Microsoft, and Vista will have to live down a bad reputation. Then after a year or so the drivers will be there, the OS will have had a few fixes, and the world will realise that it is actually pretty good.

The second reason is UAC (User Account Control), the new security feature which means users run with reduced privileges most of the time. UAC is a genuine step forward in security, but breaks many applications. Some will turn it off and lose the security benefit, others will suffer the compatibility issues. In a year or two maybe software vendors will have fixed their applications to play nicely with UAC.

I’ve been using mostly Vista for several weeks. It is more enjoyable to use than XP, but there are still annoyances which leave you wondering what its creators were thinking. For example, Vista Media Center is excellent – though I had to switch off Aero to stop it flashing – but why does the music library apparently forget its index from time to time, so all your albums disappear for a while?

Other things are just not done yet. I plugged in a SmartPhone and couldn’t figure out why Vista could only see it as a storage device. Answer: Windows Mobile Device Center is still in beta, and has to be downloaded separately.  

Little things perhaps, and your annoyances will be different from mine, but they spoil the overall effect. And if I were running a business network, I would leave it at least six months before rolling it out.

Overall I still think .NET Framework 3.0 is more significant than Vista or Office 2007, though it was hardly mentioned yesterday. It includes, after all, the two remaining “pillars of Longhorn”: Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. It is these that may support Microsoft’s platform through to the next generation of applications, even though they were invisible at yesterday’s event.

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software, windows

Mysterious Windows Vista hang explained

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Depressing post from Windows tech guru Mark Russinovich on The Case of the Delayed Windows Vista File Open Dialogs. In Windows Vista, whenever you use the File – Open dialog to browse your documents folder, the system attempts to display your full user name in a breadcrumb trail. In certain cases, this causes a delay of “between 5 to 15 seconds”, during which time your app will hang. The bad scenario is this:

  • Your computer is joined to a Windows domain
  • Your computer is attached to a network
  • The attached network does not provide a route to your domain controller

Example: your laptop is connected to a hotel wi-fi access point, and you don’t have a VPN open. Not uncommon.

Why depressing?

It’s depressing because this kind of thing is a poor user experience. It’s not only the hang; it’s that Windows provides no clue as to why you are waiting. If you are tech-savvy, you can even go into Task Manager, view the processes, and observe that nothing is busy; System Idle Process has 90% + of the CPU time. If you are really tech-savvy, you do what Russinovich did, but it’s not trivial to do so.

It’s depressing because Windows is trading the user’s time for the sake of prettification. Do you care whether the File – Open dialog has your full name in its address bar? No, you just want to open a document. But you do care that the app you are working with has hung, especially if the boss is looking over your shoulder and asking to see the figures in that Excel spreadsheet you are trying to open.

It’s depressing because it’s not a new problem. The detail is new, but I’ve noticed similar hangs in Windows before, in cases such as when you have a mapped drive letter to a location that is not available, or a share that no longer exists. Perhaps some of these are sorted in Vista, but this is just a new twist on an old issue.

The good news: maybe with Russinovich on board things like this will get fixed. But as he notes, not until Vista SP1 at the earliest.

software, windows

Running Vista with dodgy drivers? Try turning off Aero

Vista may be RTM, but it’s early days for the drivers. This will cause confusion, and will damage Vista’s reputation. For example, a letter in today’s IT Week describes what happened when you upgrade a “Vista Ready” Sony Media Center PC with the MSDN Vista RTM:

It was a disaster. The Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 video card was not supported so the machine reverted to VGA. The audio chipset also failed to have a driver so no longer works. The TV system completely fails to work, and Media Centre blue-screens when started.

This kind of thing is no surprise. Third-parties like Sony have not had the final Vista any longer than the rest of us. While Microsoft includes drivers for common hardware on the Vista CDs, there are many devices for which drivers just are not ready, and consumer systems such as Media Center PCs with lots of extras will suffer more than most. If you have a “Vista ready” PC, and are not the adventurous sort, then the best advice is to wait until the vendor comes up with properly supported drivers specifically for your machine.

