Rauschenblog

WinFX now = .NET Framework 3.0

2006-06-09T23:10:00Z

Microsoft announced today that they are renaming the WinFX to “.NET Framework 3.0”. WinFX was the (confusing in my opinion…) umbrella name for things like WPF (aka Avalon) and WCF (aka Indigo).

They are basically killing the WinFX name all together and will brand everything as .NET Framework 3.0 which will ship with Vista. Framework 3.0 will be available on the following platforms:

Vista
XP SP2
Windows Server 2003

They are officially dropping support for Windows 98 and NT 4.0 with this version of the Framework.

One important note; the core .NET Framework functionality is NOT changing meaningfully with 3.0. There are a bunch of new services being layered on top of the current core functionality in the Framework. There was likely alot of discussion about calling this .NET Framework 2.5 rather than 3.0 to indicate that it is not a major upgrade, but they likely decided to go with 3.0 because of the scope of the new services.

There are some details here.

I think this is a great move - the WinFX name was always confusing and never established any traction with decision makers or developers. This falls into the 'sometimes less is more' school of thought. The .NET name has so much momentum that even if Microsoft wanted everyone to use the WinFX name, everyone was going to end up calling it '.NET '. People talk about building '.NET apps. - they weren't going to start talking about building 'WinFX apps'.

Biggest concern I have is the rate/frequency of churn Microsoft is introducing to the .NET Framework. We are going to go from 2.0 to 3.0 to something else (Visual Studio 2007 will likely require some level of update to the Framework) in 18 months. That's faster churn that corporate customers are going to adopt and distribution of the Framework is still a big hurdle to using .NET to build apps that will be broadly distributed.

In the end, the changes are positive (both the naming changes and the changes to the technology Microsoft is making).

MIX06 - Does This Change Everything?

2006-03-27T21:31:00Z

Last week I was at the MIX06 conference in Vegas. I wanted to post my thoughts/comments on the conference.

A couple of areas of focus for the content at the show stuck out to me:

Web UE Guidance: I think as an industry we do a pretty bad job of building software that delivers a first-class user experience. We (in general) know how to build software that performs well and is reliable, but we don’t (in general) know how to build software that behaves the way people expect it to and delivers a user experience that is independent from the underlying services. It was great to see MS taking a leadership position on this. A couple of the sessions I attended on AJAX/Atlas and more generically on building great user experiences were very informative. I see a LOT of the theories on building great UEs applied to the image search results page on the Live search site.

Atlas: Atlas reminds me a LOT of ASP 1.0. At the time ASP came out there was no ‘easy’ framework/toolset for building Web apps. ASP changed that; for the first time it was easy (relatively speaking) to build a Web application. It looks like Atlas is poised to do same for AJAX, but the complexity bar will be a little higher. Like most/all things to come out of the ASP.NET team, Ajax looks to be a well thought-out framework with the promise of great tools support to make it easy to build on. I say ‘great promise’ for the tools because at the moment the framework is clearly ahead of the tools. You can build great apps with Atlas today, but it is going to be ‘harder’ than a lot of people would like.

WPF/WPFE: I came away from the conference with a solid understanding of WPF/WPFE in terms of the technology. What I’m still not entirely clear on is when/if this will be a relevant technology to a meaningful portion of the development community. From a skeptics point of view, MS is working hard to deliver something about a year from now that will be roughly the same as what you can get today with Flash. There is some truth to that point of view…especially in the context of WPFE. In truth, I do think that MS is doing some innovative work with WPF what does leapfrog what Flash offers today. The real value, however, comes from the deep integration of WPF and supporting technologies into the MS application development tools/runtime stack. I do believe that WPC will replace the current Windows forms runtime for building desktop applications. I also think you will see Web applications taking advantage of WPF, but I am less confident on this one. The big question here is when. Personally, I think it’s going to be a while before WPF becomes a relevant technology developers…if I had to guess I would say 3-4 years. It will take that long for the runtimes to become generally available, the tools support to be there, and the technology to mature.

