Tag: microsoft

Microsoft is killing it

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Here’s a blog post you wouldn’t normally expect to see on this blog. In the past, I’ve not usually been big on the Microsoft stuff. That is quickly turning around. Take a look at all the amazing stuff they did in the last day:

The only bad thing they did was this:

On Hacker News, a chain of people posted the following, which struck a chord with me:

Who would have imagined it 5 years ago?
 

Who would have imagined it five months ago?

For me, I wouldn’t have even imagined this five days ago.

Windows Azure SDK + Visual Studio 2008 Error

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Error creating Windows Azure project in VS2008. Help!

This is not a typical blog post for this blog and I apologize for this one in advance. I’ve been working with some friends from Coffee and Code on gearing up Azure development and I need the community’s help. Your help.

I’ve freshly installed a copy of Windows 7 in VirtualBox. I’ve installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional and its SP1. I’ve also selected .NET framework 3.5 from the Windows features menu. I’ve reinstalled DX11 and Uninstalled then reinstalled the Azure SDK and the Azure VS2008 tools.

Every time I go to create a new project I get this error:

'Grid' object cannot be added to 'Grid'.
Exception from HRESULT: 0x88980406.
Error at object 'System.Windows.Controls.Grid' in markup file.
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.CloudService.Wizard;component/newprojectdialogcontent.xaml'.

After I click OK (the only option available), Visual Studio shows the message in the status bar:

Creating project AppTest ... project creation failed.

I’ve searched on the web and asked around to find a fix for this error as I’d really like to get going on Azure development. Can anyone in the community help me?

Update! I’ve since learned that this is due to a bug between the 3D acceleration in VirtualBox, Windows 7, and Windows Azure SDK.

Windows Azure is Windows 8

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I sat in my office last night trying to identify what Microsoft is doing to combat upstart thin-client operating systems like Google Chrome OS, continue making money with its very popular offline Office suite and offline Windows platform, and compete against Amazon for data and web services now that the world is moving into cloud services.

They will have a lot of competition in the next 3 to 5 years against their core, money-making software products and I believe their plan is to leverage the millions of existing .NET developers and all of the skills they’ve spent years developing to change Windows from a boxed product to a subscription-based “Windows-As-A-Service” service.

I’ve been working with the Windows Azure platform for a few weeks now and I have to say I’m quite impressed. Launching apps is pretty easy once you have the required software installed and there are plenty of projects already listed at CodePlex to get you started. Moving from .NET development to Azure development is a piece of cake. They also appear to be much more open to supporting non-Microsoft development languages such as Ruby and PHP. As a Linux guy, I have to admit they’ve put this together pretty damn well.

Currently, the industry has only paid attention to the web application deployment features of Azure. I believe the true power of Azure is not just deploying scaling web applications but in its ability to launch virtualized desktops from the cloud. Let me explain what I envision Microsoft’s plans to be for the future of the entire software lineup.

The Home PC Market

Imagine you’re a standard, nuclear family buying a home PC in the year 2015. You go to Staples (or whatever your big box store of choice is) and look at what they offer. They have a number of PCs for sale but because by this time most computers have enough horsepower for the home user, the hardware statistics are subdued or even missing. Instead, the software features are prominently displayed.

Available for sale is a home PC that will give you Windows Azure (includes 5 users, Internet Explorer, Office Home, Zune music and PC game marketplace). There are three prices, depending on how long your contract term is, similar to a mobile phone.

  • 3-year contract: $249 hardware cost + $99.99 / year Windows Azure subscription
  • 2-year contract: $499 hardware cost + $99.99 / year Windows Azure subscription
  • No contract: $599 hardware cost + $99.99 / year Windows Azure subscription

You bring the PC home after buying the 3-year contract (who replaces a home PC within 3 years anyway, right?) and turn the machine on. The default software on the machine is a thin-client that simply facilitates the connection to Windows Azure. You create the users for each of your family members and in behind the scenes each of them gets a virtualized desktop (probably Windows 7 renamed to be Azure Home or something of the sort), hosted in the cloud. Instantly all activation, piracy, and product key woes are a thing of the past.

Because the virtualizations are hosted in the cloud, all of the annoyances that current operating systems have would be minimized or eliminated. Consider: All updates to the operating system could happen while the PC is, effectively, off. If Microsoft chose to solidify the hardware requirements for manufacturers, the platform would no longer need drivers after a fresh install and driver updates would happen transparently.

On the each virtualized desktop is an icon for the Zune marketplace where users can purchase Windows apps like iPhone subscribers can: from their app store. Clicking purchase would instantly make available the software you’ve purchased.

The benefit of all this is that of every cloud: You don’t always need to be on the same PC to do your work. You could sit at any computer in an airport, school, library, cafe, or your home and access your desktop from anywhere. Truly this is the stuff of the future.

SMB Market

Because the virtualized desktops will be running the Windows everyone already knows, application development will remain just as easy as it ever has. Developers who are out there, making applications on the Windows platform will only need to learn “What’s new” instead of “What’s changed?”

Businesses will be sold on cost reduction since the Windows Azure platform removes almost all administration and IT support requirements from the business. If you can plug a PC in, you’re pretty much good to go. No more crazy Windows product keys or version incompatibilities. All apps on your virtualization would be incrementally updated over time. Since everyone on the service is paying yearly, this would cover the cost to Microsoft normally attributed to upgrading.

The Windows Azure Business option would also include an SLA.

