Tag Archives: windows phone 7

.net, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, windows

Windows Phone 7 development hits the big screen

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I spent yesterday in the dim light of a Manchester cinema, attending the Windows Phone 7 developer day.

The event was organised by DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper, which is a .NET community group run, as far as I can tell, by a group of Microsoft MVPs. The sponsors were Microsoft, Appa Mundi, and NxtGenUG. Towards the end of the day, Andy Wigley (from Appa Mundi) made a statement that this was a community event and not an official Microsoft event. It was true up to a point, though as far as I can tell Microsoft paid for most of it -“Microsoft UK very kindly provided the venue and logistic support.” says the event description. Microsoft was present showing real Windows Phone 7 devices, and the presenters included Andy Wigley (from Appa Mundi) and Rob Miles, who have also presented the official Jump Start training for Windows Phone 7, and regular TechEd speaker Maarten Struys who is a Windows embedded and Windows Phone evangelist working for Alten PTS in the Netherlands. Community, or Microsoft PR?

Regardless, they were excellent speakers and well informed on all things Windows Phone 7. The community aspect did come to the fore when it came to the catering – there was none – and the venue itself which felt as you would expect a cinema out of hours to feel. I’m guessing Microsoft the community was disappointed with the attendance, around 100 in a venue that seats 330.

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There is one significant benefit to presenting in a cinema. The screen and projection was first-rate.

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The sessions themselves were introductory but struck me as useful for anyone getting started with Windows Phone 7 development – which given the devices are not yet available, is probably most of us. Andrej Radinger’s session on creating apps that work offline was particularly interesting to me. I had previously seen the Jump Start course so some of the material was already familiar, though the refresher did no harm.

Much of the challenge of Windows Phone 7 development is coping with the fact that your app will frequently get killed and have to resume later as if nothing happened. We got a lot of input on this topic.

Another challenge is coping with Expression Blend. Designer Tricky Bassett gave a short but insightful view of the design process for a Windows Phone 7 app, with some intriguing asides along the way. He is a design professional, and said that his team had been excited about SketchFlow, the prototyping tool in Blend, but in practice found it little use because they only need sketches, rather then the working controls which SketchFlow gives you. He also commented on Blend, saying that Blend with Windows Phone 7 projects was more stable than it had been before, in his experience with other projects. In previous work with Blend, solutions that did not load have been a recurring problem – I take it that either they loaded in Visual Studio but not in Blend, or vice versa.

Bassett also said that Blend takes some effort to learn, and this was confirmed by the way some of the presenters struggled to do basic operations with the tool. The Blend UI is perplexing and at events like this one I’d suggest that a Blend Basics piece would go down well.

The Silverlight and XNA platforms strike me as pretty good, though I think that lack of native code development will be a problem among the best developers – there are interesting rumours about certain developers getting special privileges.

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My overriding impression though is that the phone is good, the tools are good, but the demand is lacking. One developer told me that he has been trying to sell an idea for a custom Windows Mobile application to a small business client with 12 employees. They are keen but their employees want either Apple iPhone or Google Android phones. Windows Phone 7 may help by being a better and more attractive device, but getting past the perception that Windows phones are not much good is going to be a problem.

But what can Microsoft do? It is going to take devices that deliver on the promise, a stunning marketing campaign, and aggressive pricing, for this thing to flourish.

apple, google, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Steve Ballmer ducks questions at the London School of Economics

This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the London School of Economics on the subject of Seizing the opportunity of the Cloud: the next wave of business growth. Well, that was supposed to be the topic; but as it happened the focus was vague – maybe that is fitting given the subject. Ballmer acknowledged that nobody was sure how to define the cloud and did not want to waste time attempting to do so, “cloud blah blah blah”, he said.

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It was a session of two halves. Part one was a talk with some generalisations about the value of the cloud, the benefits of shared resources, and that the cloud needs rather than replaces intelligent client devices. “That the cloud needs smart devices was controversial but is now 100% obvious,” he said. He then took the opportunity to show a video about Xbox Kinect, the controller-free innovation for Microsoft’s games console, despite its rather loose connection with the subject of the talk.

