Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development
Microsoft has gotten a bad wrap for many years, I’ve done a fair amount of it myself. I think today’s Microsoft has a very different public-facing gorilla than it used to be.
The MS Dev Show recently interviewed Scott Hanselman, where?he was very open about Microsoft today and dealing with their detractors. Very good, very entertaining listen. It’s really good to hear from Scott who has always been committed to moving things forward at Microsoft.
I think Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror is right on with his recent take on the Microsoft Surface RT:
Surface is just like the first iPad in that it has all the flaws and rough edges you’d expect in a version one device. But it is also like the first iPad in that there is undeniably the core of something revelatory and transformative here ? a vision of the future of computing that doesn’t sacrifice either keyboard or touch.
Reviewers think Surface is intended to be a tablet killer, but it isn’t. It’s a laptop killer. After living with the Surface RT for a few days now, I’m convinced that this form factor is the replacement and way forward for the stagnant laptop. I can’t even remember the last time I was this excited about a computer. The more I use it, the more I think that touch plus keyboard is the future of all laptops.
How wonderful it is to flip open the Surface and quickly type a 4 paragraph email response when I need to. How wonderful it is to browse the web and touch whatever I want to. And switching between the two modes of interaction ? sometimes typing, sometimes touching ? is completely natural. Remember when I talked about two-fisted computing, referring to the mouse and keyboard working in harmony? With Surface, I found that also applies to touch. In spades.
Microsoft is betting big here, probably the biggest since Windows 3.0. ?The company has been trying to have a successful phone business for years now but adoption has been less than stellar.
This goes beyond using touch on the Surface devices, it extends to laptops as well. The release of Microsoft Surface RT and Windows 8 mark not simply a me-too tablet, but the marriage of old school Windows with a new touch interface and possibly marking the next step in the evolutionary scale of computing.
It’s been rumored for a while that Apple would combine Mac OSX and iOS to a single operating system that would give Apple the opportunity to create MacBooks and iMacs with touch interfaces.
Microsoft is the first to market with an operating system with the ability to combine the traditional laptop with a touch interface. ?Intel is getting behind this and supporting PC manufacturers such as Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo, Asus and others to produce super light devices with hybrid tablet and laptop capabilities. ?Scott Hanselman has a?great post discussing his use of an Intel Ultrabook prototype?with some follow-up in a second post and how it compares to the norm.
There is real innovation going on here but will users want to combine touch and typing in a laptop format? ?I think so if the hardware is good and the UI responsive.
I see the Surface, unlike the iPad which is mainly a device for consuming content, an equally good creator of content. ?I have tried many times to write a blog post or even a fairly length email on my iPad, but the process is difficult. ?The keyboard under glass doesn’t do it for me as a touch typist so my speed and accuracy pay the price.
If Microsoft can continually drive innovation in the Surface and keep the PC hardware manufacturers producing really good hardware (read like Apple) they’ll have a nice 1-2 punch with their offering. ?Software developers should feel compelled to take advantage of this and create great productive applications. ?Everybody wins, but?Microsoft has to keep focused and listen to customers.
I just wonder how easy it will be to accept touching my laptop screen. ?I always ask my daughter to keep her fingers off my MacBook Air screen when she’s pointing something out to me. ?Hopefully the glass on these devices will mask fingerprints well during use like the way the iPad does. ?Time will tell.
I’ll be the first to admit to being critical of Microsoft over the years. ?I used to be heavily invested in their technology stack but became disenchanted when they consistently seemed to keep changing direction, dragging developers along for what was often an unpleasant ride. ??
I think Microsoft has a real chance here with Windows 8 and their Surface devices to be a competitive presence in this growing tablet and ultra book market..but only if they can play it well and I’m not convinced they can.
One of the biggest challenges I faced when starting to look at the new Microsoft Windows OS and Surface devices was what all these seemingly interchangeable names meant. ?Let see, we have:
This video was pretty popular from the time where a sweaty Ballmer chanted about developers and how important they were to the company. ?
