Tag Archives: silverlight

.net, apple, cloud computing, google, internet, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Appcelerator CEO on Titanium, Aptana and the future of mobile development

I met with Aptana CEO and co-founder Jeff Haynie at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month.

Appcelerator’s main product is Titanium, an SDK which takes HTML and JavaScript source files and compiles them to native apps for several platforms, including Windows Mac and Linux on the desktop, and Google Android or Apple iOS for mobile. RIM Blackberry support is in preview. Appcelerator has recently acquired the Aptana IDE for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ruby on Rails, Python and Adobe AIR. The company has also partnered with Engine Yard for cloud-hosted Ruby on Rails applications to deliver web services to clients built with Titanium.

Haynie says that mobile is currently a three-horse race between Apple iOS, Google Android, and RIM Blackberry; but he expects further diversification. Microsoft Windows Phone is under consideration, and he says that cross-compiling to Silverlight would be possible for Titanium:

It’s a .NET SDK, we would have to build a translation into Silverlight. That’s how we do it for iOS, we translate code into Objective C. We don’t think it’s technically insurmountable.

I asked about the Appcelerator Freemium business model. Titanium is open source and you can download and use the SDK commercially for free. Haynie says it works well because companies can do a full evaluation and get to understand the value of the software fully before deciding whether to purchase. However he emphasised that larger companies, other than non-profits, are expected to take out a paid subscription.

This point could do with clarification. Indeed, the Appcelerator Plans and Pricing page shows Titanium Indie which is free but for companies of less then 25 employees, and other editions which are paid-for. But as far as I can tell there are no restrictions on the SDK. See the FAQ which says:

Can I use Titanium for a commercial application?

Yes. You can use Titanium in both a personal and commercial application regardless of what your license or price is.

What is your License?

The Titanium SDK is licensed under the Apache Public License (version 2).

I also took the opportunity to ask about Adobe AIR support in Aptana. It strikes me that this is under threat following the acquisition, since AIR competes with Titanium. Haynie was just a little evasive, but at the same time impressed me with his attitude:

Obviously we have a competitive platform from Adobe AIR. But we want developers to have the best choice, the best tools possible. So competitively we need to build the best product. If AIR is a better product and people want to use Aptana to build AIR apps, then fine. That means we need to continue to work to make a better runtime for the desktop.

Nevertheless, Haynie implied that AIR support will only continue if Adobe supports it; I am not sure what support means in this context but I think it includes a financial contribution:

We’re with Adobe on trying to figure out where we go from here … we have to spend a lot of money to support that, so we’re making sure that we’ve got Adobe’s support behind that.

I am not sure what Adobe gains from Aptana support, given that it has its own Eclipse-based IDE called Flash Builder, so I would not bet on there being significant updates to the current AIR 1.5 plug-in.

Finally, Haynie emphasised what to me are familiar themes in talking about the direction for Titanium and Aptana. Cross-platform visual design tools; designer and developer workflow; and integration in a single IDE of rich client and cloud back-end. This integration has long struck me as one of the best things about Microsoft’s Visual Studio, so it is interesting to see the theme reappear in a cross-platform context.

What I enjoyed about the interview is the way Haynie communicates the huge change and volatility that has arrived within the software development world, thanks to the impact of cloud and mobile. Times of change mean new opportunities and new products. Titanium has plenty of competition, but if Appcelerator is able to deliver a robust, cloud to device, cross-platform toolkit, then it will have a bright future.

I have posted a transcript of most of the interview.

.net, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development

Silverlight in Microsoft products – Silverlight the new Windows runtime, HTML 5 the new Silverlight?

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Is Microsoft ditching Silverlight and embracing HTML 5? Or is Silverlight the future of desktop and browser-based development on Microsoft’s platform?

Good question; and I am not sure that Microsoft itself can answer. There is evidence for both cases.

One thing I have noticed though is that Silverlight is turning up in numerous Microsoft products. This is in contrast to the early years of the original .NET Framework, which Microsoft used rather little in its own stuff, though the context is different today because of the growth in web-based development.

I guess we cannot really count Visual Studio LightSwitch, which is a tool that builds Silverlight applications, though it is interesting insofar as the target market is not expert developers, but smart general users who want to build database applications.

