Riding Herd : NearTerm

IEvangelist's biggest challenge

jmazner — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 04:21:00 GMT

Sweet, the post about the IE job has been up for two hours, and already the blogsphere is making it clear why it will be a great challenge to tackle.

David Betz:

Wanted: Technical evangelist who has never tried Firefox
Being a Lornhorn evangelist would be awesome as I believe in it's principles. But IE evangelist? You are basically looking for someone who has never used Firefox. I believe in Firefox's ideals...NOT IE's(or the oil companies')

James Avery:

I could not think of a worse job: trying to convince developers that IE is good. The first thing I would ask this person is “How do I know that as soon as I switch back to IE you won’t cut development again?”.

Do we need a strong evangelist, or what?

We were pretty quiet about IE for a while. A long while. We're starting the process of making up for that long, dark teatime of the soul. The IE team is blogging. There's a developer center, and a community home. But still, we have a lot of work to do to win back the respect of the community. How's that for a challenging job!

I'm not on the IE team, but I spent the first 4 years of my career at Microsoft doing development work on projects that delivered their user interface via IE. Here's what I remember as the "principle" of IE, to use David's words: Empower developers, and make it possible for devs to build great user experiences.

I have no idea if that's what the marketing guys would say is the soul of IE, or even the dev team -- I'm sure there are loads of IE team members who worked on the end-user browsing features who'd say user experience is the soul of IE. But, as a dev, I loved that IE was focused on helping me. Is it too bold to assert that a significant amount of the programmability we find in web browsers today was driven from IE's soul as a developer platform? Here's what I remember fondly from the time in the late 90's when I was working with IE:

IE 3 COM/component model. Using IWebBrowser for the first time was an amazing experience -- there was an IE window, running inside my app!
DOM/DHTML -- real DHTML and a real DOM, that let me programmatically reach into the element tree and tweak it to my heart's content. Again, all easily accessible from any Windows app via lovely COM objects. My recollection is that IE 4 really pioneered this notion of a full featured programming API for the browser (I don't think Netscape's Layer + JavaScript stuff was as complete a solution? If I'm wrong, someone will correct me ;)
ActiveX -- The ability to embed a full featured Windows app in a web page via an ActiveX control was amazing. Did it have problems? Sure, and we're working even today to improve the situation, as evidenced by the features in XP SP2 and newer approaches to embedding Windows code like WinForms User Controls. But when ActiveX came on the scene, it was really an amazing tool for a developer to have at their disposal. Maybe this is a sign that in the old days, IE was too focused on enabling developers.
XMLHTTP -- It's all the rage now in the context of AJAX, but it came together 5+ years ago when teams at Microsoft focused on how to improve the developer experience for building responsive, asynchronous web apps like Outlook Web Access.

Of course this is all sort of ancient history by now. The challenge for the IEvangelist will be to reconnect with what the soul of the IE team is these days, and make that visible, accessible and understandable to the rest of the world. James asks a great question -- what promise is there that the IE team actually has a set of principles and will stick to them for years to come? If you interview for the job, I will make sure you get to talk to senior folks in IE land. You can ask them that question yourself, and decide for yourself how much credibility they have. And you can challenge them -- as evangelist, you are a voice for the community inside MS, your job is to understand what the community needs to succeed, and convincing the product team to make it happen.

If this is the kind of challenge that gets you excited, you know where to go ;)

[updated: minor edit, and added a new category tag]

Non administrator: running with least privilege

jmazner — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 01:41:00 GMT

A reader emailed me a question about running under a non-administrator account in Windows today, which prompted me to do a little MSNSearch-ing. That lead me very quickly to Aaron Margosis's excellent blog. If you are interested in how you can get by in life without having to run every process as an admin, check out Aaron's post on RunAs, and then read the rest of Aaron's recent entries. Check out the nice utilities he's put together, MakeMeAdmin and PrivBar.

If you're thinking to yourself "why doesn't Microsoft build this stuff right into Windows", rest assured that you are not alone. Back at the 2003 PDC, the security team talked about apps running under least privilege. Keith's April 2004 article was based on older builds and plans have changed somewhat since then, but it's definitely on the list of areas to focus on for Longhorn.

XMLHTTP primer on ASP.NET Support Voice

jmazner — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:18:00 GMT

Brian Goldfarb sent me an email pointer to the latest ASP.NET Support Voice posting. This one covers implementing an AJAX-style experience using XMLHTTP to asynchronously fetch data from a web service.