Corporation / Government Market

For this market, Microsoft would take the SMB Market platform and simply multiply it to handle thousands of PCs. Likely they would offer additional support, a better SLA, and decreased per-unit cost due to bulk sales and contracts.

All of this is really magical stuff and I really hope the future turns out to be something similar. The other exciting part of Azure is what most people focus on: the fact that it offers nearly unlimited storage, computation, and development possibilities for developers and businesses. And that’s where Microsoft needs to cut the mustard. Or else, this whole thing is for nothing.

In order to get businesses and users to adopt the new platform, there has to be killer applications available on it. New stuff, not just Office and IE. Fun stuff like Google Goggles or Twitter. And that can only come from a completely open and available system to let the minds of developers take their crazy dreams and put them into code.

If I could make an impassioned plea to Microsoft, from a developer, please offer us an Azure development option at no cost. We’re not asking you to host our million hits per day website for free, just something we can log into, put up and app and see if it gets some traction. If it’s good and generates some revenue, give us a call and we’ll sell it or start paying.

What do all of you think of the possibilities of this new service? Are you excited about Azure? Let me know in the comments!

Well, I’ve officially made the switch to Mandriva Linux.

Posted on by John Rockefeller

After years of dual-booting between Windows XP and Mandriva, I made the decision to bring the hammer down and get rid of the former. My original intention was to make the switch when I bought a new PC but my hand was forced as I came home from work on Friday to a locked-up Windows XP desktop that never came back.

Fear not: no data was lost as Mandriva can read Windows drives. I backed up my things onto my /home partition and waved goodbye.

It’s been a roller-coaster past with Windows XP: When it first came out, I irrationally hated it. Once I got used to it, I found it actually worked pretty well. Mostly. Sure, it lacked some of the neat features Mandriva had (rotating cube desktop, wallpaper playlists, etc.) and you never quite knew when the next time it would fail was, but it got the job done. Facing a crashed system and being forced to format was always a wonderful experience. Windows doesn’t have separate partitions for your personal files and system files, meaning that when you begin again, you lose everything. Hope you made a backup! Going through the hassle of calling a Microsoft person in India to promise them you only had one copy of Windows installed was always a treat, as well.

When Vista came out I was put off by even more Digital Restriction Management (DRM) but wanted to see how it performed nonetheless. I can honestly say after using it at work for the past year and a half that it will never come close to being installed on my machines. So, that leaves us the little engine that could: Mandriva.

It’s been just over 2 days since breaking up with Windows XP and I have to say, I don’t miss a thing.

Project Natal + OpenSim = Heaven? Getting there!

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Microsoft unveiled their new Xbox 360 controller, or, lack-of-controller today at E3. Yes, I’m referring to Project Natal.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, you obviously don’t have a Twitter account. All of the videos I’ve seen thus far are pre-recorded, but if this thing works as good as they make it look, we are all in for a treat.
I have a few questions, which I’m sure you all do as well. Mine are

  1. Will the sensor be a USB device?
  2. If so, has anyone hacked their own drivers yet? :)
  3. How long until someone uses it in a virtual world, like OpenSim?

Combine this with a projection-cube-room like this one, a treadmill floor so you can actually walk, and you’ve got yourself a holodeck, son.

Render Your Sites In IE6 With Free Software

Posted on by John Rockefeller

If you’re a web developer like me or even a web designer, there comes a time in the development of your site when you need to verify that everything works with Internet Explorer. For small sites or minor tweaks this can wait until the end of the day without much worry. On larger sites, it’s likely you’ll be checking for IE 6 or IE 7 compatibility several times throughout the project.

For those of us who have moved to greener pastures by switching to Linux or for others who have updated their system to Internet Explorer 7, several options exist to view your website in everyone’s favorite web browser: Internet Explorer 6.

In order of success I’ve had with this software, some of the options for Mandriva Linux users are listed below:

#1 – Wine, Wine-Doors, and Internet Explorer 6.

Wine-Doors is a graphical, easy-to-use point and click program that uses Wine. For those unfamiliar with Wine, it is a Windows “compatibility layer” that, in layman’s terms, allows you to run Windows programs like Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office in Linux.

Installing Wine and Wine-Doors in Mandriva Linux is a breeze. Simply open up the software installer in type Wine in the search box. Install both Wine and Wine-Doors.

Once they are installed, open Wine-Doors and click on Internet Explorer 6 to install it. Wine-Doors will take care of everything, including downloading Windows fonts and the Internet Explorer program itself.

Internet Explorer 6 works great for me this way. IE loads quick and displays websites just as it would if it were running on a Windows computer. With some of the other options listed below, the fonts and performance were not as smooth.

#2 – IE NetRenderer – Web-Based Browser Screenshot

This is a unique solution that is truly cross-platform. It’s not perfect – sometimes divs, table widths, or images are off by a few pixels, but for the most part this is a really reliable and quick solution.  The process is simple: You go to their website, paste your website’s address in a form and it will refresh with a screenshot of what your website looks like in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta (still in beta as of this article’s creation).

Similar, but not free service: Browsershots. Well… It’s free, but you get put into a queue and it could take hours to get your screenshot. Unless you pay. :)

#3 – IEs4Linux

This is another project that is based off of Wine and installs easily on Mandriva Linux as well. You are able to download and extract the installer program from their homepage, but some of the fonts were off for me and it only loaded once. Once I closed the browser it never re-opened.

Also, the program is able to install IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 though I personally was only able to get IE6 installed. All other options resulted in an error. Your mileage may vary.