Dennis "D.C." Dietrich : MIX

MIX09 announced

ddietric — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:22:00 GMT

Don't make any plans for March 18-20 next year (or cancel the plans you've already made) since that's when MIX will happen once again in Las Vegas. The MIX09 website is already online and if you liked what we showed you this year you will love the cool new stuff that's coming up next!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Reflections on MIX 08 part II: What's the secret Formula?

ddietric — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:03:49 GMT

One of the outstanding sessions I attended was What's the secret Formula? (PNL14). The panelists were (in alphabetical order):

Dan Harrelson - Senior Technologist, Adaptive Path LLC
Daniel Makoski - Microsoft Corporation
Jensen Harris - Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Mike Schroepfer - Vice President of Engineering, Mozilla Corporation

The panel was moderated by Nishant Kothary who is a user experience evangelist at Microsoft. The list of panelists as well as the subtitle of the panel - A panel on designing stuff that rocks - promised a pretty user experience (UX) centric discussion. Fortunately they kept this implied promise and I found myself agreeing with most of the points made during the discussion. The following list is incomplete and by no means a transcript (meaning it is based on what was said during the panel discussion but the details are my take on the issues discussed by the panelists though you will notice quite a bit of overlap when watching the recording):

The ownership of UX must be shared by the whole product group
Sure, there are UX engineers who are the real experts and program managers usually care about UX as well. However, if developers do not care about UX when implementing features and testers do not look at the software under test beyond the specification the end result will most likely be suboptimal from a UX standpoint. To make things even worse the UX bugs that shouldn't have been there in there first place often have a lower priority than certain types of functional issues and the chance of getting the UX bugs fixed continually decreases as the ship date comes closer. That said there must be an understanding in a product team throughout the different roles that the idea of getting it right the first time applies to UX as well and that it's not enough for a feature to work in order to be of high quality as soon as a UI is involved.
There has to be one vision for the product
This is basically the limit to how much any individual can determine the UX and design for any given part of the software. Though the ownership and thus the responsibility for UX is shared the end result must be consistent in order to achieve a high overall quality. This suggests that there should be one vision and one set of design principles that everyone on the team believes in and - since there will be disagreements along the way - that a very small number of people should be in charge of making final calls on any decision if necessary so that at the end of the day the product looks like it was designed by one person although a large number of people contributed to make it happen.
Share user feedback with the developers
This goes for both negative and positive feedback. Negative feedback is important so developers (as well as testers and program managers) understand that some users will notice for example when UI elements are one pixel off even though the user may not be able to accurately express what the problem is (the user may just report that the affected UI "looks wrong"). Even more reason to take these issues seriously. Positive feedback is equally important. Jensen mentioned the example of the UI font for MS Office being changed and developers not understanding why since the new font wasn't that much different (at least from their point of view). But users did notice a difference (and again they might just say "I don't know what you did but it looks better") and sharing this feedback helps people in the technical roles to get a different perspective and be more open in the future.
Get continuous user feedback
Mike talked about how Mozilla has volunteers around the world testing the latest Firefox build every day and how it allows them to try new things and quickly get feedback. Now, obviously that doesn't work for every kind of software project. But getting user feedback throughout the development cycle to validate that you are on track and that changes and new features actually meet the needs of the customer leads to better products. For some projects this might be limited to beta releases other projects might have to resort to closed user groups under NDA but getting that feedback in early makes a difference so it's important to figure out which way of gathering feedback and how frequently works best for your project.
We are not the customer
I thought about typing this one in all caps but that would be rude. This is nevertheless a very important one. No matter if you are a developer, a program manager, a tester, a product manager, a designer or a user experience engineer (though UX engineers are usually very aware of this), no matter if you work for a global player or a startup, no matter if you work on a closed source or an open source project, you are not the customer! We use and think about software differently than everybody else and I'd say this is a pretty general rule with very, very few exceptions (and I can't even think of one right now - I just assume that there is one... there is always one). If you think about Microsoft Office it is probably obvious that the people who work on the product have a completely different point of view than the majority of end users. But even here in Microsoft's Developer Division this is true. Now you might think "you guys are developers, your customers are developers, what's the problem"? While we create IDEs, frameworks and controls for developers the majority of those developers create applications for end users who are not developers. That said, it is very important to figure out what the customers want - and it is a really good idea to have UX experts for that since customers often can't tell what exactly they need - and not to speculate what they want or even worse assume that they want what you want.
The first step of designing is a low-fidelity prototype
Let's work our way back to low-fidelity. It's tempting to do UI prototyping in a designer like Expression Blend or in Visual Studio. Those are the tools we know and they get the job done. But for prototyping they can actually be dangerous for a couple of reasons. For example they constrain you to whatever they are able to represent and they generate source code (if there is anyone out there who has never seen source labeled as "prototype" mysteriously becoming "product" code please leave a comment). The next step back is a graphics application like Expression Design or Photoshop but not everybody involved in the prototyping process knows how to use them which finally brings us to low-fidelity which can be done by anyone (even end users like your parents) at any time and is usually primitive enough for not having people get too attached to the prototype. I'm talking about any non-electronic method of drawing on a surface. Whiteboards, flip charts or simply a pen and a napkin if nothing else is available.

