Tag Archives: microsoft

microsoft

Inside Microsoft: Ex design lead gives perspective on Metro, Office, iOS and Android battles

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Here is a must-read for Microsoft watchers. Two days ago a former design lead on the Office on Windows Phone team turned up on Reddit and said I designed the new version of Office for Windows Phone. Ask me anything.

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The overall theme is that Microsoft did not get the design of Windows Phone quite right and is changing it; that Windows 8 was even worse; and that Windows 10 just might begin to pull it all together at last, though the company is also consciously moving away from a Windows-centric view. The Windows, Windows Phone and Office teams are now working together for the first time, we are told:

Windows didn’t believe in working well with others, certainly not that dumb upstart Windows Phone team.

Office believed it was the greatest software on earth, and didn’t get along with Windows.

Windows Phone was pretty proud of itself despite its middling marketshare. Too proud.

So now when these three teams got together to do something for the good of Microsoft, and the good of customers, there was a ton of ego in the way. Windows believed in the Windows way. Windows Phone believed their way. Office was like "fuck all y’all, we’re Office."

The new situation at the company is way better. People actually do care about working together in a way I hadn’t historically seen in my short time there. (or read about in many MS history books)

So I wouldn’t say Windows Phone caused the shift. You know what did? Sinofsky leaving, Windows 8 being a failure, Windows Phone failing to gain significant traction, and then Ballmer leaving.

They basically had to start working together. And it’s cool to see.

Here are a few more things that caught my eye. There are long discussions about the “hamburger” menu, three lines appearing at top left of many new apps where it is hard to reach if you are using the phone with one hand:

Don’t get me wrong, this is clearly a tradeoff. Frequently used things have to be reachable, even one-handed. But hamburgers are not frequently used, and one-handed use is not ironclad. Combine those two factors together and you see why the industry has settled on this standard. It wasn’t random.

From a developer perspective, the key insight here is that hamburgers are not frequently used. In other words, do not design your app so that users will have to reach constantly for the hamburger menu. Reserve it for stuff that is only needed occasionally.

Why is Microsoft appearing to prioritise iOS and Android over Windows, for example with Office?

When Ballmer saw the iPad version of Office, he reportedly said something like "you’re killing me." It was so fucking good. Way better than anything on any other platform. It leveraged a bunch of iOS stuff in a really good way, but it was still "unmistakably Office," as they say.

Ballmer knew it was good. And he knew the company’s other efforts were years and years out. And he iced it. Because his mentality, and what I’d call dogma, was that Windows had to be first. At all costs.

Good riddance. It was an outdated philosophy.

… The way Microsoft wins the long term war is to remind people where they’re strong. And no, it’s not through withholding Office on iOS. Not anymore. The ship sailed on Ballmer’s watch

I would love to know the date when Ballmer “iced” Office for iPad.

What was wrong with the design of Window Phone?

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he said he was going to save the company by reminding people of Apple’s sex appeal. He described colored plastics and technology as fashion. And the board thought "uh-oh, this guy is going to drive us into a ditch."

But from "Bondi Blue iMacs" and "OS X has an interface you just want to lick" you’ll notice their design went more and more subdued over the last 15-20 years. It’s because you need to shock people at first, then you get back to being more practical.

Metro had to shock people. It had to look like its own thing. And it did that really well. Pivots, panos, big text, black everywhere, it looked like art. And more than that it looked different. Something to witness. Steve Jobs even gave kudos to the Windows Phone design team! He said something like "I mean, it’s still clearly a v1, but it’s really beautiful." And he was right.

So what would I change?

Well. The interaction models, honestly. The pivots and the panoramas are a nightmare in day to day use. They’re as distinct as a Flower Power iMac, but it painted the interaction models into a corner.

In another post, there is a discussion of the difficulty with the back button. “when back is good, it’s good. But when it’s bad (from a user experience standpoint) it’s really bad.”

