- Woodinville Wine Country Passport 2008 Wrap-up
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My wife Cathy and I just attended our 3rd Passport weekend. For those of you who don't live in the Puget Sound area or are not into wine, this is an annual event where you get to spend a weekend touring 30+ wineries. Not only are you tasting wine but you're also getting to chat with the winemakers. For many of the smaller boutique wineries, this is the only time of the year that they're open to the public. My friend John Dietz fondly refers to this as the annual Woodinville Drink and Drive.
We saw more limos and shuttle buses than ever this year so it's safe to say that the number of designated drivers is on the rise. Some of these wineries are located in beautiful facilities while many others are located in warehouse and office park space. We were sad to see that DeLille Cellars would not be participating this year. You can't beat spending time in their beautiful hillside chateau with their giant fireplace and people serving you Filet Minion Crostinis while drinking D2 or Aix.
I'm happy to say that my personal winners this year didn't come from major wineries. Two wines stood out from the crowd and they came from wineries you may not have heard of before. The first one that grabbed my palate was the 2005 Tempranillo from Kennedy Shah. This wine can be found at Woodhouse Family Cellars and is produced in the Rattlesnake Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA) of the Columbia Valley appellation. I give it a 91.
The second wine that made its mark at this event was a 2004 Southern Rhone-style blend called Byzance from Brian Carter Cellars. While the tasting room near the Hollywood Schoolhouse might be new, 2-time "Winemaker of the Year" award winner Brian Carter is no stranger to the business. This blend of Grenache and Syrah comes from the Columbia Valley appellation and garners a 91 in my book this year.
As warmer weather approaches, I'm looking forward to spending more time in Columbia Valley and Walla Walla.
Rob
- From Marketecture to Architecture
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For those of you who don't already know, I recently moved on to a role as a Mobility Architect and am therefore no longer working in MCB Developer Marketing as a Product Manager. This means I will now be working with some of our largest customers to help them design and implement Windows Mobile solutions for their respective organizations. I'll miss not working closely with Loke Uei, Brian, and Khush but luckily I'm still close by in building 119.
One of my commitments as a Windows Mobile Product Manager was to ensure that the Windows Mobile Developer Center on MSDN was supplied with fresh content every month to help educate our developer community. This content comes in the form of articles, webcasts, how-to videos, and virtual labs just to name a few. Even though I've moved to another group inside Microsoft, I've committed to help keep the MSDN site flush with content until the end of our Fiscal year (the end of this June) while my replacement is being found. So you don't have to worry about the site suddenly becoming stale due to a lack of content.
The most important thing I have going on this year is that I'm the Windows Mobile Track Program Manager for Tech Ed Developers this June. I'm continuing to fulfill that role and look forward to seeing all of you in Orlando. We've taken the very best Windows Mobile and Embedded breakout sessions, labs, and chalk talks from MEDC and have integrated them into Tech Ed Developers. You'll see lots of familiar faces including the "dream-team" of MVP speakers that you're accustomed to seeing at MEDC in Vegas and around the world. If you're looking to learn about the latest cutting-edge techniques and technologies for Windows Mobile and Embedded, don't miss this important event!
Rob
- A Great Spartan Once Said...
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This is where we fight!
In a world of new mobile competitors vying for mobile developers everywhere, I'm proud to present The Microsoft® Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator 2008!
It delivers new innovations and development best practices to the Windows Mobile platform with Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Compact Framework 3.5, SQL Server Compact 3.5, a working Supply Chain application, over 5,000 lines of commented code plus over a hundred pages of helpful documentation.
Adapt your App :: Create a single binary that runs unchanged on Windows Mobile Standard or Pro, Portrait or Landscape, Rectangle or Square. No more wasting time building separate executables to accommodate different screen sizes or input methods.
Sync Services for ADO.NET :: Synchronize your data between SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 using the new Sync Framework. Keep all your occasionally-connected mobile workers on the same page.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Store and Forward :: Reliably push messages to servers or other devices via Exchange Server 2007. Programmatically notify peer devices that they have new orders waiting for them and need to sync.
MapPoint :: Guide delivery drivers to their customers via either the shortest or quickest route. Integrated mapping means you’ll never get lost again.
LINQ :: Use the new Language Integrated Query to filter results from Generic Object Collections. Query both your objects and XML using a familiar, SQL-like syntax to boost developer productivity.