Live Services: This was the area where I came away least interested/excited. I think MS has a good story with the services they are working on and the concept of ‘software as a service’, I just don’t think much of what they are building will be useful to a meaningful portion of the development community. I’m exited/interested to see what MS can deliver on top of these services, but I don’t think there is a big opportunity for developers outside of MS to integrate them.

Media Center: A bit off topic, but there was some amazing demos of the next version of Media Center. The product just keeps getting better and better with the Vista release. Once I can get HDTV content into the box over something other than an antenna (ideally via DirectTV, but digital cable will work as well…) I will be all over putting an MCE box in my living room!

All in all, it was a productive couple of days. The conference had a different feel than most big MS conferences. It felt less rehearsed/less like a 3 days marketing session which was a nice change of pace.

In the end, is Microsoft ‘changing the way we build apps’ with the announcements and information they shared at MIX – no. The messaging and direction they provided felt very consistent with their past messaging to me. Sure, there was more of an emphasis on Web UEs at MIX, but MS has always had a strong story when it comes to Web development so this was nothing ‘new’. It was great, however, to see MS taking a strong/leadership position on delivering compelling software over the Internet. There is definitely a perception that other companies are doing a better job of that (not JUST a perception...but largely one), so it was good t osee a compelling/cohesive story from MS in this area.

Cool AND Functional

2006-03-23T00:21:00Z

Microsoft is doing some pretty innovative stuff with the search engine on the Live site. Today I stumbled on the new image search results page and was pretty amazed with what they've done. Check this out:
http://search.live.com/#q=chicago%20skyline&scope=images&lod=2&page=results

The roll-over effect makes the page much more usable than the traditional image search results page. Compare the Live page to the same search done on Google:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=chicago%20skyline&btnG=Google+Search&sa=N&tab=gi

By burying all of the metadata behind the roll-over effect, the Live page is able to show significantly more images in the same number of pixels. In addition, the Live page scales WAY better as you resize the browser. With Google, I get rows of 4 images no matter what size I make the browser. The Live page adjusts the number of images on each row as I make the browser window larger/smaller.

Also note the slider control at the top of the Live page. It allows you to dynamically resize the images and updates the page without refreshing.

Last but FAR from least, note the scrolling behavior. As you move down on the Live page, more images simply appear. No more concept of “Results 1 - 20 of about 12,700” which I’ve always thought was confusing.

Overall, it is a markedly better user experience for viewing the results of the search.

Oh yea, give it a try in Firefox…you’ll like what you see.

Hate is a Strong Word

2006-02-10T05:22:00Z

Some people have the opinion that I don't like Web apps. I'm not sure where they got that idea, but it might have something to do with this.

The truth is I do like Web apps. I use them all the time...sometimes even by choice. For example, I use SQL Server Reporting Services quite a bit and it does exactly what I need. I love the broad reach that solutions built with Reporting Services provide and in all honesty the User Experience the tool provides is actually quite good for what it is (i.e. a reporting engine). There are plenty of other examples where Web apps are the right fit and the technologies that are being branded as 'Web 2.0' are expanding that category of apps quite a bit.

Interestingly, there seem to be a lot of people that think technologies like AJAX are a threat to Microsoft. Their argument is typically focused on two points:

AJAX apps are SO good that they make desktop apps obsolete.
Microsoft doesn't GET Web development

The first point is...well...just kind of silly. Yes, AJAX apps are better than non-AJAX apps, but they still can't do things that a desktop app can and they never will (in my opinion). The second point is more interesting to me. Personally, I think that Microsoft has delivered the best Web application development and deployment platform since the day ASP.NET was released. With ASP.NET Microsoft leapfrogged the competition and no one has been able to catch them since.

So, what's the point of this post? Well, I am going to attend the MIX conference next month to learn more about where Microsoft is going with their Web development tools. I've seen bits and pieces of what they have planned for the next gen of their tools, but it should be interesting to see where they are going with the tools.

I also wanted to dispel the rumors that I hate Web apps...that's simply not the case...I just don't love them as much as I love desktop apps.