Here is another insight:

The stark look of Windows Phone seemed to turn off more people than fell in love with it. I know here in this forum we’re all fans but in the mainstream marketing was only one problem. Apps was another. But the biggest one was lack of relevance. People didn’t understand why they should care. A lot of people said it looked like a nice phone, but it wasn’t for them.

Despite the criticisms, the ex-Microsoft designer (who now works for Twitter) is optimistic, saying “I do have a lot of hope for Universal apps. It’s not a magic bullet, but given enough time for the system to mature, and the business support, and new initiatives, I see rosy days ahead.”

Microsoft may be well positioned for “the next big shift”:

Look beyond just Windows. Just make amazing software. Get back some relevance that was lost. 2) Of course keep competitive with hardware, and keep improving WP. 3) Then, a few years out, when the market experiences another big shift (it’s not a matter of if but when) I suspect MS’s strength as a multi-OS developer + cloud leader will help Windows regain a ton of relevance

Fascinating stuff, though note the disclaimer:

I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m one designer and I don’t work at MS anymore.

amazon, microsoft

AWS Summit London: cloud growth, understanding Lambda, Machine Learning

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I attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) London Summit. Not much news there, since the big announcements were the week before in San Francisco, but a chance to drill into some of the AWS services and keep up to date with the platform.

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The keynote by CTO Werner Vogels was a bit too much relentless promotion for my taste, but I am interested in the idea he put forward that cloud computing will gradually take over from on-premises and that more and more organisations will go “all in” on Amazon’s cloud. He instanced some examples (Netflix, Intuit, Tibco, Splunk) though I am not quite clear whether these companies have 100% of their internal IT systems on AWS, or merely that they run the entirety of their services (their product) on AWS. The general argument is compelling, especially when you consider the number of services now on offer from AWS and the difficulty of replicating them on-premises (I wrote this up briefly on the Reg). I don’t swallow it wholesale though; you have to look at the costs carefully, but even more than security, the loss of control when you base your IT infrastructure on a public cloud provider is a negative factor.

As it happens, the ticket systems for my train into London were down that morning, which meant that purchasers of advance tickets online could not collect their tickets.

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The consequences of this outage were not too serious, in that the trains still ran, but of course there were plenty of people travelling without tickets (I was one of them) and ticket checking was much reduced. I am not suggesting that this service runs on AWS (I have no idea) but it did get me thinking about the impact on business when applications fail; and that led me to the question: what are the long-term implications of our IT systems and even our economy becoming increasingly dependent on a (very) small number of companies for their health? It seems to me that the risks are difficult to assess, no matter how much respect we have for the AWS engineers.

I enjoyed the technical sessions more than the keynote. I attended Dean Bryen’s session on AWS Lambda, “Event-driven code in the cloud”, where I discovered that the scope of Lambda is greater than I had previously realised. Lambda lets you write code that runs in response to events, but what is also interesting is that it is a platform as a service offering, where you simply supply the code and AWS runs it for you:

AWS Lambda runs your custom code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and administers all of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code, and security patches.

This is a different model than running applications in EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) VMs or even in Docker containers, which are also VM based. Of course we know that Lambda ultimately runs in VMs as well, but these details are abstracted away and scaling is automatic, which arguably is a better model for cloud computing. Azure Cloud Services or Heroku apps are somewhat like this, but neither is very pure; with Azure Cloud Services you still have to worry about how many VMs you are using, and with Heroku you have to think about dynos (app containers). Google App Engine is another example and autoscales, though you are charged by application instance count so you still have to think in those terms. With Lambda you are charged based on the number of requests, the duration of your code, and the amount of memory allocated, making it perhaps the best abstracted of all these PaaS examples.

But Lambda is just for event-handing, right? Not quite; it now supports synchronous as well as asynchronous event handling and you could create large applications on the service if you chose. It is well suited to services for mobile applications, for example. Java support is on the way, as an alternative to the existing Node.js support. I will be interested to see how this evolves.