Having said that, I’ve tested Vista on several systems with reasonable success, including a self-assembled media center PC which is now working nicely with an XBox 360 as media extender. One tip: if you run into problems, try switching off Aero and using something like the Vista Basic display as an alternative. This fixed a problem with Media Center where it would flash uncontrollably after waking from sleep, and had a similar beneficial affect on a Toshiba tablet. Aero changes the way windows are displayed at a low level. See for example Kam Vedbrat’s blog on why some application disable Aero; there’s more good information on the shell: revealed site.

It’s a shame to disable Aero, but if that’s what it takes to get a stable machine then it must be worth it; I’ll be trying again on my test boxes when updated drivers emerge.

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software, software development, windows

Office ribbons more like a chain?

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Fascinating post from Developer Express CTO Julian Bucknall about Microsoft’s new ribbon license scheme. Developer Express is a well-regarded vendor of components for .NET and Delphi developers. It’s an ambivalent post. Bucknall states that his company has signed the license, though he expresses some frustration at its restrictions:

Lurkers and active members of our newsgroups will have noticed that we’ve been downright evasive about our plans for enhancing our ribbon implementations. We’ve been asked for some very reasonable enhancements, such as docking the ribbon vertically or along the bottom edge of the application window. Well, now you understand our ambiguous replies: according to the license agreement we are prohibited from doing most of them.

He adds that:

…you, our customers, are not covered by our license agreement with Microsoft. The terms of the license are not transferable in that way: despite the fact that you are using our components, you will have to sign the Microsoft license yourselves for your own applications.

Should you sign? Although it is royalty-free, the agreement is not without obligations. As Bucknall notes, it includes “the Office UI Design Guidelines that describe, in almost excruciating detail, how the ribbon and its associated controls must work and must look in an application in order to satisfy the license.” Signing the document means agreeing that you are making use of Microsoft’s intellectual property, and also limits what you can do with the UI.

On the whole I’m in favour of UI standards, but this seems rather extreme.

I am not a lawyer but let’s recall that the matter of copyright in the look and feel of a user interface has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. Some may dispute the necessity of signing an agreement with Microsoft in order to create a ribbon-like UI for your application.

This feels like part of a new and more aggressive IP strategy from Microsoft, tying in with other recent moves like the Novell agreement. It’s playing with fire.

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software, software development, windows

Legal implications of Microsoft’s Office 2007 ribbons

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Microsoft is generously allowing developers to use its ribbon UI, as seen in Office 2007, in their own software. But is this really so generous? Here’s the key proviso:

The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access).

It raises the interesting question: to what extent is the new UI in Office 2007 a ploy to counter Open Office? The truth is that many users cannot easily tell the difference between Microsoft Office and Open Office. They look similar. The new ribbon UI has two advantages for Microsoft:

  • It looks distinctively different from other Office applications out there.
  • Microsoft believes it has legally enforceable copyright in the new UI, extending to “both design and functionality.”

Why no menus in Word and Excel?

This may be the reason for another issue I’ve been puzzling over. Why is there no option to display a traditional menu in Office 2007? The reason is not technical. All the old keyboard shortcuts in Word and Excel still work, even the Alt combinations that access the menu. It is as if the menu is a ghostly presence.

I recall asking about this at the last PDC, when Office 2007 was unveiled. Microsoft said that providing a menu would stand in the way of users adopting the new UI. In other words, they would use the menu out of habit and never properly migrate to the new and presumed better way of doing things. But I wonder if this is also part of the legal strategy. With the menu in place, Word and Excel would look less distinctive; the ribbon would come over more like a fat toolbar, rather than a major new UI innovation.

Let me add that I would undoubtedly enable menus in Word and Excel, if they were available, as I have done in IE7. To me, toolbars are primarily shortcuts to commonly used features (I make an exception for the palettes in drawing and design applications). Menus on the other hand offer in-depth access to the full functionality of the product. Menus are efficient because they drop down when you need them, and collapse to a single line of screen space when not in use.

Would Microsoft have provided menus, at least as a compatibility option, if it were not so keen to look different from Open Office and enforce its IP?

A risky strategy

Removing the Office menus is a risky strategy. I’ve been using the new Office since the final code was made available, and it is disorientating. I’m intrigued and want to persevere to see if the ribbons really are more productive; but I’m not sure that the average Word or Excel user will take to it easily. Some at least will react against it and want their old Office back. If Microsoft is really unlucky, it could even serve to drive Open Office adoption, rather than preventing it.

