Probably my last post on blog.msdn.com... please join me on my new blog at
http://www.iprinciples.com/blogs/richard
They say all good things must come to an end and tomorrow marks my last day in Microsoft!
When I had my Microsoft interview way back in 1998 I was asked how long I thought I’d be with the company. I remember saying that I expected it to be 3-4 years as I had always wanted to create my own software company one day... well over 8 years later and the time has finally come. Monday is the start of my new career as a co-founder of iPrinciples Limited (http://www.iprinciples.com) and we move in to our new offices at the Bath University Innovation Centre.
Microsoft has been a fabulous ride... and it’s the people who have made it so good! Despite what some folks would have you believe, my own experience is that Microsoft is made up of some of the most intelligent, self-critical, competitive but most importantly genuinely nice people I’ve ever had the pleasure in meeting. I'll certainly miss the place but am so excited about delivering some great projects and products under our own steam.
So here comes the next chapter... a shiny new blog should appear somewhere on iprinciples.com as soon as I get Community Server hosted. Hopefully I’ll be letting you know what it’s like to start up a small successful ISV from scratch!
Cheers,
Richard
richard@iprinciples.com
We've kicked off the Re-Mix conference in London today so I'm busy prepping for our session on 3D Internet development... it will work (honest!). I have a session which walks through the British Library project from the initial concept through the 3D modelling to XAML, development, deployment and then Silverlight. We also have a surprise in the 'sneek peek' session at the end of the day tomorrow... I'll blog some links after we've shown it.
Remember Windows 3.11? Office 3.0? Still got any floppies or DAT tapes gathering dust on your bookshelf?
Over the last few months I've been in a bit of a time warp... one minute Silverlight... then the next in DOS 6 and considering the implications of getting access to digitally born documents and applications from 10+ years ago. How do documents get stored and migrated to ensure they can be read in the future? How do you make sure those documents can be viewed exactly as they were intended/created? What about the lifecycle of that document? - the changes history?, annotations?, embedded fonts?, ... quite a minefield!
Thankfully the guys I've been working with at The National Archives live and breath this stuff! They have the responsibility to conserve the nation's paper-based and digital heritage and to make it accessible to those who want to view it. Phew!
Anyone remember the Domesday Project 1986 laser discs that Blue Peter buried in their garden? All was well... using the latest and greatest technology presuming it had a strong future... and the nightmare of trying to find a laserdisc reader for a BBC Micro just a few years later. That sums up the problem for me!
The announcement we just made with the National Archives is trying to address the issue of digital conservation head-on. With billions of documents in the world wrapped up in proprietary document formats (from Microsoft and many many other vendors) we felt it was important to focus on how we can help the body in the UK which has the biggest headache and do what we can to assist them in:
- Migrating documents to the latest Office format (Open XML) via our document conversion tools to ensure they can be accessed by the public in the future
- Ensuring legacy documents can be viewed as accurately as possible when compared to their original
- Determining the best way to migrate certain documents
- Understanding what version of tools a document was created in so a conversion process can be automated
To support these aims we evaluated the key Office and Windows combinations that have shipped and looked at some of the typical types of documents in the archive. We built a set of Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard drives containing those O/S and Office versions and made them available to the folks at the Archives to use in their on-going document conversion process.
[Gordon Frazer demonstrating the VPC library]
At the press launch, I demonstrated the new National Archives Virtual PC 2007 library of previous Microsoft operating systems and Office suites going back to Office 3.0 on Windows 3.11. Remember that beautiful white background? the chunky icons? the "easter egg" with the cast role of the developers (by clicking the yellow flag in help about with ctrl + shift a few times)? It all came flooding back and really made everyone realise how far things have moved in less that two decades!
The Virtual PC 2007 environment is going to provide an effective way for documents to be viewed in the original context in full fidelity and to enable step-by-step version upgrades to be performed if some document fidelity is lost in other conversion approaches.
Open XML is an Ecma International standard and, once documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. are converted to the various Office XML formats we should be in an easier place to keep migrating documents forward. With XML being based on text we stand a good chance!
So why are we doing this now? Well, we've actually been working with The British Library and The National Archive for about 18 months now on digital preservation with some other European organisations as members of an EU project called Planets.
I think its fair to say that we are still near the start of getting the digital preservation problems sorted, but I'm pleased to say we're actively engaged in listening to the issues and taking some real action to make the digitally-born legacy of documents readable for our kids, our kids kids, ...