Ballmer also experienced a Windows moment as he clicked and clicked on the Windows Media Player button to start the video; fortunately for all of us it started on the third or so attempt.

Just when we were expecting some weighty concluding remarks, Ballmer abruptly finished and asked for questions. These were conducted in an unusual manner, with several questions from the audience being taken together, supposedly to save time. I do not recommend this format unless the goal is to leave many of the questions unanswered, which is what happened.

Some of the questions were excellent. How will Microsoft compete against Apple iOS and Google Android? Since it loses money in cloud computing, how will it retain its revenues as Windows declines? What are the implications of Stuxnet, a Windows worm that appears to be in use as a weapon?

Ballmer does such a poor job with such questions, when he does engage with them, that I honestly do not think he is the right person to answer them in front of the public and the press. He is inclined to retreat into saying, well, we could have done better but we are working hard to compete. He actually undersells the Microsoft story. On Stuxnet, he gave a convoluted answer that left me wondering whether he was up-to-date on what it actually is. The revenue question he did not answer at all.

There were a few matters to which he gave more considered responses. One was about patents. “We’re better off with today’s patent system than with no patent system”, he said, before acknowledging that patent law as it stands is ill-equipped to cope with the IT or pharmaceutical industries, which hardly existed when the laws were formed.

Another was about software piracy in China. Piracy is rampant there, said Ballmer, twenty times worse than it is the UK. “Enforcement of the law in China needs to be stepped up,” he said, though without giving any indication of how this goal might be achieved.

He spoke in passing about Windows Phone 7, telling us that it is a great device, and added that we will see slates with Windows on the market before Christmas. He said that he is happy with Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering in relation to the Enterprise, especially the way it includes both private and public cloud offerings, but admits that its consumer cloud is weaker.

Considering the widespread perception that Microsoft is in decline – its stock was recently downgraded to neutral by Goldman Sachs – this event struck me as a missed opportunity to present cogent reasons why Microsoft’s prospects are stronger than they appear, or to clarify the company’s strategy from cloud to device, in front of some of the UK’s most influential technical press.

I must add though that a couple of students I spoke to afterwards were more impressed, and saw his ducking of questions as diplomatic. Perhaps those of us who have followed the company’s activities for many years are harder to please.

Update: Charles Arthur has some more extensive quotes from the session in his report here.

adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development

RunRev renames product to LiveCode, supports iPad and iPhone but not Windows Phone 7

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Runtime Revolution has renamed its software development IDE and runtime to LiveCode, which it says is a “modern descendent of natural-language technologies such as Apple’s HyperCard.” The emphasis is on easy and rapid development using visual development supplemented with script.

It is now a cross-platform development platform that targets Windows, Mac and Linux. Android is promised soon, there is a pre-release for Windows Mobile, and a new pre-release targets Apple’s iOS for iPad and iPhone.

LiveCode primarily creates standalone applications, but there is also a plug-in for hosting applets in the browser, though this option will not be available for iOS.

Now that Apple has lifted its restrictions on cross-platform development for iOS, it is Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 that looks more of a closed device. The problem here is that Microsoft does not permit native code on Windows Phone 7, a restriction which also prohibits alternative runtimes such as LiveCode. You have to code applications in Silverlight or XNA. However, Adobe is getting a special pass for Flash, though it will not be ready in time for the first release of Windows Phone 7.

If Windows Phone 7 is popular, I imagine other companies will be asking for special passes. The ubiquity of Flash is one factor holding back Silverlight adoption, so in some ways it is surprising that Microsoft gives it favoured treatment, though it makes a nice selling point versus Apple’s iPhone.

.net, adobe, development, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Silverlight versus HTML, Flash – Microsoft defends its role

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Microsoft’s Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has defended the role of Silverlight in the HTML 5 era. Arguing that it is natural for HTML to acquire some of the features previously provided by plug-ins – “because some of these features are so pervasive on the web that they are seen by users as fundamentally expected capabilities” – he goes on to identify three areas where Silverlight remains necessary. These are “premium” multimedia which merges video with application elements such as conferencing, picture in picture, DRM, analytics; consumers apps and games; and finally business/enterprise apps.