Nice Free Upgrade to XP Shell

2006-01-31T18:42:00Z

Microsoft released a new XP Theme called Royale with the Windows Media Center 2005. The new theme has a nice updated look that makes XP look/feel noticably better. You can get it free from MS here...also, it's nice that it's an official theme from MS so it is stable/reliable. I've been running it on all of my machines for about a week with no issues.

Streaming Media Center Content to PCs

2006-01-13T23:09:00Z

Looks like Microsoft is going to take a shot at the market that Slingbox currently dominates:
http://www.betanews.com/article/MS_Testing_Media_Center_TV_Streaming/1137177825

I have to say, however, that based on what is reported here, it doesn't look all that compelling/exciting to me. The inability to watch Live TV and/or access the full MCE TV experience is a big disappointment. Sling allows users access to both live and recorded TV...I can't think of a good technical reason that MS couldn't do the same with MCE.

It also falls well short of what BeyondTV and SageTV both offer with their software extenders. Both Beyond and Sage allow you to access the full DRV shell from any TV in your house over the network. In other words, with a single PC running Beyond or Sage with TV capture cards in it, you can watch live or recorded TV from any PC in the house...even laptops via WiFi (802.11 G or better...). I don't understand why MS hasn't built the same feature into MCE...and it looks like they won't be doing it any time soon.

Live Version of VS.NET?

2006-01-12T04:24:00Z

John Montgomery from the VS.NET team posted something today about an idea that MS has been floating in private for a few weeks - creating a 'Live' version of VS.NET:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2006/01/11/511402.aspx

I have mixed feeling on this one. I was one of the 7 people (outside of Microsoft...) that was REALLY exicted about Hailstorm a few years back when they started talking publically about it...I even wrote an article on! I still remember attending the big unveiling they had in Redmond where everyone from Verizon to eBay to Groove showed really compelling demos of how they were planning to leverage Hailstorm services to make our online lives better.

Obviosuly Hailstorm died on the vine for a bunch of good (and some not-so-good...) reasons. Now we have Hailstorm 2.0 rebranded as 'Live' and Microsoft is once again taking a shot at providing online services that will make our lives better. Interestingly this time around Microsoft has done a lot more marketing of the Live concept and released a lot fewer detials about what Live is.

In his post, John is intentionally vague about what services Microsoft is considering integrating into VS.NET. I spoke with John about this a few weeks back and floated some ideas I think would be of use:

Killer Hosted Team Development...Focued on Students: Provide a simple free way for a team of developers to work together on a project. Give them everything Sourceforge provides, but integrated it right into the IDE. This would be killer for college students working on class projects together.
Integrated Community Managed Documentation: Think MSDNpedia integrated into the IDE. Give developers quick context appropriate content from the community along with enabling developers to contribute and edit contet from the IDE.
Opt-In Framework Usage Analysis: Tool integrated into the IDE that would analyze the framework APIs that are used most frequently along with rich metadata about the use case (e.g. ISV, corp developer, hobbyst...). Tie this to the documentation above and you would have a killer set of documentaiton that can be tailored to a specific user's needs.

Have other/better ideas? John is looking for feedback and they are early enough in the planning stages for your feedback to make a difference...post a comment!

Solution for Managing Passwords

2006-01-12T04:20:00Z

Like just about everyone I struggle to manage the various credentials I use to authenticate with web sites/applications/systems I use. For the past couple of years I’ve used a VERY crude mechanism for this. I created a Note in Outlook and had about 25 entries that looked something like:

eBay
UserID: xxxxx
Password: xxxxx

This was reasonably functional in that the credentials were kept in a secure location and I could quickly access them. What became problematic, however, was the inability to search Notes for a string (at least I can’t find a way to do it…) and the need I had to access my credentials from PCs where I don’t usually run an Outlook connected to Clarity’s exchange server. So, I started looking for an alternative. I had these requirements:

Quick simple access to credentials.
File-based storage (credentials stored in a local file)
Secure storage…contents of the file encrypted using strong encryption mechanism

After doing a bit of research I settled on the following configuration:

Password Minder: Simple .NET app that stores credentials (encrypted) in an XML file. No install required…just need the Exe on your PC along with the .NET Framework 1.1 and it will run just fine.
Folder Share: I just keep finding new uses for Folder Share. For passwords, I just created a Passwords folders under the folder I sync across all of my machines and put the Password Minder XML and Exe files in there. Now I have everything I need on all of my PCs to run the app and get to my credentials.