I think this is as important today if not more so, but I’m not convinced the company is in line with this thinking today. ?If I were running Microsoft I would make sure there was an easy and affordable way for developers to get their hand on a Surface tablet long before general consumers hand them in their hands. ?Wny? ?Well, one disadvantage Microsoft has over virtually all other tablet platforms is the lack of applications. ?I know that Apple didn’t have to do this when the original iPad came out, they didn’t have to since there was no competition. ?
Today is a different story though, with Apple and over 500,000 applications and there are more on Android. ?Not all the apps for Apple and Android run on tablets but a large amount do. ?Microsoft is the underdog gorilla in the fight here, they need to be more creative.
Microsoft should embrace developers and get the tools into our hands. ?As someone who has iOS apps in the App Store, I know first-hand that its fine to test applications in a simulator but the real test comes on the hardware. ?Microsoft should be getting hardware to interested developers for at least a nicely discounted price, let me know I’m important to you. ?I would buy one for sure.
It’s the chicken and the egg problem; people won’t buy new hardware unless there’s apps, there won’t be apps until the hardware is in user’s hands. ?Developers are taking a risk spending time to create apps that may never get used. ?It would show great intentions and support if Microsoft help developers out with hardware, on a loaner basis, steeply discount or outright free. ?I doubt the last one would happen but maybe for people who have an app they are bringing to market now.
I’ve seen lots of feedback about Windows 8 and Windows RT on Surface. ?I am not going to rehash anything that is written elsewhere other than to point out a few things worth checking out.
As someone who has seen the Surface tablet and work with it,?David Pogue says the platform needs apps.
Mary Jo Foley has a great?roundup of Surface reviews on her ZDNet blog.
Bottom line, this platform needs applications if anyone will purchase a Surface tablet. ?Applications will not come without developers and Microsoft needs to open up their arms and coffers a bit and welcome developers loudly as they once did.
Windows 8 is the next iteration of Windows, the upgraded Windows 7. ?The user interface is new and a bit confusing, developers need to be writing more apps to fill the Windows Store with the applications users expect on any platform today; Twitter and Facebook clients, Instapaper and all the great apps on Mac and Android. ?This will level the playing field and where there is competition there is innovation.
The story still begins and ends with developers, developers, developers. ?
I recently needed to create a local user account for a project which involved using the Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics eConnect product. eConnect product uses some COM+ components and needs to have a user account during installation to properly setup the components. I decided the simple thing to do was to create a user named econnect just for this purpose.
You can see when I go to User Accounts the new account shows up. I expect the account to show up here :
Everything works just fine but can be a bit of an annoyance when booting up and logging into Windows 7 where I have the option of logging into my regular account or my new econnect user account. I don?t want this behavior, I just want to be shown my normal enter password textbox as I am familiar. Since this is a service account and no on will ever log in to it, I don?t want the option of seeing it.
It turns out there is some registry hacking that one can do to provide a list of users you want to hide from the system. Be warned that you could possibly add your own account to the list and be locked out of Windows 7 completely.
The process is actually pretty simple, you need to fire up regedit to get started. Once regedit is running traverse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
Once you have found the path in regedit the steps are pretty simple:
It should look something like this:
You can repeat step 3 above for each user to hide.
And that?s all there is too it. If done correctly, the user will not show up on a logon screen or even when managing user accounts.
I have been working on a project recently which requires me to integrate with QuickBooks Online, in this case from a web application. I have had the pleasure (strong word) working with integrating with QuickBooks in various capacities in the past and although it is not trivial, it does work. I ran into an interesting problem recently with an error that baffled me.
While attempting to connect to QuickBooks online from my ASP.NET C# application, I received the following COM Exception:
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3C801F08-CDC5-4129-AAE8-CCC4F116B5BE} failed due to the following error: 80040154.