It is the last of these which interests me most. Becker’s statements come soon after the preview of Visual Studio LightSwitch, which is solely designed for data-driven business applications. Taking the two together, and bearing in mind that apps may run on the desktop as well as in browser, Silverlight is now encroaching on the territory which used to belong to Windows applications. With LightSwitch in particular, Microsoft is encouraging developers who might previously have built an app in Access or Visual Basic to consider Silverlight instead.

Why? Isn’t Microsoft better off if developers stick to Windows-only applications?

In one sense it is, as it gets the Windows lock-in – and yes, this is effective. I’m aware of businesses who are tied to Windows because of apps that they use, who might otherwise consider Macs for all or some of their business desktops. On the other hand, even Microsoft can see the direction in which we are travelling – cloud, mobile, diverse clients – and that Silverlight fits better with this model than Windows-only desktop clients.

Another consideration is that setup and deployment issues remain a pain-point for Windows apps. One issue is when it goes wrong, and Windows requires skilled surgery to get some app installed and working. Another issue is the constant energy drain of getting new computers and having to provision them with the apps you need. Microsoft has improved this no end for larger organisations, with standard system images and centralised application deployment, but Silverlight is still a welcome simplification; provided that the runtime is installed, it is pretty much the web model – just navigate to the URL and the app is there, right-click if you want to run on the desktop.

If Microsoft can also establish Windows Phone 7, which uses Silverlight as the runtime for custom apps, the platform then extends to mobile as well as desktop and browser.

The downside is that Silverlight apps have fewer capabilities than native Windows apps. Printing is tricky, for example, though Becker refers to “Virtualized printing” and I am not sure what exactly he means. He also highlights COM automation and group policy management, features that only work on Windows and which undermine Silverlight’s cross-platform promise. That said, via COM automation Silverlight has full access to the local machine giving developers a way of overcoming any limitations if they are willing to abandon cross-platform and browser-hosted deployment.

A winning strategy? Well, at least it is one that makes sense in the cloud era. On the other hand, Microsoft faces substantial difficulties in establishing Silverlight as a mainstream development platform. One is that Adobe was there first with Flash, which has a more widely deployed runtime, works on Android and soon other mobile devices, and is supported by the advanced design tools in Creative Suite. Another is the Apple factor, the popular iPhone and iPad devices which are a spear through the heart of cross-platform runtimes like Silverlight and Flash.

Finally, even within the Microsoft development community Silverlight is a hard sell for many developers. Some us recall how hard the company had to work to persuade Visual Basic 6 developers to move to .NET. The reason was not just stubborn individuals who dislike change – though there was certainly some of that – but also existing investment in code that could not easily be migrated. Both factors also apply to Silverlight. Further, it is a constrained platform, which means developers have to live with certain limitations. It is also managed code only, whereas some of the best developers for both desktop and mobile apps work in C/C++.

I suspect there is division even within Microsoft with regard to Silverlight. Clearly it has wide support and is considered a strategic area of development. At the same time, it is not helpful to the Windows team who will want to see apps that take advantage of new features in Windows 7 and beyond.

Yesterday Windows Phone 7 was released to manufacturing, which means the software is done. Another piece of the Silverlight platform is in place; and I guess over the next year or two we will see the extent to which Microsoft can make it a success.

microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Windows Phone 7 briefing report: no enterprise app deployment at launch

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I attended a Microsoft briefing on Windows Phone 7 (WP7) yesterday. Here’s a quick summary of what interested me.

It does appear to be a decent phone. Unfortunately I’ve not yet received a preview device, but there’s no doubt that the user experience is well ahead of that on previous Windows Mobile devices.

The user interface is distinctive as you have no doubt seen. Microsoft is building strong links with both Facebook and Windows Live, surfaced at various places, and hopes this will be the best phone for social networking. It also hooks into Xbox Live, though it does not enable real-time multiplayer games, only turn-by-turn.

It has Bing maps with GPS support, though I suspect it will not be the equal of Google Maps on iPhone or Android. However, at least Microsoft is not in Apple’s position where it relies on a competitor for this key application.