Custom Controls :: Capture signatures and dazzle your end-users with 3D and Alpha-blended controls that alter their behavior depending on the platform they’re running on.
Managed Stored Procedures and Triggers :: The pluggable data layer allows you to say goodbye to compiling Dynamic SQL inside your code and fires events to react to INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.
Notifications and Online Help :: Formerly only supported on Pro, say hello to Popup Notifications and Online Help on Standard. Popup Notifications, also known as “toast,” display an HTML message and then disappear after a pre-determined amount of time. Using Online Help on every screen reduces your applicationtraining costs.
Language Switching and Localization :: Change Language/Regional Settings inside your app and watch text and Online Help speak a different language. Don’t wait until your application is finished to realize that it needs to be world-ready.
Time to Market :: Stop reinventing the wheel and use this Accelerator as the foundation for your next Windows Mobile development effort. If you don’t want to use the whole thing, pick and choose the components that are the best fit for your project.
Find out More :: The first Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator has been downloaded tens of thousands of times and has served as the foundation for some of the largest and most important Windows Mobile projects in the world. Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsmobile to accelerate your career as a Windows Mobile developer.
Best Regards,
Rob
- The iPhone comes to the Enterprise with a little help from Microsoft
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This morning, Steve Jobs announced that Apple has licensed the Exchange Active Sync protocol from Microsoft in order to bring the following functionality to the iPhone:
- Push Email
- Push Contacts
- Push Calendar
- Access to the Global Address List (GAL)
- Remote Wipe
- Password Policies
The Apple folks publicly bashed the way Blackberry does email through a NOC and praised Microsoft for coming up with a much more advanced architecture that allows the iPhone to work directly with Exchange in a more reliable and affordable way. Before all you fans of Windows Mobile freak out, just remember, licensing our AirSync protocol to Apple means increased sales of Exchange Server, Windows Server, ISA Server and lots of CALs.
Now on a much more threatening note, Apple did launch their new iPhone SDK that allows developers to build on-device applications using Objective C. If you've ever done development on a NeXT Workstation or Mac OSX, you'll know what Object C is. This SDK allows you to build rich applications for the iPhone that utilize the following features:
- SQLite for Database access
- Core Location for location-based services
- Core Audio
- Video via h.264
- Core animation
- OpenGL ES for hardware accelerated 3D graphics and games
- Cocoa Touch for multi touch input
- Accelerometer to use the iPhone's 3-axis sensor in apps
They've got Xcode development tools, a debugger, an emulator, and a graphical forms builder with drag and drop functionality.
Like the Amazon Kindle, they've created something called "App Store" that will be included on the iPhone so users can find, buy and wirelessly download applications to their device. You'll even be notified when there's an update to downloaded software. All downloadable applications will have electronic certificates from Apple.
If that's not enough, famous Venture Capitalist John Doerr announced that Kleiner Perkins (KPCB) started a $100 Million iFund to back companies looking to develop innovative applications for the iPhone.
By any objective measure, this is a big day for the iPhone. What can we do to ensure that Microsoft is a winner in this equation? Just like with the benefits we receive by allowing the iPhone to sync with Exchange Server, the development of iPhone apps that connect with Microsoft servers will be just what the doctor ordered. I would get started with the following:
- SQL Server Compact for iPhone
- Sync Services for ADO.NET with a provider for the iPhone SSC database so we can sync with SQL Server
- SharePoint Server 2007 access
- Communicator Mobile to access Office Communications Server 2007
You get the gist of where I'm going. Just remember, the competition never sleeps and you should always expect to have your feet kept to the fire. We must constantly reinvent ourselves and be ready to eat our own lunch before our competitors do.
- Rob
- Welcome to the New Windows Mobile Developer Center
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A quick glance at the Windows Mobile Developer Center clues you in to the fact that we’ve done a complete overhaul of the site. For years, our “bread and butter” has been delivering you content on Smart Device Development which most often included articles on building apps with the .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server CE/Mobile/Everywhere/Compact. While we will still do that, we’re now making a concerted effort to expand the diversity of our content to cover an ever-growing mobile developer audience.
The biggest thing you notice when you come to the site is 4 big boxes. Think of these as 4 concurrently running worker threads delivering more content on more topics than ever before.
