MS released a beta of Service pack 1 for VS2008 which has lots of fixes and updates. I’d like to pick out a few that I really think are worthwhile;
- Much Improved performance for web design
- Firefox support for clickonce (maybe we can go back to using it now)
- Lightweight .NET Framework (Client Profile Setup Package)
There are loads of other enhancements, but its obviously far from finished so not really ready for deployment, but looks very promising, good work VS2008 Team!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx
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Here’s a really brilliant idea, well executed. Script# allows dev’s to write C# code and then translates the code to cross browser compatible javascript. Its compatible with MSBuild and has intellisense support (cool!).
If you are a dev working with the web (especially AJAX), drop what you are doing and read about it here … http://projects.nikhilk.net/ScriptSharp/Default.aspx
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So here is the much expected HTC Diamond. Very nice, but lacking a keyboard. Its a real shame too because there’s space to have a front facing keyboard which running smartphone OS would have made a stunning device.
I’m very interested in the fact that it has accelerated graphics with a GPU which is normally a no-no for battery performance (only 900mAh!) but they are quoting 100 hours usage with push email working which is very good.
Other stand out features I noticed are 4GB storage and a 3.2MP camera which support video calling (HSDPA 7.3mbps and HSUPA). It also has an accelerometer like the iPhone so it can detect changes in position to change display to landscape and back (or maybe as an ad-hoc Wii controller). The big change is the UI which HTC seem to want to make their own, in the form of TouchFlow 3D. Its a nice phone, but evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
… and please make devices with front facing keyboards!
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This is one of those, ‘Why couldn’t they get it right’ issues where the Service Pack for .NET Framework fails to install and us ISVs are left picking up the pieces. Microsoft have released a KB article 951950 ( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-gb;951950 ) and a tool, the snappily named ’Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Registration Correction Tool’ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0BA6038C-061E-4B4A-9BE9-96A323701260
This has been a bug bear of mine for ages now, why there is no version control in .NET Framework. Lets not forget this was a technology designed to alleviate DLL version hell. But you try and find out what versions, sp’s and hotfixes are installed and you will be left wondering.
Somehow MS need to get a grip of this situation and have some sort of common and comprehensive way of querying whats installed on a target machine, its ISV hell. This is further compounded by the fact that the framework doesn’t gracefully handle version deficiencies. If a call you make from your app is missing in the version of the Framework the user has installed it doesn’t ask nicely if you would like the latest version downloaded and installed it just throws an exception that your app has to handle. Very unfriendly and inconvenient for the ISV and user.
The whole .NET Framework deployment scenario needs looking at again from a deployment perspective and prevent us ISV’s having to code around the deficiencies it was supposed to cure.
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I received my Windows 2008 Server Resource kit today, but it was somewhat more ‘compact’ that I was led to believe. The mockups showed a box about 2 foot long and purporting to have 6600+ pages in 6 books, but in reality it was a slimmer 8 inches (20cm) and had about 4000 pages in 6 books. Apparently the rest of the pages are there on the CDROM, but they never made it to print. This is quite disappointing for a publication costing $249. A quick skim through the volumes reveals a wide range of gaps in the content I would have expected, certainly not up to the standard of the Windows 2000 Resource kit. So be warned!
It contains
- IIS 7 ResKit (779 pages)
- Windows Admin ResKit (710 pages)
- PowerShell Scripting Guide (693 pages)
- Active Directory ResKit (827 pages)
- NAP Guide (816 pages)
- Security ResKit (476 pages)
- CDROM
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I don’t think so!
BillG made reference to a newer version this week at the IADB’s annual meeting. When asked about a new version of Windows he said “That’ll be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version.” He added: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”
I don’t think this is really a new version of Windows, more likely a Vista SP2 release that has a marketing programme associated with it or maybe he meant a beta would start in a year. I can’t see anyway it will not be Vista based. The pain of upgrading all our development from XP to Vista took a good 3 years from the first beta to release. There isnt enough time to develop, test and release a completely refreshed OS in that time, especially one with new features to be super excited about. There has been much talk of MinWin or components for Windows 7, again this is unlikely in any significant way as so much of the current OS is interlinked and cross dependent.
The W7M1 builds floating about now are just Vista with minor changes so far. Things would need to be a lot more advanced to have a release in a year.
But, could there be a secret project? I have long suggested to people in MS that a new parallel OS project should be started based on VM technology. This would be a highly secure mini-loader which could then load guest Windows OS partitions. These guest partitions could run specific applications or a new desktop. This would allow backward compatibility whilst allowing new desktop UI experience to be available. This would ease the migration to new types of application which are deployed separately to the UI experience. This is all possible because of Multicore and Hyper-V technology which permits this kind of segmentation. This will allow Microsoft to break free of the past architecture whilst retaining compatibility.
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My T-Mobile contract is coming to its end and thought I should just check back with Orange to see if their data plans had joined the 21st Century, and seems good news is on the way. Apparently on the 6th April Blackberry users will be given a new 2GB allowance for £6/month and the rest of us will get a 2GB allowance for £8 permonth from May 5th.
Time will tell if these come to fruition as there have been many false dawns for Orange data plan upgrades so far, if so then I would like to welcome Orange to the 21st Century!
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I have to say I love the new WindowsMobile 6.1 upgrade. I’ve tried it on a few devices including the T-Mobile Mail and it feels twice as fast and a lot smoother. One device it has brought back from the dead is the Qtek 8500/HTC STRTRK/i-mate smartflip, the fab clamshell device that had been languishing with WindowsMobile 5. WindowsMobile 6.1 really flies on this device and makes it feel fresh and modern. Watch this space for the official announcement at CTIA!