One significant aspect for both users and developers is Tile Notifications. Each installed app has a tile which the user can install on the Start (home) page. These tiles can display text and image notifications that can be customized for the user. For example, a travel app could show a red alert and a message if a plane was cancelled or delayed. A sports app could show the latest score for your favourite team. However, there is no multi-tasking, so most of the time the app is not even running. How does this work?

The answer is that Microsoft hosts a notification server through which app vendors can push notifications. The app vendor needs to store on its own server any user-specific data, such as which flight she has booked. The app vendor can then push notifications to the user via Microsoft’s service. A more detailed explanation is here.

I like this form of notification since it is non-intrusive for the user. If you do not want to see them at all, you can just remove the tile from the Start page.

Microsoft confirmed that in-browser Silverlight will not work on launch. This strikes me as surprising, since Silverlight is built into the OS. I guess it will come later.

I asked a few questions.

When will we get Windows Phone 7? Microsoft is only saying “for Christmas 2010”.

Will it support tethering? No comment at the moment.

Will there be any way to copy a file from your PC to the device? I thought this would get a straightforward answer, but it did not. I was told that the PC side of WP7 has not been announced yet. However, it will bear some relation to what has been done before for Zune – though the UK still might or might not get the Zune Pass subscription service. Prompted by this discussion, I downloaded the Zune software. It is nicer to use than Windows Media Player, for sure. Why does Microsoft have two free media players, a good one that is reserved for a small niche of US users, and a mediocre one that comes with every version of Windows? You tell me.

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Will there be any way to deploy applications without going through the Marketplace? The answer is mostly “No”, though Microsoft knows this is necessary for corporate apps and says there will be an announcement on the subject later this year. That said, there is a developer portal, intended for testing your apps, where you can specify up to 5 or 10 users who can download and install an app. This is in effect a limited private deployment, though it is not intended for that purpose.

Deploying apps to Windows Phone 7 will be slightly more expensive than it is for Apple’s iPhone. The policies are explained here. You pay $99 to register, which gets you five free submissions, after which it is $19.99 per app. Each registration is limited to five free apps, but there is no limit on paid apps. There is a 70/30 revenue split. The idea is to limit the number of low quality apps. Not a bad thing considering the amount of junk in Apple’s App Store.

microsoft, sharepoint

Microsoft cash cows alive and well, lame ducks still lame

Here is my quick summary of Microsoft’s just-announced quarterly results:

Quarter ending June 30th 2010 vs quarter ending June 30th 2009, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Client (Windows + Live) 4548 +1379 3063 +1134
Server and Tools inc. Azure 4012 +84 1546 +340
Online 565 +64 -696 -111
Business (Office) 5250 +683 3284 +578
Entertainment and devices 1600 +343 -172 -31

What’s notable about these figures? Well, the big-picture Microsoft question is how it is coping with industry transitions, in particular the transition from on-premise servers and desktop software to cloud services and mobile device clients. Of course you can debate the extent and speed of that transition, but I believe it to be real.

The story here is that Microsoft’s traditional products are still amazingly profitable, and that the effort invested in making Windows 7 a decent upgrade from Windows XP or Vista is paying off. Further, Microsoft Office sales actually exceed Windows sales. It does not really surprise me; despite the existence of capable cheaper or free alternatives, I rarely see business PCs that do not have Office installed; and Microsoft is busy locking in Enterprise customers with hooks between Office client and SharePoint server.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s progress in cloud and device looks amazingly bad. The figures are not all that easy to read, since Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is part of the Server and Tools business; and BPOS, the cloud-based Exchange and SharePoint offering, probably sits there too. The “Online” business in the figures covers Bing and MSN, and earns its money primarily from advertising. This part of the business managed to turn in a loss greater than its revenue, which is remarkable considering how successful Google is with that same business model.

Entertainment and Devices is also hard to read. If you read the press release, it turns out that the reason revenue increased was not thanks to the success of Xbox or an unlikely rebound for Zune or Windows Mobile. Xbox actually declined, and so did Windows mobile, and the increase was thanks to increased sales of Windows Embedded:

Non-gaming revenue increased $35 million or 1% primarily reflecting increased sales of Windows Embedded device platforms, offset in part by decreased Zune and Windows Mobile revenue.