I also went along to Carlos Conde’s session on Amazon Machine Learning (one instance in which AWS has trailed Microsoft Azure, which already has a machine learning service). Machine learning is not that easy to explain in simple terms, but I thought Conde did a great job. He showed us a spreadsheet which was a simple database of contacts with fields for age, income, location, job and so on. There was also a Boolean field for whether they had purchased a certain financial product after it had been offered to them. The idea was to feed this spreadsheet to the machine learning service, and then to upload a similar table but of different contacts and without the last field. The job of the service was to predict whether or not each contact listed would purchase the product. The service returned results with this field populated along with a confidence indicator. A simple example with obvious practical benefit, presuming of course that the prediction has reasonable accuracy.

microsoft, mobile

Quick thoughts on Surface 3 from a long-term Surface user

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I’ve been using a Surface as my usual travel PC for a while now – mostly Surface Pro (the first iteration) but also Surface RT and Surface 2. Microsoft has announced Surface 3 – is that a good buy?

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Note: this is not a review of Surface 3. I intend to review it but have yet to get my hands on one.

First, a quick note on how I have got on with Surface to date. I love the compact size of the devices and the fact that I can do all my work on them. I find full-size laptops unbearably bulky now – though slim ultrabooks or small netbooks still have some appeal.

The main annoyances with my Surface Pro are the small SSD size (I have the 128GB model) and a few technical difficulties, mainly that the keyboard cover (currently the Power Cover) plays up from time to time. Sometimes it stops responding, or I get oddities like the mouse pointer going wild or keys that auto-repeat for no reason. Detaching and re-attaching the keyboard usually fixes it. Given that this is Microsoft hardware, drives and OS, I regard these bugs as disappointing.

Surface power handling is not very good. The Surface is meant to be running all the time but sleeps so that touching power turns it on or off almost instantly. That’s the idea, but sometimes it fails to sleep and I discover that it has been heating up my bag and that the battery is nearly flat. To overcome this, and to save battery, I often shut it right down or use hibernate. Hibernate is a good option – fairly quick resume, no battery usage – except that about every third resume it crashes. So I tend to do a full shutdown.

I find the power button just a little unpredictable. In other words, sometimes I press it and nothing happens. I have to try several times, or press and hold. It could be the contact or it could be something else – I don’t think it is the contact since often it works fine.

The power cover has stopped charging, after 10 months of use. It is under warranty so I plan to get it replaced, but again, disappointing considering the high cost ($199).

A few grumbles then, but I still like the device for is portability and capability. Surface Pro 2 seemed to be better that the first in every way. Surface Pro 3 I had for a week on loan; I liked it, and could see that the pen works really well although in general pens are not for me; but for me the size is a bit too big and it felt more like an ultrabook than a tablet.

What about Surface 3 then? The trade-off here is that you get better value thanks to a smaller size (good) and lower performance (bad), with an Atom processor – Intel’s low power range aimed at mobile computing – instead of the more powerful Core range. Here are some key stats, Surface 3 vs Surface Pro 3:

  Surface 3 Surface Pro 3
Display 10.8″ 12″
Weight (without cover) 622g 800g
Storage 64GB or 128GB 64GB-512GB
Processor Intel Atom x7 Intel Core i3, i5 or i7
RAM 2GB or 4GB 4GB or 8GB
Pen Available separately Included
Cameras 8MP rear, 3.5MP front 5.0MP rear, 5.0MP front

What about battery life? Microsoft quotes Surface Pro 3 as “up to 9 hours of web browsing” and Surface 3 as “up to 10 hours of video playback”. That is a double win for Surface 3, since video playback is more demanding. Anandtech measured Surface Pro 3 as 7.6 hrs light use and 3.45 hrs heavy use; the Surface 3 will fare better.

How much do you save? A snag with the Surface is that you have to buy a keyboard cover to get the best out of it, and annoyingly the cover for the Surface 3 is different from those for Surface, Surface 2 and Surface Pro, so you can’t reuse your old one.