Again these are just a couple of points I thought were most noteworthy (which is of course completely subjective) and I really recommend watching the recording of the panel.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Reflections on MIX 08 part I: First day keynote

ddietric — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

This is the first on an n part post series about my personal thoughts on this year's MIX based on notes I took during the conference (and, no, I don't know the value of n yet). Let's start with the keynote on the first day which was a great kickoff with Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie and Dean Hachamovitch sharing the stage. While Ray was talking about where Microsoft and the industry as a whole are heading (and I won't even try to summarize that part of the keynote because Ray's speeches are better without a middleman) Scott and Dean presented the latest Microsoft technologies that are of interest to the MIX crowd.

Internet Explorer 8

IE 8 which is now available for download as a beta is probably the first version of IE that really got me excited because of the features the IE team has added to the browser as well as the great work they are doing in order for IE 8 to be standards compliant. In detail:

Standards compliance
IE 8 has been passing the Acid2 test since last December (see Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone) but Dean left no doubt that that was just the beginning. He demonstrated a website using CSS 2.1 being rendered correctly by Safari, Firefox and IE 8 even pointing out that IE 7 did not render the site correctly. Also, a decision was made shortly before MIX to change IE 8's default behavior to be standards compliant and the IE team has contributed about 700 CSS 2.1 compliance tests to the community which are available for download from the Internet Explorer Testing Center and distributed under the BSD license.
JScript support
IE 8 features a heavily improved JScript engine as well as integrated debugging tools. I haven't done that much scripting in my career but I remember very well that debugging was always painful.
New end user features
Activities and WebSlices are pretty cool features which - assuming broad adoption - will make navigating the web much easier. But it gets even better as they will be available to the community with no strings attached since the specifications for both are released under Creative Commons licenses and covered by the Open Specification Promise (see IE8 and IP Licensing for details).

Silverlight 2

The first beta of Silverlight is now available for download as well and contains tons of improvements compared to the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. Also, many samples and articles about the new beta release have been published on the web already (for example on the Showcase site on Silverlight.net) so I'll point out some facts that I think deserve more attention:

Cross-platform
Because of our partnership with Novell Silverlight applications will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, in case of Linux by using Moonlight as the runtime. In other words Silverlight applications will run on the three most well-known desktop operating systems and we are sharing automated tests with the Moonlight development team to help them ensuring that both runtimes behave in the same way.
Data binding
One of the features (additional controls aside) that has been requested many, many times and which is available now in Silverlight is data binding (there is a tutorial for those of you who are new to (WPF) data binding).
Enabling Rich Internet Applications
Silverlight 2 allows developers and designers to create applications with a much better user experience compared to internet applications based on technologies like AJAX. Two examples I particularly like are the Hard Rock Memorabilia application using Deep Zoom and AOL's new Silverlight-based mail client which is faster than traditional webmail applications and also leverages platform features like isolated storage.
Silverlight (1.0) on mobile devices
The plan to make Silverlight available on Nokia's S60 platform, Series 40 devices and internet tablets was already old news during the keynote (only a couple of hours old but nevertheless not latest news). However, in combination with the announcement of Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6 the message was really that a lot of the cell phones and smartphones will be able to run Silverlight applications in the near future.

Last but not least I want to mention that I watched the keynote live in an overflow room and yet there was a lot of applause from the people in that room despite the fact that the speakers on stage could not hear it.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Reflector add-in (proof of concept) for highlighting platform APIs

ddietric — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:58:00 GMT

I was talking to one of our partners at MIX about the new security model in Silverlight. In case you're not familiar with it yet I recommend reading The Silverlight Security Model (as well as part II and III if you're interested in the details) on Shawn's blog since he explains it very well (see also the documentation on SecurityCriticalAttribute, SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute and SecurityTreatAsSafeAttribute). In a nutshell: There is no CAS in Silverlight. Instead you are simply not allowed to call certain APIs in order to provide a robust sandbox which allows you to execute applications on a website without having to worry about the application possibly compromising your computer. For example a Silverlight application can't just access the file system or connect to any machine on the Internet.