1. From the “Applications for Smart Devices” box, you’ll see content that targets native, managed, and SQL Server Compact topics. Don’t worry. It won’t be 100% enterprise development 24/7 anymore. We’ll tackle more and more consumer scenarios like Peter Foot did recently with his article on Mobile Facebook. We’ll also go the other direction too and provide content on working with low-level APIs with C++. And yes, we’ll even start talking about creating better device drivers.
2. The “Mobile Web” box will unleash wave after wave of new content that covers the explosion that some are calling “Mobile 2.0.” You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of building web sites designed for mobile devices as we talk about things like the new .MOBI standards, W3C Mobile Web best practices and the XHTML Mobile Profile. Don’t forget AJAX on Internet Explorer Mobile. Jim Wilson and Mel Sampat have blown everyone away with their coverage of AJAX on our favorite mobile platform.
3. In the “Mobile Games” box we’ll resurrect a topic that we used to give a lot of coverage to several years ago. Based on the way this segment of the market is taking off, teaching you how to build games for Windows Mobile devices could turn out to be just as important as the work we’ve done in teaching you how to build mobile apps for the enterprise. We do in fact have a portable gaming runtime for all our devices called Direct3D Mobile that can be programmed via another portable runtime called the .NET Compact Framework. We also have Direct Draw or you could just chill out and create a casual 2D game with simple Sprites using NETCF and maybe a little GDI+.
4. The “Rich Internet Applications” box is a bit of a mystery and looks to be pretty vacant place at the moment. Don’t think of it like you would an “Under Construction” web site. Think of it as the big tease that it is. Who knows for sure what’s to come in the RIA space for Windows Mobile devices?
Now that I’ve covered the 4 big boxes, take a look at the “Getting Started with Windows Mobile” section on the top-right hand side of the page. This place is a tour de force of readiness to get you going with Windows Mobile development. Labs, Webcasts, Videos, Solution Accelerators, Wiki’s, SDK’s, runtimes, and Power Toys oh my!
Stay on the right side of the page and drop one section down to give props to our Device Application Developer MVPs. We all owe so much to these great folks! They single-handedly created the Windows Mobile developer community back at the beginning of this decade by answering questions in the NETCF newsgroup, writing books, speaking at conferences (with the highest scores) and creating amazing organizations like OpenNETCF.org. They also identify a disproportionally greater number of bugs in our beta software than any other individual or group.
If you move back beneath the main boxes on the page, you’ll see a section on the left that completely displays the content of the latest Windows Mobile Team Blog. The section on the right displays the latest blog posts from Jim Wilson, Loke Uei, Me, Visual Studio for Devices, the NETCF team, the SQL Server Compact team, Steve Lasker, Jason Langridge, Mel Sampat, Constanze Roman, and Frank Prengel. The real-time information delivered by these blogs will keep you abreast of the latest developments in the Windows Mobile community.
Last but not least is a section at the bottom that lists all the Forums that help make up the Windows Mobile ecosystem. Get answers to some of your toughest questions from Microsoft employees and the community at large whether you’re building apps with C++, C#, VB, and/or SQL Server Compact.
As a Mobile Developer, Architect, Marketer, Planner and former Embedded MVP, it’s been my vision to create a one-stop resource for all my Windows Mobile needs. I believe this new Windows Mobile Developer Center is a big step in that direction. The multiple, concurrent streams of content that follows the launch of this new site will represent the proof in the pudding. It’s been my great pleasure to deliver fresh content on a monthly basis to the Windows Mobile developer community. As always, I look forward to your feedback so that I can better equip you with the information you need to get your job done.
Best Regards,
Rob Tiffany
- Mobile Scalability + Staggering Performance
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As you know from my recent posts, I've been hanging out at 1,200 concurrent Subscribers trying to boost performance. When I first hit the 1,200 Subscriber mark, I was able to change and replicate ~13 million rows per hour. I was happy with the scalability, but the performance was no better than what I achieved with 600 concurrent Subscribers. Rather than push the scalability envelope out to 1,800 or 2,400 Subscribers, I decided to tweak, poke and prod my portable data center until I could get better performance at the 1,200 level. I succeeded with the architecture you see below:
Sometimes more is more. Sometimes less is more.