A quick look then at what I would be paying for the Surface 3 vs Surface Pro 3 in a configuration that makes sense for me. With Surface 3, I would max out the RAM and storage, because both are rather minimal, so the cost looks like this:

Surface 3 with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage: $599
Keyboard cover: $129
Total: $728.99

Surface Pro 3 with 8GB RAM, 265GB storage, Intel Core i5, pen: $1299
Keyboard cover: $129.00
Total: $1428.99

In other words, Surface 3 is around half the price.

Will I buy a Surface 3? It does look tempting. It is a bit less powerful than my current Surface Pro and perhaps not too good with Visual Studio, but fine for Office and most general-purpose applications. Battery life looks good, but the 128GB storage limitation is annoying; you can mitigate this with an SD card, say another 128GB for around $100, but I would rather have a 256GB SSD to start with.

However, there is strong competition. An iPad Air, I have discovered, makes an excellent travel companion, especially now that Office is available, provided you have a good keyboard case such as one from Logitech; you could get an iPad Air 2 with 64GB storage and a keyboard for slightly less than a Surface 3.

The iPad comparison deserves some reflection. The iPad does have annoyances, things like lack of direct access to the file system and non-expandable storage (no USB). However I have never encountered foibles like power management not working, and as a tablet it is a better design (not just because there are abundant apps).

It is also worth noting that there is more choice in Windows tablets and convertibles than there was when Surface was first released. Some are poorly designed, but ranges like those from Asus and Lenovo are worth checking out. In a sense this is “job done” since one of the reasons for Microsoft doing Surface was to kick-start some innovation in Windows hardware.

I hope to get some hands-on with Surface 3 in the next few weeks and will of course report back.

microsoft, software development

StackOverflow developer survey shows decline in C#, Windows

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StackOverflow, a popular (and the best) site for programming queries, has published its annual developer survey. Respondents included:

26,086 people from 157 countries participated in our 45-question survey. 6,800 identified as full-stack developers, 1,900 as mobile developers, 1,200 as front-end developers, 2 as farmers, and 12,000 as something else.

That is a decent sample size, though not necessarily representative of the entire developer community.

What is notable? Here are a few things that stood out for me:

Developers are young. The largest group is 25-29 and the average age 28.9 years old.

92.1% of respondents are male. Ouch.

Software is still a good bet for a career even if you have no qualifications. 41.8% declared themselves self-taught. That said, it is not clear to me what proportion of respondents do programming as their main job. Presumably not the two farmers?

If you look at the “Most popular technologies”, there is a striking decline in C# over the last three years:

2013: 44.7%

2014: 37.6%

2015: 31.6%

That’s a shame because C# is an excellent language. The reason? It’s speculation, but probably means less Windows development, whether server or desktop.

Swift is top of the “most loved” list, meaning a language that developers intend to continue with. Salesforce tops the “most dreaded”, meaning a platform that developers cannot wait to abandon, followed by Visual Basic.

What OS do developers use on the desktop? Here, Windows remains the biggest, but is declining:

2013: 60.4%

2014: 57.9%

2015: 54.5%

Windows XP has declined dramatically, down from 10.8% in 2013 to 1.0% today.

Where have developers gone, if they no longer use Windows? Mac is up over the period, but only by 2.8% share. 3.5% are using “Other”, interesting (Chromebook?).

I’ll stop there; I don’t want to spoil the survey.

Conclusions? This puts some data (albeit imperfect) on the theory that Microsoft is losing its grip on the developer community – though note that Microsoft’s technology in general remains popular, just less so than before.

Postscript: Several on Twitter have observed that most languages have declined over the period, not just C#. Here’s the difference in share from 2013 to 2015 for some of them:

JavaScript: –2.2%

SQL: –11.6%

Java: –5.1%

C#: –13.1%

PHP: –5.1%

In other words, all of the top 5 have declined, though C# has declined the most.