I also just noticed that Brian's link to Bertrand's post showing off how ASP.NET provides a simple programming model for these asynchronous callbacks. Note his response in the comments section:

The ASP.NET callback feature already works on IE and Firefox and the final version will work on more browsers.
The example about wiring up several text boxes can be solved by the CallbackMultiplexer sample control that's included in my sample workspace (http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=cb2543cb-12ec-4ea1-883f-757ff2de19e8).

Very cool.

Web Smart Client in the real world - MSDN Chat Feb 17

jmazner — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:36:00 GMT

In response to my previous posts about the spectrum of smart clients, I got an email from Mark Levison about an upcoming MSDN chat he's co-hosting: "No Touch Deployment in the real world", on Feb 17 at 1pm (although 1pm in which time zone the page doesn't actually say!)

Mark has built a real product (Databeacon) using the hybrid web + WinForms UserControl techniques (as well as some standalone smart client apps) I talked about. It's great to see real products taking this approach, although I hope we can continue to refine the permissions model as Mark requests to make the experience even more seamless and smooth for users. Keep in mind that in a corporate domain environment, these things could all be administered centrally as domain policy.

Fiddler for HTTP inspection/debugging

jmazner — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:15:00 GMT

Via the IE team blog, it's Fiddler! This tool looks great.

When I worked on the Sharepoint Portal Server client components, I often spent a lot of time with the Windows Newtork Monitor tool, sniffing HTTP packets to see what requests Office XP or other clients were sending, and what responses the server was providing. I also used a little tool that a tester had built to issue custom HTTP (mostly DAV) requests.

Fiddler looks like a much more refined tool for this kind of work, though, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. The fact that it's built on the .NET Framework is a nice bonus.

VSLive Smart Client demo

jmazner — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 05:14:00 GMT

We had a good time with Soma's keynote at VSLive, and the folks at Fawcette have made the talk available via streaming media (and the transcript is over here). Craig Neable represented our evangelism team as the demo jock, walking through our good-better-best smart client story. Fast forward to minute 40 to see him in action.

We were hoping to make a few different points with the demo:

In a world of connected systems, clients finally can reach out to access all the data they need
Smart clients provide the most productive user interface for filtering that data down to the right set of information
Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework version 2.0 provide the best tools for developers interested in building smart client experiences
Smart client is not an all or nothing proposition! In fact, there's a very nice pay-as-you-go model. You can add a little bit of smart client technology and see a huge return in productivity.

That last point is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's what I was getting at in my previous post. I've heard from web developers that sometimes "write smart clients" sounds like "throw away your existing code base, abandon all your existing customers, and retrain your entire development staff." But that's not the case at all. You can find the most important user functionality in your web app, and even one smart client developer can implement an improved user experience that will make a big difference to your users. And, they can do it using the same tool (Visual Studio) and core frameworks (from the .NET Fx) as your existing team of web devs.

In our demo at VSLive, we made this point in transitioning from the default ASP.NET site to the same site enhanced with a WinForms control. The scenario we set up was a real estate agent looking through hundreds of listings for properties that might interest a client. The client might say "I want a 3 bed, 2 bath house", and our ASP.NET site made it easy to find properties matching that description -- the same kind of functionality you'd see on any web site today.

But a good real estate agent knows that even if the client said 3b 2ba, they'd be happy to also consider a 3b 1.5ba that met the rest of their criteria, like location and price. The client probably would also consider a 3b 2.5ba as well, or maybe even a 4b 2ba. So if you're using the default web site, you have to do multiple searches, and each search requires a round trip to the server and a wait for the new page to come back.

For the demo, we replaced the standard ASP.NET grid with a WinForms control wrapping the new DataGridView control in Visual Studio 2005. Because the DataGridView is built to support large data sets, we were able to bring all the data down to the control, and then do all additional filtering directly on the client, without having to round trip. Not only that, but we tweaked the DataGridView so that the search would filter to plus or minus one of what the agent specified, so a search for 3b 2ba also returns the similar properties the agent would be interested in. Then we highlight the properties which are an exact match, so the agent can quickly see which properties meet all the client's requests, and which only come close. In the standalone smart client, we make another simple change -- we used the standard slider control to let the agent quickly change the target property price. By scrolling back and forth, almost playing the control like an instrument, the agent can very quickly determine the range of properties that might meet the needs of the client.