After explaining this I was asked if there was a list with all APIs you can't call in Silverlight. While I'm not sure that there is really one list somewhere covering all APIs in Silverlight I noticed that it would be quite simple to generate one by writing some code that reflects on the Silverlight assemblies. However, that's when it hit me that this theoretical list would be rather long and consisting of information you don't care about most of the time. I guess a document basically describing the differences between the full .NET Framework and Silverlight (as far as the types they have in common go) would probably be more helpful (I'm still trying figure out if we indeed have something like that).

At the same time I thought it would be handy though to have something that allows me to browse APIs with the critical and safe critical APIs marked. And since many people use Reflector (yes, even me and others with access to the source code - it's just quicker to decompile an assembly than getting the right files out of the source control system) I looked into customizing it to do exactly this. The result was the following code:

using Reflector;

using Reflector.CodeModel;

using System;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using System.Drawing;

namespace Reflector.AddIns

{

public class SilverlightPlatformHighlighter : IPackage

{

#region Private Consts

private const string CriticalAttributeTypeName = "SecurityCriticalAttribute";

private const string CriticalAttributeTypeNamespace = "System.Security";

private const string SafeCriticalAttributeTypeName = "SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute";

private const string SafeCriticalAttributeTypeNamespace = "System.Security";

private const string TreatAsSafeAttributeTypeName = "SecurityTreatAsSafeAttribute";

private const string TreatAsSafeAttributeTypeNamespace = "System.Security";

private readonly Color CriticalAttributeColor = Color.FromArgb(0x00, 0xFF, 0xC0, 0xC0);

private readonly Color SafeCriticalAttributeColor = Color.FromArgb(0x00, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0x80);

#endregion Private Consts

#region Private Fields

private TreeView tree;

#endregion Private Fields

#region IPackage Members

public void Load(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)

{

tree = (TreeView)((IAssemblyBrowser)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IAssemblyBrowser)));

tree.AfterExpand += new TreeViewEventHandler(tree_AfterExpand);

}

public void Unload()

{

tree.AfterExpand -= new TreeViewEventHandler(tree_AfterExpand);

}

#endregion IPackage Members

#region Private Methods

private void tree_AfterExpand(object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e)

{

ICustomAttributeProvider attributeProvider;

ITypeDeclaration type;

foreach (TreeNode node in e.Node.Nodes)

if ((attributeProvider = node.Tag as ICustomAttributeProvider) != null)

{

bool isCritical = false;

bool isSafeCritical = false;

bool treatAsSafe = false;

foreach (ICustomAttribute attribute in attributeProvider.Attributes)

if (attribute.Constructor != null &&

((type = attribute.Constructor.DeclaringType as ITypeDeclaration) != null))

{

if (type.Name == CriticalAttributeTypeName &&

type.Namespace == CriticalAttributeTypeNamespace)

isCritical = true;

else if (type.Name == SafeCriticalAttributeTypeName &&

type.Namespace == SafeCriticalAttributeTypeNamespace)

isSafeCritical = true;

else if (type.Name == TreatAsSafeAttributeTypeName &&

type.Namespace == TreatAsSafeAttributeTypeNamespace)

treatAsSafe = true;

}

if (isSafeCritical || (isCritical && treatAsSafe))

node.BackColor = SafeCriticalAttributeColor;

else if (isCritical)

node.BackColor = CriticalAttributeColor;

}

#endregion Private Methods

}

While it technically is (the code for) a Reflector add-in I'd rather call it a proof of concept since it ignores the assembly nodes in the tree as well as the parent of any given node. The code is also a bit hacky since it relies on implementation details of Reflector which may change in the future. Compiling the code into an add-in and loading it into Reflector gives you an assembly browser which marks critical types and members in red and safe critical ones in yellow (which is more of an FYI anyway):

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

What happens in Vegas...

ddietric — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:47:00 GMT

Well, I published a post on Tuesday and haven't ever since (not counting the remote debugging post which I prepared before going to MIX). Turns out MIX got in the way of blogging about MIX on a daily basis (fortunately some fellow MSDN bloggers had time to do so). It is nicknamed a "72-hour conversation" and I have to say this nickname points out a very compelling aspect of MIX which is the opportunity to network with people with different backgrounds working in different industries (a good example for how ubiquitous the web is today) but all with a shared passion for the web and the latest web-related technologies. With that said I've been busy so far talking to customers and partners when not attending sessions. And when not talking to customers and partners I was busy following up with customers and partners I promised to send email or hook them up with someone who they should get in touch with.