What does this mean? Since the numbers sum to more than 100%, it might imply more specialisation. Or it might just say something about how the StackOverflow community has evolved, since that is the source of the data. Still, it seems to me that you cannot spin this as good news for Microsoft, though it might be less bad than it first appears.

microsoft, mobile, software development, visual studio, windows

Windows 10 at Mobile World Congress 2015: a quick reflection

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I attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week – with 93,000 attendees and 2,100 exhibitors according to the latest figures.

It was a big event for Microsoft’s new Windows. It started for me on the Saturday before, when Acer unveiled a low-end Windows Phone (write-up on the Reg). Next was Microsoft’s press conference; Stephen Elop was on stage, presenting two new mid-range Lumias as if nothing had changed since last year when he announced the now-defunct Nokia X:

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The Lumia 640 looks good value, especially in its XL guise: 5.7” 1280 x 720 display, 8GB storage plus microSD slot, 13MP camera, 4G LTE, quad-core 1.2GHz CPU, €189 ex VAT. The smaller Lumia 640 is now on presale at £169.99; we were told €139 ex VAT at MWC, so I guess the real price of the 640XL may be something like £230, though there will be deals.

These phones will ship with Windows Phone 8.1 but get Windows 10 when available.

The big Windows 10 event was elsewhere though, and not mentioned at the press conference. This was the developer event, where General Manager Todd Brix, Director of Program Management Kevin Gallo and others presented the developer story behind the new Universal App Platform (not the same as the old Universal App Platform, as I explain here).

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This was the real deal, with lots of code. There was even a hands-on session where we built our own Universal Apps in Visual Studio 2015. Note that the Visual Studio build we used featured an additional application type for Windows 10; this is not the same as a Store app in Windows 8, though both use the Windows Runtime.

As someone with hands-on experience of developing a Store app, I am optimistic that the new platform will achieve more success. It is a second attempt with a bit more maturity, and much greater effort to integrate with the Windows desktop, whereas the first iteration went out of its way not to integrate.

Much of the focus was on the Adaptive UX, creating layouts that resize intelligently on different devices. The cross-platform UI concept is controversial, with strong arguments that you only get an excellent UI if you design specifically for a device, rather than trying to make one that runs everywhere. The Universal App Platform is a bit different though, since it is all Windows Runtime. Microsoft’s pitch is that by writing to the UAP you can target desktop, Windows Phone, tablet and Xbox One, with a single code base; and without a cross-device UI this pitch would lose much of its force. Windows 7 legacy is a problem of course; but if we see Windows 10 adopted as rapidly as Windows 7 (following the Vista hiccup) this may not be a deal-breaker.

The official account of the MWC event is in Gallo’s blog post which went out on the same day. There was much more detail at the event, but Microsoft is holding this back, perhaps for its Build conference at the end of April. So in this case you had to be there.

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Aside: if you look at the publicity Microsoft got from MWC, you will note that it is mostly based on the press conference and the launch of two mid-range Lumias, hardly ground-breaking. The fact that a ton of new stuff got presented at the developer event got far less attention, though of course sharp eyes like those of Mary Jo Foley was onto it. I have a bias towards developer content; but even so, it strikes me that a session of new content that is critical to the future of Windows counts for more than a couple of new Lumias. This demonstrates the extent to which the big vendors control the news that is written about them – most of the time.

microsoft, mobile, salesforce.com

Microsoft and Salesforce: Office 365 integration in Salesforce 1

Salesforce has posted a video showing Microsoft Office 365 integration in the forthcoming version of Salesforce 1, its cloud platform and mobile app.

The demo is not in the least elaborate. It shows how a user opens the Salesforce 1 app on an iPhone:

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searches for a document on Office 365 and previews in in the app:

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taps the Word icon to edit in Word on the iPhone:

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and shares the document with a colleague:

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Not much too it; but it is the kind of workflow that makes sense to a busy executive.