To get the same set of data back from the original web site would have taken tons of round trips -- first a search for 3b 2ba at $650,000, then another search for 3b, 2ba at $675K, then a search for 3b 1.5ba at $650K, etc, etc. But with a minimal amount of dev effort to take advantage of smart client components like the DataGridView and the slider control, the agent could do all those searches with just a flick of the mouse.

Small investment, big improvement in productivity. That's the promise of smart client technology.

Anyways, I think Craig makes the point in the video above in less time than it took me to write all this, and you to read it ;) So thanks to Craig and the rest of the demo squad (Robert Hess, Hans Hugli, Thomas Lewis, Chris Flores, David Shadle) for a great presentation on Monday.

[Update: in response to several comments below -- UserControls are not a feature new to VS 2005. You can build UserControls in VS 2003. Jay Allen wrote a nice MSDN article (from 2002, in fact) that walks through the process. Our particular UserControl hosted the DataGridView, which is new to VS 2005]

Chubby clients

jmazner — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 06:39:00 GMT

Soma, the VP of our Developer Division, mentioned last month that he’d be talking about Smart Clients at VS Live next week. I’m one of the lucky few folks in the evangelism team who got to help build the smart client demo that Soma will use during that talk. As Soma mentions, we’re going to show off some ClickOnce features as the basis for smart client deployment and updates.

We also hope to make a point that there is a spectrum of smartness, if you will. There a set of attributes which we think must all be present for an app to be called a Smart Client. But you can also take a thin client and add a little bit of smartness to it – and while that doesn’t make it a capital S Smart Client, it does certainly make it a smart-er client, and it improves the user experience.

A great example of this, in my humble opinion, is Google Suggest. It’s clearly still a web-based app that lives in the browser and won’t work offline. But it’s amazing how just a little bit of client programming (JScript against an ActiveX object) can improve the user experience. Chris Justus noticed the user experience benefits that client programming enabled, writing “The XMLHTTP / XMLHttpRequest object to communicate back with a server and get new info / instructions without refreshing the page ... the new black of web development... go read everything you can about this...”. Even a Slashdot commenter, Gopal V, gave Microsoft some credit for enabling these kinds of client interactive pages.

Anders Norås also blogged about the coolness of smart-er web pages. He calls them “chubby clients”, and shows in a blog post how to implement Google Suggest-like functionality using ASP.NET.

The main focus of Soma’s demo will be on full-fledged smart clients, which provide a really compelling user experience. I’ll hopefully write more about the demo over the next week. But it’s worth remembering that even investing a teeny bit in client smartness can make a big difference in your user experience.

Whidbey MSDN docs

jmazner — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:51:00 GMT

I spent a frustrating few minutes googling (and MSNSearching) for the online class reference and samples for the Whidbey version of WinForms. I couldn't get any promising hits from my searches. But a little manual searching turned up the complete reference, as part of the WinFX SDK on MSDN. There, alongside docs for Avalon, are docs for WinForms 2.0 classes like DataGridView (which is what I was looking for in the first place.) There are even what look to be some nice samples (haven't tried compiling yet.)

So here's my attempt to teach the search engines that if you want Whidbey / Winforms 2.0 MSDN class reference docs, you go to http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/?//winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/ref/system.windows.forms.aspx

InfoWorld Top 100 IT projects of 2004

jmazner — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 22:24:00 GMT

A colleague sent around a link to InfoWorld’s write-up of their top 100 IT projects for 2004: “As judges, our editors have an explicit bias toward multiple technologies used in innovative ways to serve well-defined business goals.”

The web site links to profiles of 7 of the projects. 4 of those relied on MS technology, including the projected voted as tops in 2004, the UPS package flow initiative.

UPS: “The package flow software was developed in-house using COM+ components written in C, C++, and Visual Basic running on Windows 2000 Server. SQL Server maintains the planning, real-time sort, and post-sort reporting databases. […]Callagee explains. “We needed it to scale very easily from one little PC to several servers.””

Mary Kay: “Another benefit is real-time visibility into financial data — accessible through a portal powered by Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services — which gives accounting executives up-to-the-minute information to take to the boardroom. […]The project required extensive integration of real-time transactional information between new and legacy systems, calling for an IT support team of no less than 40 people to pull it off. Microsoft’s BizTalk provided the XML integration platform”

BP: “a homegrown, exception-based application built on Microsoft’s .Net platform aggregates and analyzes all the data.”