Lync Server 2010 is a better example. Silverlight is used for the control panel.

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Windows Azure, a strategic product for Microsoft, uses Silverlight for its control panel

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Windows Intune, for maintaining networks online

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System Center for managing Microsoft servers. I’m not actually sure how much Silverlight is used in System Center, but I understand the newly announced “Concero”, a new feature for managing public and private clouds, uses a Silverlight control panel and I suspect it is used elsewhere as well.

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These are a few that I am aware of; I would be interested in other examples.

Now, you can make sense of this to some extent by distinguishing “Windows platform” from “broad reach” applications. It is curious, but Silverlight which started out as a broad reach plugin is gradually moving towards a Windows platform runtime, though it still runs on a Mac with some limitations, mainly lack of COM interop. There has been speculation that Silverlight could merge with the desktop Windows Presentation Foundation and become a commonly used application runtime for desktop Windows as well as web apps, and of course Windows Phone.

When Microsoft wants broad reach, it uses HTML, an example being Office Web Apps which make hardly any use of Silverlight.

Nevertheless, using Silverlight for products like Windows Intune could be annoying for administrators who might otherwise use an Apple iPad when out and about; but I guess Microsoft figures that if you are deep enough into Windows to use Intune, you probably will not be using an iPad.

Let me add that Silverlight seems to me to be working well in the examples above, to the extent that I have tried it. Could they be done equally well in HTML and JavaScript? Probably, if users have IE9, but probably not if it is IE8 or earlier.

Silverlight the new Windows, HTML 5 the new Silverlight?

.net, apple, google, microsoft, mobile, mono, open source, professional, silverlight, software development

Mono project: no plans for cross-platform WPF

Miguel de Icaza’s report from the Game Developer Conference is upbeat, rightly so in my view as usage of Mono is continuing to build, not only in game development with Unity, a development tool that uses Mono as its scripting engine, but also for mobile development for Apple’s iOS with Monotouch and for Android with Monodroid. These mobile toolkits also give Mono a stronger business model; many sites use Mono for serving ASP.NET applications on Linux, but without paying or contributing back to the project.

Mono is an open source implementation of C# and Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

That said, it is interesting that Mono is still struggling with an issue that has been a problem since its first days: how to implement Microsoft’s GUI (Graphical User Interface) framework on other platforms. Mono does have Gtk# for Windows, Mac and Linux, but this does not meet the goal of letting developers easily port their Visual Studio client projects to Mono. There is also an implementation of Windows.Forms, but de Icaza mentions that “our Windows.Forms is not actively developed.”

Apparently many tools vendors asked the Mono team at GDC when Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) would be implemented for Mono. WPF is the current presentation framework for Microsoft.NET, though there is some uncertainty about where Microsoft intends to take it. I remember asking de Icaza about this back in 2003, when the WPF framework was first announced (then called Avalon); he said it was too complex and that he did not plan to implement it.

This is still the case:

We have no plans on building WPF. We just do not have the man power to build an implementation in any reasonable time-frame.

That said, Mono has implemented Silverlight, which is based on WPF, and there are some signs that Microsoft might merge WPF and Silverlight. What would the Mono team do then?

Miguel de Icaza says:

Silverlight runs on a sandbox, so you can not really P/Invoke into native libraries, or host DirectX/Win32 content inside of it.
There are other things missing, like menubar integration and things like that.

Of course, this is no longer true on Windows: Platform Invoke is coming in Silverlight 5.

Perhaps the Mono team will knuckle down and implement Silverlight with desktop integration, which would be good for cross-platform Silverlight and compatibility with Microsoft .NET.

Then again, it seems to me that Mono is increasingly divergent from Microsoft .NET, focusing on implementing C# in places that Microsoft does not touch, such as the mobile platforms from Apple and Google.

That is actually a sign of health; and you can understand why the Mono team may be reluctant to shadow Microsoft’s every move with Silverlight and WPF.

.net, delphi, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

DevExpress developers ask for more Windows Forms, say Silverlight and WPF not ready

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DevExpress, which creates add-on components and tools for Windows and Delphi, has posted its 2011 roadmap. This shows more convergence between components for Silverlight and WPF:

In essence, by the end of the year, the functionality of DXGrid, DXEditors, DXDocking, and DXRibbon will be the same across both platforms.