This interests me for several reasons. One is that, historically, Salesforce and Microsoft are not natural partners. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loves poking fun at the Redmond company. I remember how he spoke to the press about “Microsoft Azoon” soon after the launch of Azure. He did not believe that Microsoft grasped what cloud computing was. Of course his product also competes with Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM.

That said, Salesforce always tied in with Microsoft products like Active Directory and Outlook, because it needed to. It could be the same today, as Office 365 has grown too big to ignore, but I am sensing a little more warmth from Benioff in Microsoft’s Nadella era:

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It is also worth noting that the workflow above needs iOS Office to work well. The example edit could have been done in Office Web Apps, I guess, but the native app is a much better experience. Microsoft’s decision was: do we keep Office as a selling point for Windows, or do we try to keep Office as the document standard in cloud and mobile, as it has been on the desktop? It chose the latter path, and this kind of partnership shows the wisdom of that strategy.

cloud computing, exchange, microsoft

Notes from the field: when Outlook 2010 cannot connect to Office 365

If you set up a PC to connect to Office 365, you may encounter a problem where instead of connecting, Outlook repeatedly prompts for a password – even when you have entered all the details correctly.

I hit this issue when configuring Outlook 2010 on a new PC. It was not easy to find the solution, as most technical help documents suggest that this is either a problem with the autodiscover records in DNS (not so in this case), or that you can fix it with manual configuration of the connection properties (also not so in this case).

Note that if you are using Office 2010, you should install the desktop setup software from Office 365 before trying to configure Outlook. However this still did not work.

The clue for me was when I noticed that Outlook 2010 was missing a setting in network security for Anonymous Authentication.

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In order to fix this, I installed Office 2010 Service Pack 2, and it started working. The problem is that if you set up a new PC using an Office 2010 DVD, it takes a while before everything is up to date.

I heard of another business that had this problem and decided to upgrade their Office 365 subscription to include the latest version of Office, rather than figuring out how to fix it. Now that plans including desktop Office are reasonably priced, this strikes me as a sensible option.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft publishes new OneDrive API with SDK, sample apps

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Microsoft has announced a new OneDrive API for programmatic access to its cloud storage service. It is a REST API which Microsoft Program Manager Ryan Gregg says the company is also using internally for OneDrive apps. The new API replaces the previous Live SDK, though the Live SDK will continue to be supported. One advantage of the new API is that you can retrieve changes to files and folders in order to keep an offline copy in sync, or to upload changes made offline.

Unfortunately this does not extend to only downloading the changed part of a file (as far as I can tell); you still have to delete and replace the entire file. Imagine you had a music file in which only the metadata had changed. With the OneDrive API, you will have to upload or download the entire file, rather than simply applying the difference. However, you can upload files in segments in order to handle large files, up to 10GB.

I have worked with file upload and download using the Azure Blob Storage service so I was interested to see what is now on offer for OneDrive. I went along to the OneDrive API site on GitHub and downloaded the Windows/C# API explorer, which is a Windows Forms application (why not WPF?). This uses a OneDrive SDK library which has been coded as a portable class library, for use in desktop, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows Phone Silverlight 8.

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I have to say this is not the kind of sample I like. I prefer short snippets of code that demonstrate things like: here is how you authenticate, here is how you iterate through all the files in a folder, here is how you download a file, here is how you upload a file, and so on. All these features are there in this app, but finding them means weaving your way through all the UI code and async calls to piece together how it actually works. On top of that, despite all those async calls, there are some performance issues which seem to be related to the smart tiles which display a preview image, where possible, from each file and folder. I found the UI becoming unresponsive at times, for example when retrieving my large SkyDrive camera roll.

Gregg makes no reference in his post to OneDrive for Business, but my assumption is that the new API only applies to consumer OneDrive. Microsoft has said though that it intends to unify its two OneDrive services so maybe a future version will be able to target both.

At a quick glance the API looks different to the Azure Blob Storage API. They are different services but with some overlap in terms of features and I wonder if Microsoft has ever got all its cloud storage teams together to work out a common approach to their respective APIs.