I’ve been using this for about a week and absolutely LOVE it. It’s simple, secure, and now that it is setup I don’t have to think about it again…exactly what I was looking for.

Microsoft and DirectTV Announcement

2006-01-09T14:10:00Z

One of the more exciting (to me anyway...) announcements from CES last week was the partnership announced between Microsoft and DirectTV. The announcement was made during Bill Gates' keynote - he said that MS would work with DirectTV to bring both SD and HD content into the Media Center world. No details given on what that means or when it will happen, but this is the first time I've heard of any plans to bring DirectTV content directly into Media center.

This is a BIG announcement for DirectTV fans like me given...especially in the light of their decision to drop their partnership with Tivo. I currently have an older dual tuner Sony/Tivo DirectTV PVR that I love. It only does SD, but it works brilliantly and has been our main PVR for the past 4 years.

I love Media Center, but without a clear path on how to get DirectTV HD content into the box I haven't seen any reason to move to it. My guess is that we won't see anything in terms of DirectTV integration until this time next year (will almost certainly be tied to Vista along with cable card support...), but at least there is now a reason to believe it will happen at some point!

Couple of interesting links:

MS Press Announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan06/01-05WMDIRECTVPR.mspx

Additional Coverage: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060105-5913.html

Great Phone First Device

2005-12-12T17:29:00Z

I get asked a lot about what phones people should get, so I thought I’d post this proactively.

When it comes to phones, I find that most people fall into one of two categories:

Phone First: People that want something that looks, feels, and works like a phone first, PDA second. This primarily means a form-factor that closely resembles a ‘traditional’ cell phone. These phones don’t have a QWERTY keyboard, but they are generally significantly cheaper than PDA first phones.
PDA First: People that want a device they can use to read and compose email along with full calendar/contact list management capabilities. These devices are typically larger and more expensive. They aslo tend to make less than ideal phones...dialing is harder, they are bigger (harder to carry in your pocket), and you tend to look a bit silly with it pressed up to your face. Many come with QWERTY keyboards...

For anyone looking for a Windows powered Phone first device, this looks like a great option:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000920072169/

Key Features:

Windows Mobile 5.0 which will shortly support push email notification (aka black-berry email...)
EDGE wireless network (much faster than standard GPRS…)
Bluetooth
Price: $200 with a contract…pretty cheap for a windows powered phone

Well, that's just downright cool...

2005-11-22T22:23:00Z

http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/lacie-lego-bricks-138934.php

Xbox 360 Video Disappointment!!!

2005-11-18T22:04:00Z

As I mentioned earlier this week, I'm working hard on getting all of the media in our house digitized and avaialble all of the places we watch TV (living room, office, home theater). I've been hoping that the Xbox 360 would serve as the perfect device for accessing media in the living room (in addition to playing games). Well, it looks like I can forget about that idea...

Today I came across this article:

http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/Xbox360/video.html

In summary, you can only watch video from two sources on the 360:

Downloaded from Xbox Live Marketplace (I don't even know what that is...)
Streamed from a Windows Media Center 2005 PC (WMV and MPG2 files ONLY!!!)

So, there is no way to watch DIVX or XVID files from the 360...and no way to watch any video files streamed from a PC running Windows Media Connect.

Man, what a disappointment...the device is absolutely capable of doing it, but the options simply aren't there.

I guess the search for the ideal living room device continues...

The Forgotten Requirement: Reporting

2005-11-16T03:41:00Z

What's the number one requirement overlooked on most corporate line of business (LOB) application development projects...I say it's reporting. Most businesses can't answer fundamental questions about the data flowing through their systems becuase they don't have a reporting infrastructure in place to collect, analyze, and present data to the end users.