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The Samsung i710 has been delayed again to mid April, so I’m tempted by this cheaper £195 (half the i710 price) Toshiba G710 which is almost the same dimensions as my beloved Dash and its WM6 Standard. Its a pretty weedy processor and an otherwise unremarkable spec but it does come with built-in GPS. No software, but at least the hardware is there. Its due early April so I may give it a go instead.
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I think Microsoft did a good thing making the IE8 beta public, I know they say its a dev release but hopefully it will do two important things close to my heart;
Firstly, and most importantly, help ISV’s and developers focus on writing a single standards compliant code base for web apps and banish all the ‘#if def’ scenarios for all the various browser quirks that look great on the quirky browser but throw the rest for six.
Secondly, and nearly as important, banish IE6 from the face of the earth. This is the worst affliction out in the wild with its appauling standards support and even worse CSS rendering performance. The sooner IE6 is a distant memory the better.
One very cool thing I want to mention about IE8 is the support for web slices; this is where you can hot link to a small part of a web page and see it on demand without having to reload the site. Check it out.
Anyway, get IE8 beta 1 here … http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx
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Well it had to happen. the excellent T-Mobile Mail (HTC S620) is discontinued. No stock left, all traces erased from the T-Mobile website. I am really sad as this was a fantastic device, the best I ever owned. Now its unlikely to ever get an official 6.1 upgrade from T-Mobile, which will mean unlocking the phone and applying an HTC image… when it arrives.
So what next? Well the Samsung i780, thats what. Almost identical dimensions plus assisted GPS and WiFI. I almost bought one on Orange, but their stingy data allowance means I’ll wait for an unbranded device and continue with T-Mobile. There is no unlock for this yet either. I don’t like the number keys being two in, they should either be on the left edge or one in. The only other thing I’m not sure about is that this is a WM6 Pro device (PPC) not a smartphone, and I’ve not yet seen the need for a touch screen on a phone, and theres a stylus to lose, but we will see.
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If you are as old as me you will remember the Cairo project, an attempt to create an object based layer on top of what was then Windows NT (remember that?). I was lucky enough to see some of the prototype Cairo builds but they never came to fruition. The best bit was the OFS (Object File System) which was the pre-cursor to WinFS (which also died), but the flashy bit was the UI which eventually was toned down in Windows 2000.
Well now some crazy guys are re-creating Cairo, or at least the shell bits, initially for Vista but also later for XP (Hooray). I’m not entirely sure what they will achieve with this, but almost anything is better than the current Vista shell. So we’ll have to wait and see, but it looks pretty.
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Here’s a good idea, hosted Virtual Servers. I needed a new Windows Server so I got a virtual one courtesy of VPS Land (http://www.VPSLand.com).
The reason this is such a good idea is that it reduces the cost of hosting because your hoster can put multiple machines on a single physical machine. ok performance will suffer somewhat, but they do make several assertions about minimum CPU availability. The virtual servers are built of Quad core physical servers and mine feels fast to me. Its cheap too, $17 per month, for a ‘dedicated’ server.
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I love SharePoint and I hate it too. Its great in concept, but often so rigid in structure when creating a project. I’ve often thought why not just code the site in ASP.Net when designing a SharePoint solution, but I usually end up with SharePoint because it just has some handy bits and so many corporates are familiar with it. I usually struggle explaining SharePoint to some customers as its more a dev tool than a solution and its only when we deliver a KM or CMS solution that people get it, or at least understand what it did.
I just saw this article in TechNet magazine about SharePoint as a Wiki, which is a great concept, but one I thought a bit out of SharePoints scope but its interesting. I’m not convinced about the presentation, but the editing tools are there. Seeing this would not necessarily encourage me to use a Wiki as a knowledge management tool, but at least its supported in concept.
So now SharePoint can be a Content Management System, and Knowledge Management solution or even a Wiki.
More here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/cc162514.aspx
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I’ve upgraded my main server to the latest Windows Server 2008 build and installed Hyper-V. This box is Quad core with 4GB so it should be fine for running the Hyper-V environment. Hyper-V is an exciting update since it levearges the underlying hardware VM capabilities. For interest I just tried running Windows XP in VirtualPC under Windows XP under a Hyper-V session, and it works! and is surprinsingly fast, or at least no slower than natively.
What is amazing to me is that this relatively cheap commodity box combined with the Windows 2008/Hyper-V combo is akin to a mainframe from 10 years ago, think S/390 with MVS or VM/CMS which would have cost millions.
Anyway, as I find more info I’ll report it here, but its looking good.
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I watched with interest the channel9 video from the IE team that IE 8 has finally passed the ACID2 test, which is one measure of standards compliance. they have a small movie showing how the ACID2 test progressed with various builds over the past few months (it should draw a smiley face, similar to the Aceed logo of the 80’s). It finally draws the image correctly.
You can try it yourself with your own browser here http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html but don’t forget to check the reference image to see what it should look like (IE7 is not ACID2 compliant).
What is amazing is how far out of compliance some browsers are. If you are still using IE 6 I encourage and implore you to get upgraded to a better browser capability as provided by IE7, Firefox 2 or Opera 9. Its only when you compare the CSS rendering of FF2, O9 or IE7 with IE6 that you see how slow, wheezy and downright inaccurate it is with a modern AJAX site. As a company committed to providing our web services to appear like desktop apps using AJAX, IE 6 users always complain but it truly is their browser and not our sites which are at fault. If people won’t move on we can’t make the experience better. Its no good saying the display is rubbish and slow in IE6, its never going to get any better. So move on up, please!
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Any hints on where I can get an HTC S640 apart from getting a Telus contract, in Canada?
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Thanks Microsoft! just got a nice email telling me they are sending me a retail copy Vista for participating in the VHD development program. Unfortunately its coming from the US so will probably attract a hefty import duty charge which will make it not very free, but its the thought that counts.
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