FedEx Kinko’s: “users can now print directly from their Windows desktops to the FedEx Kinko’s location down the block […]Rather than developing a whole new application from scratch, FedEx linked together various existing internal and external Web services through the .Net platform”

Useful, and free: Lookout, XP Backup

jmazner — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 22:47:00 GMT

Nothing better than finding a couple of free utilities that are actualy useful.

Lookout: this is a local search client that integrates with Outlook. I am quite impressed, it took about 15 minutes to index my exchange content, plus a couple .pst archives, plus everything in My Documents. Now I can do full text search over all of these from a toolbar in Outlook, and results show up immediately. They even do a nice hover-over preview, so you can see the first few lines of each email in the result set (preview doesn't work for documents, unfortunately.) And it's not thrashing my RAM or hard drive, it seems to be a good background citizen. The app was built by Lookout Software, which Microsoft acquired back in July.

XP Backup: XP Pro has a neat little backup utility built in. In about 15 minutes, it had bundled up all the documents and files on my tablet into a 1GB .bkf file, and then after I had reinstalled the OS, I was able to restore from that file in even less time. It looks like it has the smarts to do some basic scheduling and incremental backups as well. In any event, is was more convenient than trying to manually copying and restoring a bunch of directories.

SP2 working well for me

jmazner — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 00:48:00 GMT

With SP2 released and available via Windows Update, I wanted to update all my machines. Here's my brief summary of how my upgrades went.

Home machine #1: Toshiba Portege R100. Upgraded from XP SP1 to SP2 via Windows Update. Results: Flawless. Install completed without a hitch, the machine is running great, and wireless is behaving better thanks to the upgrades in SP2.

Home machine #2: Dell OptiPlex GX270. Upgraded fom SP1 to SP2 via Windows Update. Results: needed some driver updates. The install process itself went smoothly, but after using it for a day, I noticed that once my monitor power was turned off (for energy conservation, after 20 min of idle), it wouldn't come back on. I went to device manager and told it to find a newer driver for my ATI All-in-wonder 9700, which it did, but the problem was still happening. So then I went to Dell's website and looked for BIOS updates -- I was a few revs back, so I updated the BIOS, and the problem went away. I wish Windows Update had automatically found both of these for me, but I'm a happy camper now. UPDATE: actually, I am still having video problems, ATI's Catalyst tool tells me on occasion that the VPU has stopped responding and has been reset -- the OS and running apps are never effected, but the screen blanks out and then comes back with video acceleration disabled. I'm trading some mail with folks at ATI now to see if we can't figure out what's wrong. Also, it's an AIW 9700, not 9600 as I had in my original entry.

Work machine #1: Toshiba Portege 3500 (TabletPC). Upgraded from SP1 to multiple internal private test builds of SP 2 (and at least once then reverted back to SP1,) up through RC1, and then RTM. Results: It's a miracle this machine still works at all, but in fact it does work, and quite well. I love the new Tablet and wireless features in SP2, the in-place TIP really improves the pen input experience. The only glitch on this machine is that when I try to connect to a new wireless network for the first time, I get an alert box saying that some wireless settings could not be saved. But it connects to the network just fine none the less. I might repave this machine to get back to a clean state, since not only has it had multiple SP2 interim builds, but it also lived through a number of Office 2003 SP1 betas, including at one point having I think three different version of OneNote running. UPDATE: It turns out the alert box I'm seeing is actually supposed to be there -- apparently Microsoft IT has set some group policy that prevents certain wireless settings from being changed. The WLAN team on Windows agrees with me that the text of the error message ought to be changed so that it's more informative.

Work machine #2: Compaq DeskPro Workstation 300. Upgraded from SP1 to first RC1 and then RTM of SP2 via corporate deployment/SMS. Result: Working great, no problems at all. But since I had a nice new hard drive ready and waiting (upgrading the existing 20GB drive to a more respectable 120GB), I ended up doing a fresh install onto the new drive, and that worked fine as well.

UPDATE: Work machine #3: Alienware Area 51m. Upgraded from SP1 to a couple different RCs, and then RTM of SP2. Result: Working great.

Overall I'm really pleased with the SP2 experience. On my desktop machines, I'm glad that I have the increased security and the souped up firewall. On the laptops, the new wireless and tablet features are much, much appreciated -- especially given that they're free!