Take a look at the following articles for more background on the announcement:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm which also has a video interview with the Microsoft UK MD Gordon Frazer - my laptop's 15 minutes of fame! :-)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2117863,00.html
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287842,00.htm
http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/desktop/news/index.cfm?newsid=3843
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/microsoft+saves+digital+archives/587172
We have a new Architect Forum coming up on the 15th May which is going to focus on Software plus Services. We have a great agenda and speaker list lined up so why not come and join us? The event and registration link is http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032335942&Culture=en-GB
I think I'm pretty fortunate in my job as I get to meet loads of smart people who are brave and smart (or crazy) enough to dive into uncharted technology waters and try out things with our technology platform that beggar belief.
Alex and Mark at Shaxam must fall well and truly into the 'crazy' category because I've been working with them over the past year or so on the British Library work and they have taken their 3D conversion tools to another level. Actually, they are genuinely 'crazy' and probably need locking up but that's another story :-)
The idea is this...
1. you build a 3D model in Lightwave (or convert another 3D model into Lightwave)
2. you use the Lightwave to XAML plug-in converter to suck out the models, textures, morphs (animations), lighting, specularity, bla, bla, bla and plonk it into XAML
3. you load up the XAML in Expression Blend and press the 'make me a jolly clever application' button (either stand-alone or a browser-hosted XBAP)
4. Bob's your uncle and you have a full 3D (browser-hosted if XBAP) model which you can navigate around or add other snazzy event handlers in Blend to control the model.
Why not check out these couple of converted examples to get a real idea... remembering that this is all XAML!
and let me, Alex and Mark know what you think! I'll post some other examples next week all being well.
One of the great things about working at Microsoft is the smart folks who you work with on a daily basis... honest! The good news is that through our new group blog you'll be able to get to know the other guys in my team and the sort of antics we're getting up to. The link is http://customerteam.spaces.live.com/ and there are already a couple of intro postings to set the scene.
We're running a developer-oriented event which drills into Open XML at the end of the month. Just pop here if you fancy it.
In this 2 day workshop you will learn the structure and semantics of the new Office Open XML file format. You will spend time working with the three major markup languages; WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML and PresentationML. You will develop Office Open XML enabled solutions using System.XML and the Packaging API. Learn about advanced topics such as digital signatures or working with custom XML and data-binding.
If you already know about the benefits, you might like to sign our online petition at http://www.microsoft.co.uk/openxml/ ?
Following on from my earlier rant... on the 2nd April Ecma announced...
“Ecma International welcomes the continuation of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 process for Ecma-376: Office Open XML File Formats with the 5-month ballot by the national members of ISO and IEC” said Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, new Secretary General of Ecma International. ”We look forward to working with ISO/IEC and their Member Bodies and National Committees to address any technical issues that they may have about Office Open XML and look forward to Ecma-376 Office Open XML becoming an ISO/IEC standard”.
The whole problem space of document archival is huge and, having recently met again with the guys who have to deal with this problem for the UK (the National Archives), in my view it is really essential that the major document formats are elevated to de jure standards rather than remaining de facto.
If, like me, you have an interest in electronic document standardisation and you'd like to see Office Open XML become an ISO standard why not make your voice heard by contacting your ISO reps and letting them know? (the UK is represented by the BSI and this is their contact address).
Back in November 2005 I blogged about the Open XML document format being submitted to Ecma and was raving about the likes of Jean Paoli (co-creator of XML) who have pushed this so hard. Well, the Ecma standardisation process did its business and we ended up with an international standard on December 7th 2006. So far so good... everyone likes standards, right?
The next step was to extend beyond Ecma and make sure the benefits of international standardisation were available for all... hence the submission to ISO. Here is where things started to go pear-shaped thanks to what appears to be corporate competitive engagement in the standards process.
Jean Paoli's open letter at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx gives more details, but the one-liner that sums it up for me is:
If successful, the campaign to block consideration of Open XML could create a dynamic where the first technology to the standards body, regardless of technical merit, gets to preclude other related ones from being considered.
I've always been a believer in standards in order to help drive interoperability and integration, and feel it is a huge shame that we could be heading for a world where the world's standardisation processes could result in a 'first past the post' situation. I want a considered, balanced process where appropriate standards can co-exist and even overlap to give customers an appropriately constrained yet productive choice.
With announcements like Novell's support of OpenXML and the ODF/Open XML translator I think we have an environment in which both specifications can interoperate and where users should be able to standardise on the one which meets their business needs best - which means they should ultimately both be ISO standards. As a long-standing member of the British Computer Society (BCS), I really hope our National bodies such as the BCS and the British Standards Institute (BSI) will take a strong customer-centric and customer-enabling view of this whole standardisation activity.