Knowing that the ISAPI DLL running on IIS is the biggest bottleneck in the system, I decided to scale out to 6 IIS servers in addition to my separate SQL Publisher and SQL Distributor servers. The 2 SQL Servers have 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM while the 6 IIS servers contain 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM. Each IIS server would accomodate 200 concurrent clients each. In the last week of December 2007, I throttled back the MAX_THREADS_PER_POOL registry setting on the IIS servers from the default of 20 to just 3 and ran my test harness. This resulted in the changing and replicating of ~15 millions rows per hour; a boost of 2 million rows per hour over my previous test. Using fewer threads on each IIS box meant lower memory and CPU utilization across the board. Instead of overwhelming SQL Server will lots of threads trying to perform work all at the same time, SQL Server got to chill out and thus processed each sync much faster. This was great news so I pushed the fewer threads experiment even further. I executed my test harness with 2 threads and then just 1 thread per IIS server. Using just 1 thread resulted in the changing and replicating of ~18 million rows per hour; a 3 million row per hour boost over using 3 threads per IIS server.
At ~21 million row changes per hour, 2 threads per IIS server is the sweet spot!
- Rows changed: 5,826 per second | 349,600 per minute | 20,976,000 per hour | 503,424,000 per day
- Bytes per row: 116
- Data replicated: 2.3 GB per hour | 55 GB per day
The longest and average sync times dropped significantly over the first results I got with 1,200 concurrent Subscribers:
- Longest sync time: 14 minutes
- Shortest sync time: .6 seconds
- Average sync time: 3 minutes, 38 seconds
The IIS didn't break a sweat:
- IIS1: CPU: 11% | Mem: 172 MB | Network Utilization: 89%
- Disk I/O: OS: .3%, ISAPI: 3.8%
- IIS2: CPU: 8% | Mem: 167 MB | Network Utilization: .91%
- Disk I/O: OS: .2%, ISAPI: 3%
- IIS3: CPU: 6% | Mem: 171 MB | Network Utilization: .82%
- Disk I/O: OS: .2%, ISAPI: 2.8%
- IIS4: CPU: 7% | Mem: 171 MB | Network Utilization: .71%
- Disk I/O: OS: .5%, ISAPI: 3.4%
- IIS5: CPU: 6% | Mem: 152 MB | Network Utilization: .92%
- Disk I/O: OS: .3%, ISAPI: 2.3%
- IIS6: CPU: 8% | Mem: 151 MB | Network Utilization: 1%
- Disk I/O: OS: .3%, ISAPI: 2.6%
The CPU was finally well-utilized (after dozens of tests that never went higher than 35%) on the SQL Publisher and the SQL Distributor's disk that held the transaction log was pegged (which means it could use some RAID 0 or 10 medicine).
- SQL Distributor: CPU: 9% | Mem: 2.32 GB | Network Utilization: .64%
- Disk I/O: OS: .7%, SQL: 1%, DB: 16.8%, LOG: 100%, Snapshot Share: 1%
- SQL Publisher: CPU: 74% | Mem: 4.19 GB | Network Utilization: 4%
- Disk I/O: OS: 1.1%, SQL: 13.7%, DB: 1%, LOG: 22.6%
I'm very pleased with these results as they represent the kind of scalability and performance that our clients are looking for when they're considering building and rolling out a mobile line of business application. As usual, the low memory and CPU utilizaiton on the IIS servers will lead architects to think that using 6 load-balanced boxes is wasteful and they deserve to be consolidated. I've been down that path and the place that I've arrived at today tells me that the ISAPI DLLs are exhausted long before you can detect any strain on the IIS server. That being said, the use of fewer threads means that I don't need the memory and CPU power I once thought I needed. Lower-end IIS servers could be purchased or perhaps consolidation could happen by deploying them as virtual images inside Hyper-V on Longhorn or Virtual Server on Windows Server 2003. Definitely something worth looking at.
In the near term, you should expect to see me push the scalability envelope to the 1,800 and/or 2,400 concurrent Subscriber level in an effort to see what it takes to saturate a single SQL Server box. Along the way, I will take a look at virtualization options to see how well they work out. Lastly, you'll see me persue "Republishing" architectures with SQL Server in an effort to make Mobile Merge Replication scalable enough to support hundreds of thousands or millions of Windows Mobile devices. Only then could you consider using this technology for large-scale consumer applications with a national or global reach. Remember, Windows Mobile 6 comes with a built-in content synchronization engine called SQL Server Compact 3.1. When you start thinking big, you realize that we could use this technology to push intelligent advertising to devices or build the next global social networking platform designed for people on the go.
See you at TechReady 6!
- Rob
- My New Book is Now Available!