As for Windows Forms, or winforms, the roadmap says:

With regard to the Windows Forms controls, it is most likely that there will be a large number of smaller enhancements and new features rather than any large complex new control. The reason for this is simple: we believe that our offerings for this platform are very mature and robust.

Customers posting comments to CTO Julian Bucknall’s blog are not happy:

It is sad to see Winforms pushed back so much. WPF is still too slow on most computers for major apps and SL is not mature enough for a complete ERP app.

says Sigurd Decroos, while Heiko Mueller is more blunt:

Sorry guys, but with this roadmap I will not extend my subscription. I use only WinForms and ASP.NET and I’m not interested in WPF/Silverlight – WPF at this time for me is not suitable for my kind of applications (larger business Apps). Silverlight in my eyes is a dead technology – HTML5 is the future for rich internet applications.

Porting is also an issue says Ioannis Mpourkelis:

I believe that you should put more resources on the WinForms controls for 2011. Winforms is here to stay for many years, especially for the companies who want to support existing Winfroms applications. Currently it is impossible to port WinForms applicaitons to Silverlight and very difficult to port WinForms applications to WPF.

Check the full comments for more.

More evidence for the uncertainty around where Microsoft is going with its rich client API.

Update: Bucknall comments on this specific issue here.

.net, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Where is Microsoft going with its Rich Client API? Microsoft drops some clues as developers fret

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A discussion taking place in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) newsgroup, in a thread called WPF vNext, shows how Microsoft’s confused rich client development strategy is affecting developers, and offers some clues about what is coming.

Developer Rudi Grobler, who posted on his blog some wishes for Windows Phone, Silverlight and WPF, describes his difficulty in discerning Microsoft’s direction:

The strategy for the future is very vague… I daily get questions about should I use WPF or Silverlight? Is WPF dead? Is Silverlight dead? etc…

Jeremiah Morrill describes his frustration with WPF performance:

Microsoft has known of WPF’s performance problems since the first time they wrote a line of code for it.  You will be hard pressed to find a customer that hasn’t complained about perf issues.  And you will not have gone to a PDC in the last few years and not hear folks bring this up to the WPF team. This is 3rd party info by now, but I’ve been told the issues I have noted have been brought up internally, only to be disregarded.

and remarks his frustration with what has happened to Silverlight:

Silverlight’s strategy USED to be about cross-platform, get-the-runtime-on-every-device-out-there, but it’s obvious that is not the strategy any more.  What happened to Silverlight on set-top-boxes?  Android? I read an article that some people saw it on XBox, but nobody has talked about it since.  Cross-platform with OSX has become symbolic at best.

Developer Peter O’Hanlon describes how the uncertainty has affected his business:

I run a small consultancy, and I bet the company on WPF because I could sell the benefits of faster development time for desktop applications. We have spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the platform and saw that Silverlight gave us a good fit for developing web apps. In one speech Microsoft caused me months of work repairing the damage when Muglia seemed to suggest that these technologies are dead and Microsoft are betting the farm on Html 5. We hand our code over to the client once we have finished, and they ask us why they need to invest in a dead technology. I don’t care what you say on this thread, Microsoft gave the impression that html 5 was the way to go.

[…] Muglia’s statement about the future being html caused serious issues for my company. We lost two bids because the managers didn’t want to commit to "dead" technology.

Microsoft’s Jaime Rodrigues, WPF Technical Evangelist, offers the following response:

You are telling us to improve perf in WPF. We hear this loudly and we are trying to figure how to solve it. Unfortunately, there are a few pieces to consider:

1)      First of all,  a lot of our customers are telling us to invest more into Silverlight.  Let’s say (again made up) that demand is  4-to 1. How do we justify a revamp of the graphics architecture in WPF.  This is not trivial work; the expertise in this space is limited, we can’t clone our folks to 5x to meet everyone’s needs.