I do not intend to be negative. OneDrive is an impressive and mostly free service and the API is important for lots of reasons. If you find the OneDrive integration in the current Windows 10 preview too limited (as I do), at least you now have the ability to code your own alternative.

microsoft, software development

Universal Apps: a look at Microsoft’s first efforts on Phone and PC

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Windows 10 for phones is now available on preview; I wrote a first-look piece for The Register here. I like it better than I had expected; it is a bit laggy but pretty much stable and with some compelling new features.

The main interest of the preview for me though is the appearance of first-party universal apps. Since these form a key part of the strategy for Windows 10, it seems to me that they merit close attention; after all, this is what Microsoft is hoping other developers will do when creating apps for Windows. Universal apps are not actually new in Windows 10 – you can write one today for Windows 8 and Windows Phone – but in the forthcoming Windows they run on the desktop rather than just in the tablet environment. There are also changes in the Windows Runtime API and frameworks though these are currently undocumented as far as I am aware (wait for Build!)

How many Microsoft universal apps are there in Windows 10, designed for both tablet and phone? Quite a few. The ones I am looking at here are Settings (not sure if this is actually the same app), Calculator, Photos, Sound Recorder, Alarms and Feedback.

There is more coming, most notably Outlook (including Mail and Calendar), Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The latter three are already available in preview in Windows 10 for PCs and tablets, but not yet for phone. However, the Android and iOS phone versions are probably a good indication of what is to come, at least for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For Outlook there is some confusion caused by Microsoft acquiring third-party apps and rebadging them, so in these cases Windows 10 may diverge more from iOS and Android.

Enough apps then to be significant. In the screenshots that follow, I have shown in most cases three versions of each app: Windows Phone 8.1 (the equivalent app, not a universal app), Windows 10 PC, and Windows 10 phone. My general observations are:

1. The old Windows Phone version is more carefully optimized for a smartphone, with a chunky UI that is optimized for touch.

2. The new apps have more functionality, as you would expect for apps that need to work on the desktop where expectations are higher.

3. The new apps have a distinctive look and feel compared to either Windows Phone 8.1 apps, or Windows 8 “Metro” apps. Needless to say, they look different from Windows 7 style desktop apps as well. These are still Windows Runtime (the platform underlying “Metro” or “Store” apps) but in general the UI is denser than before; there is more information on view in a single screen.

While I have some doubts about the usability of the new apps on a phone, this seems to me a good direction overall; the phone is benefiting from work Microsoft is doing for the PC and vice versa. I think we will see better, more useful apps on both platforms as a result.

Now for the screenshots:

Calculator

Windows Phone 8.1 Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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A good example of how the new app is more functional but less well optimized for touch.

Alarms

Windows Phone 8.1 Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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I have cheated a bit here because no world clock in the old Alarms app!

Sound Recorder

Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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No Phone 8.1 version. But you can see this really is the same app. I am glad to see this on the phone; it is an update of an ancient Windows accessory and actually useful.

Photos

Windows Phone 8.1 Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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Feedback

Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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While this is the same app, you can see that Microsoft has adapted the UI for the phone. In the Phone version, you hit the All Categories link to see the categories and select. In the PC version, they are listed in a left-hand column. The Universal App concept allows for a totally different UI on different devices if necessary.

Settings

Windows Phone 8.1 Windows 10 Phone Windows 10 PC
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The Settings app is radically changed in Windows 10; a good thing in that the Windows Phone 8.1 settings is a hopeless long and confusing list and needed some organisation. The Windows 10 PC version looks different but has the same sections and icons.