But I've been taking notes throughout the event and will start publishing posts about the things that really impressed me over the next couple of days. And this unplanned delay has its positive sides too since it gave me time reflect on what I've heard and seen and I'll also be able to link to the recordings of the sessions I want to blog about. Stay tuned!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Setting up Silverlight 2 remote debugging on Mac OS X

ddietric — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:20:00 GMT

Let's face it: Silverlight is awesome! So are the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight. One reason why it is so awesome is that you can run your applications on Windows and Mac OS X. But what if you need to debug an application while it is running on a Macintosh? Since there are no development tools for the Mac we have to resort to remote debugging which will allow us to debug the application running on OS X using Visual Studio on Windows. In order to do this we need to set up the CoreCLR debugging proxy on the Mac and then configure VS accordingly.

We start off by configuring the Mac. Everything we need on the Mac is part of the VS Tools for Silverlight installation and can be found in the directory %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Silverlight\MacIntel\ (or %ProgramFiles(x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Silverlight\MacIntel\ if you're running a 64-bit version of Windows). We just copy the whole folder over to the Mac e.g. into /Applications/ (you may also want to rename the copy on the Mac as MacIntel doesn't really describe the content that well). After that we have to mark the files configcoreclrdebug and coreclr_dbg_proxy as executable and then run configcoreclrdebug which will set up the debugging proxy and create a Windows executable containing all the information required to set up VS. It only requires two inputs: A port number in the range from 49152 to 65535 which will be used by the proxy to listen for incoming connections (you can also just hit Enter to accept the default in squared brackets) and a password used to protect the data in the Windows executable.

HOSTNAME:~ username$ cd /Applications/MacIntel/

HOSTNAME:MacIntel username$ ls -la

total 384

drwxr-x--- 6 username admin 204 Mar 3 05:25 .

drwxrwxr-x+ 42 root admin 1428 Mar 3 05:26 ..

-rw-r----- 1 username admin 62464 Mar 3 05:25 ConfigureWindowsCoreCLRDebuggingBase.exe

-rw-r----- 1 username admin 55383 Mar 3 05:25 MacDebuggingReadme.rtf

-rw-r----- 1 username admin 23604 Mar 3 05:25 configcoreclrdebug

-rw-r----- 1 username admin 48944 Mar 3 05:25 coreclr_dbg_proxy

HOSTNAME:MacIntel username$ chmod u+x configcoreclrdebug

HOSTNAME:MacIntel username$ chmod u+x coreclr_dbg_proxy

HOSTNAME:MacIntel username$ ./configcoreclrdebug

Generating debugger certificate and private key...

Done.

[...]

Select a TCP port number to be used for debugging: (49152-65535) [58752]:

[...]

Please specify a password at least eight characters long that will be used to

protect the debugging private key during transportation to the Windows machine

from which debugging will be performed.

Password:

Re-type password:

The CoreCLR debugging environment has been successfully configured on this

machine for the current user. In order to enable debugging from a remote machine

running Windows it will be necessary to propagate these same configuration

settings. To aid in this a Windows executable has been created in the following

file:

/Users/username/.coreclrdbg/ConfigureWindowsCoreCLRDebugging.exe

[...]

HOSTNAME:MacIntel username$

We now copy ConfigureWindowsCoreCLRDebugging.exe from the location mentioned in the output of configcoreclrdebug back to our Windows machine and execute it. All it will ask us for is the password we used to generate the executable.

C:\Users\username\Desktop>ConfigureWindowsCoreCLRDebugging.exe

Password: ********

This machine and user account has been successfully configured.

C:\Users\username\Desktop>

And we're done. We can now test this by creating a little app, copy the ClientBin folder over to the Mac and execute it there. Then we'll attach to it by using the Attach to Process... command from VS' Debug menu. We select CoreCLR Remote Cross-platform Debugging as the transport and enter the name or IP address of the Mac as the qualifier which will get us a list of the processes running on the remote machine. We just need to select the right instance of the web browser hosting the Silverlight runtime (its type will be CoreCLR Remote) and hit Attach. After that we can set breakpoints, check the value of variables and so on as usual.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The day before MIX...

ddietric — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:06:00 GMT

So, I finally made it to Las Vegas. However, not without a four hour delay in Portland due to a leaking lavatory which made it necessary to use another aircraft. That of course caused me to miss most of the presentation of The King of Kong meaning I got to watch the last three minutes of the documentary and now probably will end up ordering the DVD. But at least I saw the discussion/QA with Steve Wiebe, Ed Cunningham and Walter Day where they talked about professional gaming in general and beating Donkey Kong in particular.

Other than that I don't have much to report at this time since I can't talk about [you’ll], [have to] and [wait] yet. Except for pointing out a press release published by Nokia announcing "plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world's leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets".

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.