2)      Let’s assume we did take on the work.  My guess (again, I am not engineering) is that it would take two years to implement and thorougly test a release.  At the stage that WPF is at, a rearchitecture or huge changes on the graphics stack would be 80% about testing and 20% about the dev work.    It is not a trivial amount of work.   Would we get the performance you want across myriad of devices? We don’t know. WPF bet on hardware, and there is new devices out  there that are trading hardware for battery, weight, or simply for cost.  it would suck to do that much work, make you wait a long time, and then not get there. Let’s get real on the asks; you say "improve perf" but you are asking us to do a "significant re-write"; these two asks are different.

3)      By the time we get there, what will be a more powerful framework?  Silverlight, WPF, C++, or SuperNew.Next ??  we don’t know today.  We go back to #1 and look at demand We are in agreement that "customers" is the driving principle.

The WPF has looked at the trade-offs, and risk many times.  We are also looking at what customers need. Jer, to you it is all about graphics.  To many others, it is about data.  So, how do we serve all customers??
The strategy is exactly what you have seen/heard:

1)      WPF 4.5 is going to have some significant data binding performance improvements.

2)      We are not redoing the graphics framework, but we are doing a lot of work to let you interoperate with lower level graphics so that if you need more graphics perf you can get it, and still keep the RAD of the rest of the framework.

[…] Hope it helps; apologies if it does not, and again, wait for Rob Relyea or someone else to make it official.  That is just my 2c as a person who bet heavily on WPF but has seen the data that drives the trade-offs the team has to make.

This will be disappointing to former Microsoft evangelist Scott Barnes, who has initiated a Fix WPF campaign.

The problem though is lack of clarity about the strategy. Look at Rodrigue’s third point above. Nobody can predict the future; but what is Microsoft’s current bet? Silverlight, HTML5, or maybe SuperNew.Next – for example, the rumoured new native code UI for Windows 8 or some variant of it?

My own view is that the current difficulties are rooted in what happened with Longhorn and the fact that the Windows team abandoned WPF back in 2004. I’ve written this up in more detail here.

Lest this post be misinterpreted, let me emphasise that Microsoft has a good track record in terms of supporting its Windows APIs long-term, even the ones that become non-strategic. Applications built with the first version of .NET still run; applications built with Visual Basic 6 mostly still run; applications built for ancient versions of Windows often still run or can be coaxed into running. Build an application with WPF or Silverlight today, and it will continue to work and be supported for many years to come.

My guess is that events like the coming 2011 MVP Summit and Mix 2011 in April will bring some clarity about Microsoft’s mobile, tablet, Windows and cross-platform story for rich clients.

Update: Barnes has his own take on this discussion here.

microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development, vista, visual studio, windows

Microsoft still paying the price for botched Vista with muddled development strategy

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Professional Developers Conference 2003. Windows Longhorn is revealed, with three “pillars”:

  • Avalon, later named Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
  • Indigo, later named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
  • WinFS, the relational file system that was later abandoned

With the benefit of hindsight, Microsoft got many things right with the vision it set out at PDC 2003. The company saw that a revolution in user interface technology was under way, driven by the powerful graphics capabilities of modern hardware, and that the old Win32 graphics API would have to be replaced, much as Windows itself replaced DOS and the command-line. XAML and WPF was its answer, bringing together .NET, DirectX, vector graphics, XML and declarative programming to form a new, rich, presentation framework that was both designer-friendly and programmer-friendly.

Microsoft also had plans to take a cut-down version of WPF cross-platform as a browser plugin. WPF/Everywhere, which became Silverlight, was to take WPF to the Mac and to mobile devices.

I still recall the early demos of Avalon, which greatly impressed me: beautiful, rich designs which made traditional Windows applications look dated.

Unfortunately Microsoft largely failed to execute its vision. The preview of Longhorn handed out at PDC, which used Avalon for its GUI, was desperately slow.

Fast forward to April 2005, and Windows geek Paul Thurrott reports on Longhorn progress:

I’m reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck.

Thurrott was right. But why did Longhorn go backwards? Well, at some point – and I am not sure of the date, but I think sometime in 2004 – Microsoft decided that the .NET API for Longhorn was not working, performance was too bad, defects too many. The Windows build was rebased on the code for Server 2003 and most of .NET was removed, as documented by Richard Grimes.