If you want more info on Open XML, check out http://openxmldeveloper.org and take a look here for more on ODF.
I've mentioned Expression Blend in a few posts as one of the core tools for WPF design. The release candidate is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-blend/try.mspx so why not give it a try... our starter for 10 video on Blend is linked from here if you want to see a sample app being created from scratch.
On the run up to the Vista launch I had been speaking with Paul Douglas and Richard Keith at Future Publishing (just down the road from me in Bath) about taking some of their content and hosting it in the cool WPF Turning the Pages application. I think the online preview of the Official Windows Vista Magazine looks fantastic in the full WPF 3D environment (despite the ugly mug on page 10!) and is clearly the most engaging online magazine environment I've come across. Is this the future of magazine publishing where we save the forests? or is the Daily Mail or New York Times readers that offer the best reading experience? I think realism of the 3D page flipping is amazing for graphically rich reading experiences and the 'Flow Layout' features of WPF that are highlighted in the newspaper readers are a fresh and typographically accurate way to read text easily. Maybe the combination of the two is where we need to head next?
Anyway, why not try it out here and let me know what you think?
For the last few months I’ve been working with the guys at London Underground and Edenbrook. Having seen the impressive use they’ve made of Office 2003 and Sharepoint in particular, we started talking about the possibilities with the Office 2007 System and how we could work together to take their Network Management systems to the next level using new visualisation approaches and through the technology advances that Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0 brings. The London Underground had about 970 million passenger journeys last year and keeping most of those people moving to the right place at the right time is pretty challenging!
After a 2 day Architecture Design Session and 3 week Proof of Concept (4 developers, 2 part-time designers) in our Microsoft Technology Centre labs we emerged with a really compelling application which can take live and historical feeds from sensors placed all over the Underground Network and which are already exposed through a plethora of internal XML Web Services. The hard work was getting the services and data structured in the best way to make accessing the information as easy as possible via WPF’s in-built data-binding (and this took about 2 of the 3 weeks). As a separate stream, we had a couple of designers working on the layout and artefacts using Expression Design and Expression Blend, and those were integrated into the application in the last 2-3 days. Having the same project structures in Blend and Visual Studio really made the designer/developer relationship simple – if you haven’t checked out those tools yet I certainly recommend finding some time. In fact, why not take a look at a series of Channel9 videos which Martin Grayson, Nick Page and I put together to get you past the panic of the blank project in Blend?
The final application uses the familiar tub map images and also adds a geographically-accurate view and even a 3D perspective of the Underground system (3D was added in the last day!). Over the map we overlay real statistics such as crimes, engineering works, incidents, etc. And you can turn on/off layers easily, such as individual lines, stations and even the trains which are shown animating in their actual positions on the track network. All the data and application is real, so there are no ‘smoke and mirrors’!
The really good news is that the project is much more than a flashy graphics demonstration – we built it on a solid Service Oriented Architecture and a Framework which is their foundation for future development. We first showed the application at the Developer launch of Vista, so you can see it for yourself if you view or download the keynote. We ran a case study session on this project at the Architect Insight Conference so I'll try to publish the slides soon and hopefully a screencam of the app so you can see it all in higher resolution.
I figured if I'm going to take this blog thing seriously I'd better find a tool which suits the way I work because the web based publishing UI is not for me... I reckon I need something that works offline, has easy publishing of pictures and is pretty simple to use. So here goes Windows Live Writer. So far I'm quite impressed - the web preview mode is nice and hooking it up to the MSDN blog was dead simple. Wonder if the publish button works?Here goes...
Eric and I are now full steam ahead in preparation for our workshop on Monday (although Sunday night is looking like "one of those nights!" already). Anyway, we were chatting over our experiences earlier and I think we hit on a little nugget... the question is... are we right?
So... [tangent - all Microsoft Corp staff start one in four sentences with the word "So" for some reason and it has started to catch on over here a bit. If I start saying things are "super awesome" - please come by and whack me over the head with a wet lettuce!]... anyway...
So... if we have a spectrum of choices between fully on-premise solutions and fully on-demand (or SaaS) solutions, do we see organisations moving between them over time? It seems to me that the advantages of getting set up cheaply and quickly have huge benefits in the short-medium-term but as other issues such as tight integration with other systems takes priority there will be a desire to bring those outsourced systems in-house. So... (here I go again - sorry!)... are those ISV's that already have successful on-premise solutions in a better position for future growth than those building a simple SaaS solution? I guess it depends on the size of the market, ability to configure the application, integration points across the firewall, etc. All thoughts welcome before Sunday night please J