Searching the various Intuit Developer Forums led me nowhere. I was thinking it may be the fact I am funning on Windows 7 and figured it might be an incompatibility with Windows 7 and the COM components from Intuit in their QuickBooks SDK. After various Google searches I picked up a few clues to the source of the problem, which in hindsight should have been a bit more obvious to me.
The root of the problem was not really Windows 7 but the fact I am running 64-bit and Visual Studio 2008 defaults the Platform Target to ?Any CPU? when building a project. So selecting Project-> {project name} Properties show the following dialog with Any CPU selected:
By changing the choice of the Platform Target to x86 and rerunning my application, the creation of the session to QuickBooks Online works fine. The idea should have probably been more obvious to me, knowing the DLL?s from Intuit are 32-bit COM-based and the interop to my 64-bit operating system could cause some problems.
If anyone wants to add the technical details as to why this behaves as it does, I will update this post with those technical details. I hope this helps someone else with the same problem so they won?t waste the time that I did.
I have been running Windows Vista 64-bit as my main .NET development system for quite some time now and pretty happy with the results. I put each client I have in a VMWare virtual machine (VM) and install the necessary operating system, this keeps things isolated and clean from my Vista host.
I decided to upgrade my Vista host to the Windows 7 RTM, to get some of the niceties I have enjoyed while testing out Windows 7 in a VM. The upgrade went very smooth but only later did I realize there was a problem upon starting a couple of my client VM?s. I was greeted by this error:
After a bit of searching the web I stumbled upon a blog post by Andreas Heil titled Broken VMware Workstation Network Adapter, which described my problem and the solution almost completely. I won?t repeat his solution here, but it turned out Bridging was not enabled on my VMNet1 adapter. My virtual adapter looked liked this:
Checking the box next to VMWare Bridge Protocol fixed the issue of not having network connectivity in all of the effected VM?s.
I have wanted to be a Windows Vista user and developer since before it was released, but there always seemed like something didn’t work or some application I used kept crashing. The pure pain of the performance of Vista alone was not worth the "upgrade" from Windows XP.
I have tried both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista and had a horrible time, consistently running into problems trying to get the iPhone working with iTunes under Vista as well. I wrote about some issues before giving up.
Once Vista Service Pack1 was released I decided to update a couple of my virtual machines (VMWare, no Virtual PC here) and was a bit disappointed by my observations, the VMs were not noticeably faster. I had heard SP1 was significant performance improvements over Vista RTM, but this was not so.
I had the opportunity to get my hands on a Vista disk with SP1 already part of the install, this way you don’t to install Vista and then install the service pack later. I did this first in a fresh virtual machine with 1G of RAM, the install was clean and the VM runs amazingly fast on VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro with 4G of RAM.
Since Vista ran so well in a VM on my Mac I decided to go for it and replace a flaky Windows XP installation on my main development system. The installation went very smooth and I did not have to install any third party drivers for my Asus motherboard.
Setting out to install all the necessary software packages like Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005, iTunes and a ton of other packages has resulted in a very fast and stable platform. All of my issues with the iPhone and iTunes as well as the ASP.NET development server are gone. One of my biggest complaints, speed, seems to be a non-issue for me today.
After a few days of pretty heavy use I have to say I am pleased with Vista at this point. It shouldn’t matter installing Vista and the service pack later but it certainly seems to be better doing it this way.
If I look back to the days of Windows XP it did take Microsoft a couple service packs for users to adopt XP and be happy with it. There were performance complaints, stability issues and compatibility problem that were all overcome. I think this may be very much the same.
I think Vista is very good at this point and I have to admit it took me a lot to say it. I have been down on it since the release and all of the troubles I have faced. I have given a good deal of razzing to the Microsoft consultants I work with, they get paid to love Vista and poking at them has been a lot of fun.