On one level, I applaud Microsoft for taking some risks with Office 2007, after years of conservative upgrades. I’m keeping an open mind about the productivity benefits of the new UI. However, I doubt anyone would welcome the idea of the ribbon UI becoming an industry standard owned by Microsoft, and used specifically to prevent competition in office applications. It also strikes me that there are risks for developers who sign up for the “free” UI license. What if at some future point Microsoft said you are competing directly with Office?

software, windows

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken

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Users are reporting that Outlook 2007 is slow – much slower than Outlook 2003, which it is meant to replace.

Experiences vary, but the worst affected are those with large mailboxes. Large in this context means thousands of messages and several GB size. Looking at the newsgroups there may be a particular problem with Outlook on 64-bit Windows. I’m not impressed; though it’s not yet clear how widespread the problem is. I’d be interested in comments.

Confession time: I have a huge mailbox. That means I can easily find old email correspondence, and that’s a feature I value. Furthermore, I lack the time or patience to sift through and delete what is no longer required. Unfortunately, the most effective advice for those suffering from slow Outlook 2007 installations seems to be: reduce the size of your mailbox.

While there may be good organizational reasons for doing this, it seems odd that it is needed on today’s machines, with vast amounts of RAM and disk space, and unspeakably fast CPUs. And if you use Exchange, be sure that you archive to a server location, otherwise you can end up with several little archives littered over every machine you use, and they likely will not be backed up.

Why should users have to prune their mailbox because the very latest Outlook cannot cope with it as well as the older version? Surely it is not that difficult to query and display emails from a local database?

I’m also disappointed that, for all the talk of user experience, the new Outlook does not slow down gracefully. You know the kind of thing: you start the application and an unresponsive, semi-painted window appears for a while. You click to change folders and the application appears to hang. You click to drop-down a menu and the application freezes for several seconds. Isn’t this the kind of thing that background threads are meant to help with?

As for RSS, I can’t make sense of what Outlook 2007’s designers were aiming at here. Note that I think the RSS central store, installed with IE7, is a great idea. However, “central store” in this context means central to the local machine. What Outlook seems to do is to copy the contents of this store to your mailbox and then keep it synchronized. I think that’s a mistake: mailboxes are big enough already, and Outlook would do better to query the central store dynamically.

The real problem comes when you use Outlook with Exchange. Many users take advantage of the server-side mailboxes in Exchange by using Outlook on several different machines, all pointing to the same Exchange mailbox. For me, this is the primary advantage of Exchange and Outlook. But what if those several different machines have different RSS feeds in their central store, or even the same ones?

So far, it appears that Outlook cannot cope. I end up with duplicate feeds, I end up with feeds showing in the RSS feeds folder that are not listed in Tools – Account Settings – RSS Feeds; in fact this list is empty on my desktop machine, Sync is turned off, but I still have a ton of feeds in the Outlook RSS feeds folder.

It seems simple to me. Either Outlook’s RSS integration should be 100% local, in which case you just see what is in the central store on your current machine. Or it should be 100% server-based, in which case Exchange should handle the RSS updates. Mixing the two is just silly.

Tip for improving Outlook performance: if you are happy to do this, go into Tools – Account settings – Microsoft Exchange Server – Change – More settings – Security, and remove the checkbox from “Encrypt data between Outlook and Exchange”. Other factors may be search engine integration (Microsoft’s or other), A/V integration, or other add-ins.

Bottom line: I suggest caution before rolling this out over a network.

Update: other tips you can try

A few other things that have helped people:

  1. Exchange users: Remove Outlook 2003 and do a clean install of Outlook 2007, making sure that a new offline store is created from scratch.
  2. Run on Vista.
  3. Turn off indexing. Tools – Options – Search options – uncheck all folders. It’s a shame to do this as the indexed search is useful.
  4. Let indexing complete. Might be worth leaving the machine running overnight.
  5. Reduce the size of your mailbox (of course).

The above will not solve all the problems, but can mitigate performance issues.