Windows Embedded is an interesting story. I don’t know how its figures break down, but I research things such as digital signage and point of service systems from time to time, and there is a lot happening in that space which deserves more attention from the technical press, especially as it directly touches our lives.

Despite the Embedded success, Entertainment and devices also turned in a substantial loss, though nothing like the horrors of Online.

Conclusions? One is not to write off Microsoft; it’s still a highly profitable giant. But the other is that the company desperately needs a big success outside Windows and Office to convince us that it really has a bright future. A sparkling launch for Windows Phone 7 would do nicely.

.net, microsoft, professional, visual studio

Developing for Windows Phone 7

I spent some time today watching parts one and two of Windows Phone 7 Jump Start presented by Rob Miles and Andy Wigley. After a slow start there were clear demos of basic coding for Microsoft’s new phone; and I’d guess that most Microsoft platform developers would be reassured that if they can code for Silverlight, or do games in XNA, they will not have any problem coding for Windows Phone 7. The further implication is that it will be relatively easy, with the proviso that complex applications with good performance and excellent design are never easy. There is also the challenge of learning Expression Blend, if needed.

All participants were asked to state what other mobile platforms they had developed for; and while we were not shown the results of these polls there was a comment to the effect that “Windows mobile and None are neck and neck”, which I found interesting. It suggests that iPhone and Android developers are in no hurry to learn about Microsoft’s phone. If Microsoft gets enough customers they may then take an interest. Competing with Apple was always a given; but it is the rise of Google Android which must be most troubling to Microsoft, since it has given the non-Apple phone vendors what they need.

Still, the combination of Visual Studio plus Windows Phone 7 does make sense for .NET developers.

An early slide presented the Windows 7 hardware, which is worth reviewing as it is a reasonable specification. Supposedly Microsoft is taking a hard line with OEMs to keep the spec at or better than this minimum:

Display

480×800 QVGA
320×480 HVGA

Capacitive touch

4 or more contact points

Sensors

A-GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, Light

Camera

5 mega pixels or more

Hardware buttons

Start, Search, Back

Memory

256 MB RAM or more

8GB Flash storage or more

GPU

DirectX 9 acceleration

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, windows

Ten years of Microsoft .NET – but what about the next ten?

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Technology products have many birthdays – do you count from first announcement, or release to manufacturing, or general availability? Still, this week is a significant one for Microsoft .NET and the C# language, which was first unveiled to the world in detail at Tech-Ed Europe on July 7th, 2000. The timing was odd; July 7th was the last day of Tech-Ed, whereas news at such events is normally reserved to the first day or two – but the reason was to preview the announcement at the Professional Developers Conference in Orlando the following week. It was one of the few occasions when Europe got the exclusive, though as I recall most of the journalists had already gone home.

It is interesting to look back, and I wrote a piece for The Register on .NET hits and misses. However you spin it, it’s fair to say that the .NET platform has proved to be one of Microsoft’s better initiatives, and has delivered on at least some of its goals.

It is even more interesting to look forward. Will we still be using .NET in 2020?

There is no sign of Microsoft announcing a replacement for .NET; and little sign of .NET catching on in a big way outside the Microsoft platform, so in part the question is about how the company will fare over the coming decade. Still, it is worth noting that the role of the .NET framework  in that platform still seems to be increasing.

Most predictions are wrong; but the general trend right now is towards the cloud+device computing model. The proposition is that both applications and data belong in the cloud, whether public, private or hybrid. Further, it seems plausible that we will fall out of love with personal computers, with all their complexity and vulnerability to malware, and embrace devices that just work, where the operating system is locked down, data is just a synchronised local cache, and applications are lightweight clients for internet services. Smartphones are already like this, but by the end of this year when Apple’s iPad has been joined by other slates and small computers running Google Android, Google ChromeOS, Intel/Nokia MeeGo and HP WebOS, it may be obvious that traditional laptop and desktop computers will decline.