I have heard over the past year or so rumors about Microsoft buying Yahoo and it never seemed to materialize. You know how rumors get started, it is a good story against the monster Google. Strictly from a shareholder’s point of view this is good news. It’s good news if you are a Yahoo shareholder because you just gained about $9/sare over its recent close. If you are a Microsoft shareholder you stand to gain in the long term with the added value of Yahoo to the Microsoft portfolio. I am a Microsoft shareholder and have been for a while, the announcement gave me an opportunity to pick up some more Microsoft with it being down $2/share on the announcement. The more important aspect of this potential merger is what it means for customers of both companies. Yahoo has a huge base of customers for both search and it’s portal, which is number 1 in Alexa. As everyone on the internet knows, Microsoft bid $44.6 billion dollars for Yahoo. This is a true reflection how determined Microsoft is to purchase Yahoo. My take on the merger is a huge upside for Microsoft and for Yahoo, who is losing value by the day. Microsoft will gain much needed gain in both search and advertising revenue. I feel this is the real value for Microsoft’s bid. If it goes through Microsoft will have bought a huge boost in traffic and advertising revenues. This will be a great boost for Microsoft shareholders for years to home. So, what happens to the open source properties such as Flickr? I don’t think they will be shutdown, but will continue to be run as they are now. I doubt Microsoft has any intentional goals to shut them down. I read on Twitter how people said they would create their own Flickr and Del.icio.us because Microsoft would either shut them down or change them. Come on, those properties are not of any value to Microsoft and they will just remain as they are. The outcome of the proposed merger is a long ways off. Google will have to put in it’s 2 cents, trying to get the merger rejected. I think for only Google is this a bad deal, they are arrogant and don’t respect Microsoft, which will be their downfall. The first thing that needs to happen is Yahoo needs to give it’s nod to the deal and the Security and Exchange Commission needs to approve it. It will take many months if and when Yahoo agrees to the deal. They would be stupid not to, they have nothing in the pipeline and are losing value daily. I hope the deal is approved and a better Microsoft is the result.
Windows Writer Zone has announced Windows Live Writer is finally out of beta and available now and is free.
Windows Live Writer is the tool I use to write this blog as well as craft the articles I write for InfoQ. I used several tools over the past couple years that I have blogged and none are as smooth and easy to use as Windows Live Writer. I think the user interface is what makes the product so nice to use.
More information can be found at the Windows Live Writer web site.
I recently decided to dump Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 in favor of VMWare’s Workstation 6.0.? Why?? The primary reason is VPC is a pretty lousy virtualization environment, has lousy support for anything but Microsoft and no one outside of Microsoft creates any virtual machines for it.?? Yes, I sound bitter.? I think it’s because I am, I have had enough of all the? jumping through hoops to get Linux distributions running on Virtual PC. I decided to download the VMWare Workstation 6.0 30-day trial to see how well it works.? I was a long-time user of VMWare products before Microsoft purchased Virtual PC.? I didn’t really make a decision to switch other than VMWare kept upgrading and the cost was too much for a poor developer and the price was right for Virtual PC, so I switched. Apparently VMWare did not sit back and fold after losing me as a customer.??? VMWare has a great following of dedicated users who create tons of virtual machines you can just download and just boot-up.? VMWare Workstation also does a great job of supporting many different vendors as the guest operation system, which work right out of the box without having to pour through forums like you do with Microsoft’s VPC.? Try getting Ubuntu Linux 7.04 to work on VPC without jumping through hoops. I have installed Ubuntu, Fedora Core 5, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista on VMWare without a hitch.? When setting up a new virtual machine in VMWare you are given many different operating systems to choose from, Virtual PC is primarily focused on Microsoft operating systems.? It’s understandable but it says a lot about the value of non-Microsoft OS’s. The only drawback to VMWare’s product is the price, $189 for a single user versus free for Microsoft’s VPC.? Of course I have to think to what my father has always said, you get what you pay for.? VMWare’s products are so much more mature and the development much more focused. I purchased my copy VMWare Workstation 6.0 from Programmer’s Paradise.?? VPC was uninstalled faster than it ever booted Vista.
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