Further update

Microsoft has posted some official workarounds. See here for comment and link

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software, windows

Vista on a Tablet

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I tested Vista RTM on a Toshiba Portege M400. This is a great though expensive Tablet PC: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU, fingerprint reader (handy for logging onto a table without tapping in a password), FireWire, Bluetooth, etc etc. Perhaps its most notable feature is the “slim select bay”, which comes as standard with a DVD rewriter, but can be replaced with a 2nd hard drive or a 2nd battery. Hence this is one of few laptops with an integrated RAID controller. The 2nd drive is also handy for testing multiple operating systems.

I had this running reasonably well with Vista RC2, and rather optimistically tried an in-place upgrade to Vista RTM. It failed badly. I left it chugging away and came back a couple of hours later to find it in a blue-screen, reboot cycle. I suspect the problem was with one of the beta drivers I’d installed in an attempt to get all the integrated devices working. Who knows what would happen if you tried the in-place upgrade from XP: probably bad things.

Anyway, I zapped RC2 and did a clean install instead. That was straightforward, although you still need to download Toshiba’s SATA RAID driver in order to get Vista to see the drive. Contrary to some reports, you don’t actually have to enable the RAID controller.

The laptop was immediately usable, though I did have to install Intel’s wireless driver to get the wireless network working. I’ve not reinstalled all the other beta drivers, since Toshiba will likely come up with better versions shortly. This laptop is promoted as “Vista Capable”. For the time being, some devices are disabled.

The Tablet side of things works very well indeed. My main use of Tablet mode is for meetings and conferences. Taking notes is easier and more natural when writing on a screen.

I realize that the Tablet has not been a big commercial win for Microsoft, and has probably proved a costly experiment for some hardware partners like Acer. Nevertheless, it’s an important advance in mobile computing. Tablets are a vast improvement on touch-sensitive screens such as those found on a Pocket PC. The electromagnetic digitizer means you can lean your hand on the screen as you write (just like paper), and finer drawing is possible.

Here’s what impressed me most. I opened up Word 2007 and started text input using the handwriting tool. I have poor handwriting, but my first sentence or two came out letter-perfect.

Overall Vista RTM does seem a little snappier than the RC2 release. It’s just those pesky drivers – which is no doubt why the laptop has problems resuming sometimes after sleep or hibernation.

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itunes, multimedia, windows

Vista Media Center: remarkably good

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This is one of several notes on testing Windows Vista final version in various scenarios.

One of these is Media Center. This is an alternate, simplified user interface to your TV and other media content, intended to be operated with a remote rather than mouse and keyboard. In XP days this was offered as a separate, dedicated version of Windows, but now it is part of Vista Ultimate. A side-effect handy for journalists and others who run multi-purpose networks is that Media Center PCs can be joined to a Windows domain.

The tricky part of Media Center is the prerequisites. Ideally, you need:

  • A PC in your living room or wherever you prefer to watch TV*
  • A wide-screen TV with a high-resolution screen (eg LCD TV)
  • This PC also connected to broadband internet
  • This PC also connected to a hi-fi or equipped with very high-quality PC speakers
  • This PC also quiet enough not to be annoying when in stand-by
  • A TV card with BDA (Broadcast Driver Architecture) driver
  • The special Media Center remote

I tested Vista on a home-assembled machine which more or less conforms to the above. The soundcard is a Creative Audigy Platinum ZS; the TV card is a Nebula DigiTV, for which there are beta BDA drivers. I’ve been using this for a while with XP and Nebula’s own TV software.

Vista RTM went on as a clean install in its own partition. Next, I had to download the beta Vista drivers from Creative, and the beta BDA drivers from Nebula. This is the Vista life right now: the OS may be finished, but the third-party drivers are far from done. The Creative drivers actually time-out in January. Nevertheless, after a restart or two I was able to setup Media Center and successfully scan for TV channels. I also pointed the media library to a folder of ripped CDs in MP3 format. Media Center downloaded a TV guide and also found artwork for most of the ripped CDs, making for a polished presentation.

Overall, Media Center is a delight to use. The UI is easy to navigate, though scrolling through lists can be ponderous. Shortcuts to important screens like “My music” and “Live TV” work well, and the reassuring big green button always brings you back to the media center home screen. It really is not too geeky, provided that everything works as it should. Browsing through the guide works great, recording programs is a snap, and so is browsing and playing your ripped CD library (or, I presume, “plays for sure” downloads, though I don’t have any).