It turns out that the .NET Framework is well suited to this model, so much so that Microsoft has made it the development platform for Windows Phone 7. Why stop at Windows Phone 7 – what about larger devices that run only .NET applications, sandboxed from the underlying operating system and updated automatically over the Internet? Microsoft cannot do that for Windows as we know it, because we demand compatibility with existing applications, but it could extend the Windows Phone 7 OS and application model to a wider range of devices that take over some of the tasks for which we currently use a laptop.

In theory then, with Azure in the cloud and Silverlight on devices, the next ten years could be good ones for the .NET Framework.

That said, it is also easy to build the case against. Microsoft has it all to do with Windows Phone 7; the market is happily focused on Apple and Google Android devices at the high end. Microsoft’s hardware partners are showing signs of disloyalty, after years of disappointment with Windows Mobile, and HP has acquired Palm. If Windows Phone 7 fails to capture much of the market, as it may well do, then mobile .NET will likely fail with it. Put this together with a decline in traditional Windows machines, and the attraction of .NET as a cloud-to-client framework will diminish.

Although developer platform VP Scott Guthrie, C# architect Anders Hejlsberg and others are doing an excellent job of evolving the .NET framework, it is the success or failure of the wider Microsoft platform that will determine its future.

adobe, flash, mobile

Flash and AIR for Windows Phone 7 by mid 2011?

I’m at an Adobe partner conference in Amsterdam – not for the partner sessions, but to be one of the judges for tomorrow’s application showcase. However, I’ve been chatting to Michael Chaize, a Flash Platform evangelist based in Paris, and picked up a few updates on the progress of Flash and AIR on mobile devices. AIR is a runtime which uses the Flash player for applications that are not hosted in the browser.

It’s well known that AIR for Android is ready to preview, though it is not quite public yet. Which platforms will come next? According to Chaize, AIR for Palm webOS is well advanced, though a little disrupted by the coming HP takeover, and Blackberry is also progressing fast. He added that Windows Phone 7 will not be long delayed, which intrigued me since that platform itself is not yet done. Although Microsoft and Adobe have said that Flash will not be in the initial release, Chaize says that it will come “within months” afterwards, where “months” implies less than a year – maybe six months or so.

We also talked about the constraints of a mobile platform and how that affects development. Currently developers will need to use the standard Flex components, but Chaize said that a forthcoming Flash Mobile Framework will be optimized for devices. Of course, the more you tailor your app for mobile, the less code you can share with your desktop version.

The Apple question also came up, as you would expect. Chaize pointed out that Adobe’s enterprise customers may still use the abandoned Flash Packager, which compiles Flash code to a native iPhone app, since internal apps do not need App Store approval. That said, I suspect that even internal developers have to agree the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, with its notorious clause 3.3.1 that forbids use of an “intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool”. Even if that is the case, I doubt that Apple would pursue the developers of private, custom applications.

microsoft, mobile, windows

Windows Phone 7: is it really consumer?

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Here at TechEd in New Orleans we’ve seen some further demos of Windows Phone 7. Two features that have been highlighted are the ability to have more then one Exchange account, and a mobile version of SharePoint Workspace for easy access to SharePoint documents and an option to keep an offline copy.

Neither of these strike me as consumer features, which is intriguing given that at the Mix conference in March we were told that the first release of Windows Phone 7 is firmly targeted at consumers rather than businesses.

I also saw a report in the New York Times this morning noting that Apple is working to stave off the threat to iPhone from Google. No mention of Windows Phone 7, which I suspect has been almost written off as irrelevant by the general public. In the rarefied atmosphere of Microsoft TechEd, though, where most people I talk to seem to be solidly Microsoft platform – Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and so on – having a mobile phone that integrates nicely makes a lot of sense.

There’s also the application aspect. Windows Phone 7 runs Silverlight, which means .NET code, so for developers who already use Visual Studio it is a mobile platform that fits with their work.

In fact, it is easy to see why Windows Phone 7 will appeal to these business users, whereas in the consumer space it is up against tough competition.

I will be interested to see what Microsoft says about business use of Windows Phone 7 as we get closer to launch.