Jon Udell's blogs turn into a cover story

jmazner — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 16:49:00 GMT

Jon Udell has turned his series of blog entries on Longhorn into an InfoWorld cover story . His editor makes the point that the blogging drove some great discussion and contributions to the final article. It’s cool to see that discussions I took part in with Jon, like here and here, had an impact on the final article. I’m also glad that after talking to Quentin Clark, Jon concluded that “If you're investing today in XML document formats, you should expect WinFS to do a good job running XPath or XQuery searches over them”. There’s a lot more from Quentin on Jon’s blog.

I think the final article came out well. I particularly like the order in which Jon lays out the WinFX pillars, since this is exactly how I do it when I give a WinFX overview:

First you need to get your data, no matter what device, server or service it lives on. You want to get to it in a secure, reliable way. That’s Indigo
Now you need a way to store it locally, so that you can find the relationships between data from all these disparate sources and turn it into useful information. That’s WinFS.
Finally, you want a way to see that information, a compelling visualization that makes sense of it all. That’s Avalon.

Jon also made the point about WinFX betting heavily on .NET as a foundation: “One thing that's not in question, however, is Longhorn's deep commitment to .Net. […] That's great news for the long-term health of Windows, the productivity of its developers, and the security of its users.” I’d agree. When ISVs ask what they can do to get ready for Longhorn, the first step is to get familiar with .NET and managed code. If you have an existing Win32 app, look into the enhanced C++/CLI support in Visual Studio 2005. If you’re starting on a new app, write it in managed code from the start.

Only one sentence in the article struck me as not quite right: “Microsoft is doing nothing to improve Internet Explorer's support for DOM, CSS, SVG, or other standard ways to enrich the browser.” It might be accurate to say that the Avalon team aren’t investing here, but read the comments of IE’s Group Program Manager, Tony Chor, over at Channel9, or read IE Program Manager Dave Massy’s blog, or take a look at the community discussion on the IE wiki. I’m pretty sure these guys are doing more than nothing to enrich the browser.

Thanks to Scoble for pointing out that the article had hit the web.

Allocating aligned memory in Windows

jmazner — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 20:49:00 GMT

A question came up on an internal alias about allocating memory blocks along page alignments, and it was harder than I expected to find the answer. So here is the link to _aligned_malloc
on MSDN, and now Google can work its magic.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/vclrf_aligned_malloc.asp

_aligned_malloc
Allocates memory on a specified alignment boundary.

Smart client bonanza

jmazner — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 22:52:00 GMT

I came across a bunch of smart client links today, perhaps these will be of interest to some of you.

Beta versions of smart client patterns and practicies guide, including suggested usage of the Offline Application Block

The just-released Smart Client Developer Center on MSDN

Some marketing-speak about business value of smart clients

I know “smart client“ is a contenious term, so here's how the MSDN dev center describes what smart client is all about:

Improved Reliability in Heterogeneous Network Environments
Increased Performance and Scalability
Develop Applications Faster
Access to Local Machine Functionality (such as DirectX)
Integration with Existing Desktop Applications and Systems
Ease of Deployment and Security
Mobility Support and Data Synchronization Capabilities
Native XML and Web Service Support
Better User Experience and User Interface
Flexible Data Access and Local Caching of Data

Evangelizing security in XP SP2

jmazner — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 17:27:00 GMT

I spent a bit of time recently away from Longhorn evangelism, in order to help with some XP SP2 evangelism. It sounds kind of funny to talk about evangelizing a service pack, I suppose, but SP2 has some pretty significant new security features in it.

I was asked to help evangelize the Attachment Execute Service. I like how diplomatically they try to explain user reaction, noting that “users will fail to properly discriminate between viruses and safe attachments.” The research I’ve seen is quite interesting – it suggests that, in general, most users actually can’t discriminate between the effects of the OK and Cancel buttons in a dialog box. I saw a presentation on this once that was just like that old Far Side cartoon about what dogs hear – the author showed a real dialog that asked some question, and then showed how users perceived the text. It was something like “Pick a random number between 1 and 10, if you pick correctly I’ll take one set of actions you won’t understand, otherwise I’ll do something else you won’t understand. What did you pick?” and then the buttons were [OK] and [Cancel].

The inability of users to decipher the average message box is a failure on the part of software designers, of course, not users, but it has significant implications for security. The first implication is that you should just avoid dialog boxen altogether if possible, because odds are users won’t read or process your message anyhow. The second implication is that if you do show an alert, particularly for something serious like security and malicious attachments, you need to be clear on what’s going on. That’s what Attachment Execute Service is about -- a centralized API that any app can call to determine whether a warning dialog is needed, and if so, show a common dialog that users will hopefully learn to read and trust.