Not sure yet how Zune fits in here.

A neat touch is that you can play games with the remote. For example, the new 3D chess game works beautifully played from 10 feet back.

Microsoft has built in some interesting download options, most of which don’t seem to be enabled yet. A link to an online store got me a page not found error. Clearly the foundations are in place for a complete integrated home entertainment system based on download rather than purchased CDs or DVDs.

But does everything work perfectly? Not quite. From time to time yesterday I got “Unknown Audio error” with an error code, though it seemed to be harmless. The system has problems waking from sleep, and on one occasion the audio went silent. Another issue is that occasionally Media Center starts continually flashing, making it unusable, and there is no way (that I’ve found) to stop it other than to restart the application.

Are these errors the fault of Vista, or Media Center, or third-party beta drivers? My guess is mostly the last of these; but it still tarnishes the overall experience.

So how do non-geeks get this lot set up and working? The best way is to buy a complete Media Center system with the software pre-installed, and then to have an expert come to your home and set it all up. That’s expensive. Plus, can you trust the cheaper OEM PC vendors not to mess things up with sub-standard hardware, dodgy drivers, noisy fans, and third-party foistware that wrecks Microsoft’s carefully-designed user experience?

By contrast I imagine Apple will come into this space with a couple of boxes that plug in and just work. However it will likely be more expensive and will tie in to iTunes and iPod with Apple’s lock-in DRM. Of course Vista is DRM-laden as well, though at least Microsoft will license its DRM to third-parties. Note however that Media Center works fine with unprotected MP3s and standard CDs and DVDs – and no doubt Apple’s system will as well.

Time will tell who wins, or whether both get a decent market share. And there is also Sony to come. In the meantime, and despite the hassles, I’m impressed with Media Center so far.

*Note on Media Center Extenders

You can avoid the requirement for a PC in your living room by using a Media Center Extender instead. This could be an XBox 360 or a dedicated hardware device, hopefully smaller and quieter than a typical PC. A Media Center Extender has most of the same features as Media Center, a bit like a remote desktop to your Media Center PC. You can have multiple Extenders for a single Media Center PC. You need a fast network (802.11b won’t cut it), and you still need to be able to connect a TV aerial (or cable TV) to the Media Center PC, which could be a problem in some homes.

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security, software, windows

Vista is on MSDN. Now for the tricky decisions.

MSDN subscribers can now download the final build of Vista, which means it is available to a large number of people outside Microsoft for the first time.

If you are one of them, you will have one or maybe two tricky decisions to make.

I take it for granted that you will install it, for test and development of course.

First, do you upgrade the release candidate? Or clean install? Daniel Moth says the upgrade is OK, but I plan to do a clean install eventually, despite the hassle. Otherwise there is always the nagging worry that something which doesn’t work right is broken because you upgraded.

Second, do you enable or disable UAC? This is a hot potato. If UAC is widely disabled, then Microsoft’s best effort yet to secure Windows will have been wasted. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly annoying, and in the worst case some app you depend on might not work at all.

I’m keeping it on. With RC2, I’ve found ways to run all the apps that I need to have working, even including Borland Developer Studio 2006 (a very problematic install, though it may be better in the final release build).

As I said to Dan Fernandez:

My view is that Windows security is a huge issue both for Microsoft and actually for every internet user. UAC looks like a pretty good effort to improve it, so to my mind it is in all our interests to try and make it work.

That said, I’m not optimistic. I think lots of people will disable it; I’m also waiting for the first support notes from third-parties that give users the steps to do this – like the little leaflets that come with video cards and other hardware, explaining that you must ignore the warnings in XP about unsigned drivers.

By the way, although Vista is now final, there is still going to be a lot of pain around drivers as well as application compatibility. For example, the Vista drivers for my Toshiba Portege M400 are still in various states of beta, and no doubt the fingerprint reader still does not work. It’s going to be a while before the situation improves and users get anything like a smooth upgrade on this kind of hardware.

Update

See Ed Bott’s post and the linked article for an illustration of the extent and impact of the Windows security problem. The article analyzes a recent pump-and-dump spam attack. Apparently 99.95 of the botnet machines used were Windows, 47.23% XP with SP2.

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