Vista as we now know was not a success for Microsoft, though it was by no means all bad and laid the foundation for the well-received Windows 7. My point though is how this impacted Microsoft’s strategy for the client API. WPF was shipped in Longhorn, and also back-ported to Windows XP, but it was there as a runtime for custom applications, not as part of the core operating system.

One way of seeing this is that when Longhorn ran into the ground and had to be reset, the Windows team within Microsoft vowed never again to depend on .NET. While I do not know if this is correct, as a model it makes sense of what has subsequently happened with Silverlight, IE and HTML5, and Windows Phone:

  • Windows team talks up IE9 at PDC 2010 and does not mention Silverlight
  • Microsoft refuses to deliver a tablet version of Windows Phone OS with its .NET application API, favouring some future version of full Windows instead

Note that in 2008 Microsoft advertised for a job vacancy including this in the description:

We will be determining the new Windows user interface guidelines and building a platform that supports it. We’ll eliminate much of the drudgery of Win32 UI development and enable rich, graphical, animated user interface by using markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime.

In other words, the Windows team has possibly been working on its own native code equivalent to XAML and WPF, or perhaps a native code runtime for XAML presentation markup. Maybe this could appear in Windows 8 and support a new touch-oriented user interface.

In the meantime though, Microsoft’s developer division has continued a strong push for .NET, Silverlight and most recently Windows Phone. Look at Visual Studio or talk to the development folk, and you still get the impression that this is the future of Windows client applications.

All this adds up to a muddled development story, which is costly when it comes to evangelising the platform.

In particular, eight years after PDC 2003 there is no clarity about Microsoft’s rich client or RIA (Rich Internet Application) designer and developer story. Is it really WPF, Silverlight and .NET, or is it some new API yet to be revealed, or will IE9 as a runtime play a key role?

There is now a little bit more evidence for this confusion and its cost; but this post is long enough and I have covered it separately.

google, microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, qt, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Nokia plus Windows Phone 7 – would that be a smart move?

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The rumour is that Nokia’s CEO, ex-Microsoft Stephen Elop, is planning a major strategy announcement on Friday February 11. The obvious move would be to embrace a new Smartphone platform, since neither Symbian nor MeeGo look likely to catch up with frontrunners Google Android or Apple iPhone. Could Elop be planning to partner with his former company and embrace Windows Phone 7?

It is a fascinating proposition. Here is the case in favour. For both Nokia and Microsoft, Android is the key competition in this market. The momentum behind Android is deterring both phone manufacturers and operators from investing seriously in Windows Phone 7. Microsoft’s phone is well-regarded, but has made little impact on the general public. Nokia could change that; it could make beautiful Windows 7 phones and get them to the mass market.

Microsoft has also done a good job with the developer tools for Windows Phone 7, with Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight, XNA, and the .NET Framework.

On the other hand, if Nokia were to adopt Windows Phone 7 for its high-end phone platform, would it not alienate its own development community, which is oriented towards Linux and C/C++? I think it would, unless Nokia insisted that as part of its deal with Microsoft, Windows Phone 7 would also support native code development with Qt, Nokia’s cross-platform application framework. This would be great news for Microsoft as well, though it might not recognise it. Windows Phone 7 needs to allow native code development, and Qt is ideal for the purpose. Qt already supports Windows CE, which underlies Windows Phone 7. If Nokia could present Windows Phone 7 as just another platform for Qt, the deal would be palatable for existing Nokia developers.

If Nokia were to announce this, it would transform the prospects for Microsoft’s Smartphone OS as well as helping Nokia to make a renewed impact.

Now for the case against. I am not sure that Qt on Windows Phone 7 would be acceptable to Microsoft, which might prefer to keep developers locked to Visual Studio and .NET; and Nokia has an easy alternative, which is to adopt Android instead. Qt support is still an issue, but there is already an independent project to bring Qt to Android. The combination of the Android and Nokia brands has obvious appeal, whereas taking on Windows Phone 7 would be risky.