.net, microsoft

Microsoft open sources heart of .NET: CoreCLR runtime now on GitHub

Microsoft’s CoreCLR is now available on GitHub. We knew this was coming, but it is still a significant step, since this piece is the very heart of .NET: the execution engine that consumes a .NET IL (Intermediate Language) executable and compiles it to machine code for execution. The IL can easily be decompiled back to C#; it is in a sense fairly close to what you wrote in the editor. The CLR piece compiles it to a native executable, and also handles garbage collection (automatic memory management) and interop with other  native code libraries. The just-in-time compiler in CoreCLR is called RyuJIT.

CoreCLR is not same as the .NET Framework CLR (as found in the Windows desktop today), though one thing we now learn is that it is a true subset:

CoreCLR is a subset of the .NET Framework CLR. They share the same codebase and are updated together. For example, an update to the .NET GC improves both CoreCLR and the .NET Framework CLR.

We setup a live 2-way mirror between the coreclr repo on GitHub and the .NET Framework TFS server within Microsoft. The latency of the mirror is low, measurable in minutes.

Contributions made to the coreclr repo are integrated to the Microsoft TFS server automatically and will become part of both the .NET Framework and .NET Core products. The same is true in reverse, that .NET Framework CLR changes (within the CoreCLR subset) are mirrored to the CoreCLR repo. These changes will sometimes result in large commits to unrelated components.

This is good news since it reduces the risk of fragmentation between the .NET Framework and the CoreCLR. Note that the same does not apply to the framework libraries, which are forked between .NET Framework and CoreFX. The reason for the fork is to enable cross-platform .NET and to benefit from greater modularity in the Framework without breaking the existing .NET Framework.

Some other points of interest:

  • CoreCLR will run on Linux and Mac but not yet, this is work in progress
  • CoreCLR powers Windows Phone apps as well as ASP.NET 5
  • CoreCLR uses the CMake build system rather than MSBuild, because it runs cross-platform

There is a key architectural difference between CoreCLR and the .NET Framework, which is that in CoreCLR each application is deployed with the runtime and libraries it requires, whereas in the .NET Framework applications depend on a system-managed runtime and shared libraries. This has the advantage that applications are standalone, and you could run one from say a portable USB drive on a system which did not have .NET or Mono installed.

The disadvantage, aside from greater use of disk space, is that patching the same libraries across multiple applications is hard. In the interview here Microsoft offers a clue about how it might come up with a solution for this. Jan Kotas on the CLR team talks about an ideal scenario where identical copies of the same DLL are in fact shared even though each application appears to have its own copy. This sounds similar to the mechanism used by de-duplication in Windows Server. The file system makes it look as if several copies of a file exist in different directories, but in fact there is only one. If you update a file though, the right thing happens and only the virtual copy that you overwrite is changed. It sounds as if Kotas has in mind a variant where you could say, “update this file and all its instances elsewhere.” This would of course somewhat undermine the concept of app-isolated dependencies; but you know what they say about cakes and eating them:

“The ideal we should get to is every application has a local copy of everything. People eventually get to a point where through some OS mechanisms or through some other means the DLLs that are the same between different applications would get shared. That way nobody needs to worry about is this shared, or is it not shared. The ideal place that we’d like to get to is that sharing happens under the hood. It can happen through different mechanisms for different applications. [That would be the] ideal place for the runtime and how to version it.”

said Kotas. Possibly I am misinterpreting this; but it does sound like some kind of sharing-but-not-sharing solution to the patching problem.

Another point to note: a managed code application cannot execute without help. In order to run, every managed application needs three things:

1. The application code

2. The CLR – either CoreCLR or the .NET Framework CLR

3. A CLR host which loads the CLR and instructs it to execute the application. The CLR host has to be native code, for obvious reasons.

In the .NET Framework this third piece is invisible, since it is handled by the operating system (though apparently SQL Server is a special case). In the CoreCLR world though, you need to think about the CLR host. ASP.NET 5.0 has the KRuntime (K probably stands for Katana) which I think is the same as Project K. If you want to test CoreCLR today, you can use a host called CoreConsole which (as its name implies) lets you run console apps. Apparently there are a few technical problems using CoreCLR with ASP.NET 5 as the moment.

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