On most projects reporting it at most an afterthought. Once the system is up and running development might be asked to put together a couple of quick reports that will provide at most a cursory view of the data the system is generating. Businesses need more than this. They need a deep understanding of the data if they are going to make the right decisions.

Ever wonder why Walmart has lower prices than other stores? Well, there is no one answer to that question, but one answer is their investment in analyzing and understanding their data. They do a better job of collecting and analyzing data then their competitors which allows them to operate their business more efficiently and effectively than their competitors.

The military has a term that comes to mind whenever I talk about reporting - Situational Awareness. There is a great defintion here:

Situational Awareness is the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about what is happening to the team with regards to the mission. More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you.

This concept is more applicable than ever to business environments. Having the ability to access and understand the data your business is producing is crucial to success.

I was an Accounting major in college...analyzing and understanding numbers has always fascinated me. Recently I've been taking a look at the new reporting and data analysis tools Microsoft has provided with SQL Server 2005. The tools really are remarkable...if you haven't taken a look at them yet, take a few minutes to walk through some of the demos for Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services.

Reporting needs to be promoted to first class citizen status when it comes to corporate LOB projects. The companies that do this will continue to have an advantage over their less well informed competitors.

Beyond TV 4.0

2005-11-16T03:24:00Z

Over the past 2 years I've been on a quest to get our media in the house 100% digital and PC accessible. Music was pretty straightforward...rip everything to an electronic format and get it on a share. Took a few weeks, but toughest part was choosing WMA or MP3 (I went WMA).

Movies were next and were a lot more work. First I had to learn how to rip movies...not an easy task, but not too bad with tools like AutoGK. The second challange was figuing out how to watch the ripped movies in the living room. I went through several options here (some legal, some not so legal...), but settled on a D-Link DSM-320. It struggles a bit with high bit rate movies, but overall does a nice job. They have since come out with DSM-520 which should address the issues with high bit rate movies, but I haven't tried it.

The last thing I tackled was TV. Here I took a look at Windows Media Center, Beyond TV, and Sage TV. All three packages essentially turn your PC into a full featured DVR. I ultimately settled on Beyond TV becuase it offered some key features that Media Cetner did not:

A software extender that allows me to watch live or recorded shows from any PC in the house (we currently have 3 desktops and 2 laptops...).
The ability to auto-compress recorded shows (to WMV files). This makes it easy to take shows with me when I travel.
Web programming...I can setup recording from any PC that can access the Web.

Media Center a REALLY close second and had some killer features that BeyondTV did not...namely support for OTA HDTV and a full media browser interface. HDTV support really was the killer. I have an ATI All in Wonder HDTV card, so I was ready for HD in terms of hardware. I stuck with Beyond TV because of the software extended. The ability to watch TV from my PC at home was killer for me.

Snapstream released v4.0 of Beyond TV last week and they added in one big new feature - support for HDTV (OTA only...). I upgarded over teh weekend and overall am very happy with the product. I now have a single program guide that gives me access to SD programming via DirectTV and HD programming avaialble in Chicago. It does all the things you would expect of a full-featured DRV; watch one show while recording another, pause live SD or HD shows, etc... I highly reccomend Beyond TV if you are looking to do a PC based DVR.

The only 'complaint' I have is that I can not get the software extender to work for HD material on my desktop. Based on the support forums, it looks like there is an issue with running the Link software on a PC with an nVidia 6600GT card. Hopefully they will have a fix for this soon...otherwise it might be time for a new vdeo card.

Check out our work

2005-11-07T15:39:00Z

One of the things I've been working on over the past few months will be shown off today. Clarity built the demos for the Steve Ballmer keynote address at the VS/SQL 2005 launch event today in San Francisco and I was the Engagement Director for the project. We built the 'Get Down Digital' demos that will be shown in the keynote today and during the opening keynote at each of the launch events around the world.

Building demos can be a frustrating/challenging process. We basically had 12 minutes of demo time to show off the work of thousands of MS employees over the past 5 years. Obviously not an easy task...hopefully what we came up with will do the product justice...Microsoft truly has delivered some remarkable products today.

You can watch today's event live or delayed here:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/steveballmerlive/