The biggest shadow over Windows Phone 7 is cast by Microsoft itself. I do not doubt the commitment of the team which builds it within Microsoft, nor the quality of the developer tools. I do question though whether Microsoft as a whole sees a long-term future for Windows Phone 7 and its “Metro” user interface. The strong hint at CES was that Windows 8, rather than Windows Phone 7, is the basis of Microsoft’s tablet strategy; and if that proves to be the case, then Windows Phone 7 may gradually be displaced. Another puzzle is how Microsoft intends to use “Jupiter”, a rumoured new user interface library for Windows that may well be designed with mobile and touch control in mind. Maybe full Windows with “Jupiter” is the future of Microsoft’s mobile platform, rather than Windows Phone 7? I discuss this in more detail here.

There is enough uncertainty around Windows Phone 7, and enough buzz around Android, that Google’s mobile platform looks to me more attractive than Microsoft’s from Nokia’s perspective. I do not dismiss the Windows Phone idea though; it would be a bold and interesting move.

I expect this post to be very out of date soon, if not by Friday, then certainly by early next week at Mobile World Congress.

Update: A Nokia and Microsoft partnership is looking more likely since Google’s Vic Gundotra tweeted:

#feb11 "Two turkeys do not make an Eagle".

cloud computing, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

How Microsoft’s Office Web Apps were written in C# and compiled to JavaScript, maybe

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While researching another product I came across this 2009 tweet from Microsoft’s Nikhil Kothari:

Office 2010 web apps – perhaps one of the most ambitious script# projects!

Script# is loosely equivalent to the Google Web Toolkit, but whereas GWT compiles Java to JavaScript, Script# compiles C# to JavaScript. According to the site:

Script# is used extensively by developers within Microsoft building Ajax experiences in Windows Live, Office to name just a couple, as well as by a external developers and companies including Facebook.

I had come across the project before, but was waiting to see if would evolve beyond what looks like a personal project for Kothari. It is hosted on http://projects.nikhilk.net rather than on an official Microsoft domain, and the latest release is 0.6.2. In other words, it does not have the look of a project that you would recommend for production work, interesting though it is. Nor is there much public activity around Script# that I can see, though there is a CodePlex site dedicated to improving its JQuery support.

Seeing Kothari’s tweet though raises several questions.

  • Did Microsoft really use it for Office Web Apps, a high profile project which is a key part of Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy?
  • Is there another, more up-to-date version of Script# that is used internally and which may one day burst into the public arena?
  • How might it impact the Silverlight vs HTML5 debate, if Microsoft comes up with a C# to JavaScript compiler in Visual Studio that lets developers code in .NET but deploy to cross-platform JavaScript?

I am sure there are readers of this blog who know more than I do, so by all means let me know.

.net, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Silverlight native extensions allow deep Windows 7 integration, but forget cross-platform

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Microsoft has released Native Extensions for Silverlight, a set of libraries which enable access to Windows 7 features including taskbar Jump Lists; access to attached devices including webcams, cameras and phones; the sensor API for accelerometer support; and even the ability to intercept Windows messages. The ability to intercept Windows messages allows lots of interesting hacks as veteran Visual Basic developers will recall; it was one of the tricks used to overcome limitations in early versions of VB.

The native extensions are only available to out of browser applications running outside the sandbox; the user must consent to trust such applications. Silverlight 4 already had the ability to use COM automation. These new extensions simply build on this existing feature, providing COM automation wrappers for these Windows 7 APIs.

What this means though is that Silverlight developers can create applications that integrate deeply with the Windows 7 desktop and local hardware.

Another way of looking at this is that the subset of Windows applications that can be implemented in Silverlight rather than the full .NET Framework has now increased. It lends some support to the theory which I considered here, that a future version of Silverlight will be the application platform for the Windows 8 app store and for mobile devices running Windows 8. This is speculation though; Microsoft has not said much publicly on the subject. Silverlight is well suited to an app store since installation is easy, updates are near-automatic, and apps are isolated from the rest of the operating system.

The native extensions are Windows 7 only. Forget the Mac, these things do not even work on Windows XP. They only apply to trusted out of browser applications though. Silverlight running in the browser still has similar features on Windows and Mac.

.net, apple, google, microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development, windows 7

Talk of Windows 8 on an smartphone shows Microsoft’s mobile confusion

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During a conference call to discuss Intel’s latest financials, CEO Paul Otellini raised the possibility of putting the full Windows OS onto a smartphone, running a low power Intel SoC (System on Chip). The matter came up with Otellini was asked about the impact of Windows on ARM, announced at CES earlier this month:

The plus for Intel is that as they unify their operating systems we now have the ability for the first time: one, to have a designed-from-scratch, touch-enabled operating system for tablets that runs on Intel that we don’t have today. And secondly, we have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors running Windows 8 – or ‘next-generation Windows’ – into phones, because it’s the same OS stack. And I look at that as an upside opportunity for us.

The reasoning seems to be: if Windows 8 is designed to run well on mobile devices with ARM, it will also run well on mobile devices with an Intel SoC, which will let us put it on phones.

Note the point he highlighted: Microsoft unifying its operating systems. No more full Windows vs Windows CE; one OS from mobile to desktop.

Although that sounds compelling, the snag is that Windows is not well suited to low-power mobile devices, which is why Windows CE was invented in the first place. Microsoft can fix this to some extent by fixing the things that make it unsuitable, but it carries a heavy compatibility burden.

It also throws up the question: just what are Microsoft’s long-term plans for Windows Phone 7, which is built on Windows CE, has its own GUI mostly written in native code, and a development platform based on .NET – Silverlight and XNA – plus a native code SDK that only mobile operators and device manufacturers get to use?

At CES Microsoft Steven Sinofsky sort-of denied that Windows will encroach on Windows Phone 7 territory. “Windows Phone 7 is uniquely focused on the small form factor that Windows doesn’t focus on,” he said.

Nevertheless, the company’s decision not to use the Windows Phone 7 OS for tablets may make that inevitable. What is the difference between a smartphone and a small tablet? Does Microsoft expect developers to write apps designed for Windows on a small tablet and then rewrite them for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight?

It does not make sense; and despite the Windows Phone 7 promotion included in CEO Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote, I was left wondering whether Microsoft’s new mobile OS really has a future.

That said, Silverlight abstracts the OS, so in principle Microsoft could use it to form a consistent mobile development platform irrespective of whether the underlying OS is Windows CE or full Windows. I am not getting that sense from the company though, and I’d expect the primary Windows SDK to remain based on C++.

I am struggling to understand how Microsoft expects this to work. App compatibility is the obvious benefit of full Windows; but two big issues are that most Windows apps are not touch-friendly and are not designed for small screens. Putting Windows on a tablet with a decent screen size and the dreaded stylus works to some extent, but will never compete with Apple’s iPad for usability. On smaller screens most existing apps will not work properly; and if Windows on small devices sprouts a completely new touch-friendly GUI, or borrows the one from Windows Phone 7, then app compatibility with desktop Windows will be limited.

It feels as if Microsoft’s Windows team is saying one thing, the Windows Phone 7 and developer teams saying another, and partners like Intel saying yet another. Windows Phone 7 was meant to be the thing that made belated sense of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, but even that now looks doubtful for the reasons stated above.

Microsoft is still a long way from having a coherent strategy for mobile devices, and that lack is damaging the company and helping Apple and Google to establish their competing operating systems.

Update: Mary-Jo Foley writes about Microsoft “Jupiter” which is a rumoured new user interface and application model designed for Windows 8 and its app store:

Jupiter is going to be a new user interface (UI) library for Windows, built alongside Windows 8. It will be a thin XAML/UI layer on top of Windows application programming interfaces and frameworks for subsystems like graphics, text and input. The idea is Jupiter will bring support for smoother and more fluid animation, rich typography, and new media capabilities to Windows 8 devices.

Is Jupiter a .Net technology, or XAML adapted for native code, or both? Is it one and the same as, say, Silverlight 6? That is not stated, though Senior VP Soma Somasegar helpfully (or not) said that:

some of the information in this post is not right and out of date, not reflecting Microsoft’s current thinking.

That seems to tacitly confirm that it fairly represents Microsoft’s thinking at some time in the not-too-distant past.

It would make sense to me if Microsoft used Silverlight to unify its application platform as mentioned above, and combining the XAML presentation layer with native code could address performance and memory usage concerns with .NET. This is the kind of news that would really give confidence to Silverlight developers, rather than the damage limitation PR that Microsoft has put out since PDC late last year.

On the other hand, I believe Somasegar when he says the information is out of date, so for the time being it is just another dose of uncertainty.