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"Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1" is now available in print! Those of you in the continental U.S. can just buy it directly from the Hood Canal Press site at http://www.hoodcanalpress.com/catalog.htm and get free ground shipping. It's on Amazon in the U.S. so you can order it at http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Mobile-Synchronization-Server-Compact/dp/0979891205/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199744085&sr=1-13 as well. At Amazon UK you can find it here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Mobile-Synchronization-Server-Compact/dp/0979891205/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199744162&sr=1-7.
Go buy it and start building large-scale line of business and consumer applications for Windows Mobile!
-Rob
- Yes, We Can Scale to 1,200 Concurrent Subscribers!
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Yet again, I've doubled the number of concurrent Subscribers to 1,200 where each Subscriber is equivalant to a Windows Mobile device. I used 6 servers running 200 Subscribers each to create client load, plus 3 load-balanced IIS servers, and a separate SQL Server Distributor and Publisher. Each IIS server had its MAX_THREAD_PER_POOL registry setting set to 10 and had to handle 400 concurrent Subscribers. With 1,200 concurrent Subscribers contending for resources on every tier, the system performed 10,693 syncs per hour, which is half the 22,401 syncs per hour that I saw when running 600 Subscribers back at the Partner Summit. That being said, the system held steady at the number of rows it could change and replicate per hour:
- Rows changed: 12,831,600 per hour | 307,958,400 per day
- Bytes per row: 116
- Data replicated: 1.42 GB per hour | 34 GB per day
The longest and average sync times jumped significantly over the results I got with 600 concurrent Subscribers:
- Longest sync time: 17 minutes
- Shortest sync time: .5 seconds
- Average sync time: 6 minutes, 38 seconds
Just like in Vegas and at the Partner Summit, the IIS and SQL Servers are chilling out throughout this test with the IIS servers and Distributor using more memory:
- IIS1: CPU: 8% | Mem: 229 MB | Network Utilization: 1%
- IIS2: CPU: 14% | Mem: 225 MB | Network Utilization: 1%
- IIS3: CPU: 8% | Mem: 226 MB | Network Utilization: .89%
- SQL Distributor: CPU: 5% | Mem: 2.95 GB | Network Utilization: .32%
- SQL Publisher: CPU: 36% | Mem: 4.12 GB | Network Utilization: 1%
The obvious takeaway from this test is that we can scale to 1,200 concurrent Subscribers but we're no longer sustaining an upward curve in performance. In fact, the curve has started heading downward. Does performance always head northward in a linear fashion forever in other systems? Of course not, so don't be bummed. I think a system that can change and replicate almost 14 million rows per hour while accomodating 1,200 Subscribers that are making 1,200 row changes per sync is pretty incredible! Remember, real-world systems don't have each Windows Mobile device make 1,200 rows changes every time they sync. My portable data center and test harness is designed to dramatically exceed what one would see in the real world!
I might be crazy, but I don't want to give up on pushing the performance of this system higher without a fight! Therefore, I'm going to run this test again with 1,200 concurrent Subscribers, except next time I'll use 6 IIS servers. If you remember, I didn't just double the number of Subscribers replicating against SQL Server, I also doubled the number of Subscribers hitting each IIS server. I went from 200 to 400. By adding 3 more IIS servers, I'll be backing the number of Subscribers per IIS server down to 200 again. Don't be fooled by those low CPU numbers on the 3 IIS servers. The ISAPI DLL gets all it can handle long before you begin to stress the server as a whole. Also, reading to and writing from all those .IN and .OUT files creates a lot of I/O. Stay tuned to see what happens...
- Rob
- I'm Holding the First Copy of My Third Book
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Believe it baby!
Many of you have seen me at various Microsoft events during 2007 with my portable data center where I pushed the envelope of what's possible with Mobile Merge Replication. After synchronizing almost 14 million rows per hour between SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1 at the Window Mobile Partner Summit, I've never felt more confident in this powerful technology. If your organization wants to mobilize its workforce, I've got the answer for you.
One of my goals for the year was to convert a complex 4-tier Merge Replication architecture into an easy-to-follow handbook.
So I posted every chapter of this book to my blog over the last several months and with a lot of help from my friends all over the world, we whipped this book into shape. I am now a believer in the notion of community technical editing. I want to send a big thanks to Hood Canal Press, the MVP community, and lots of supportive colleagues at Microsoft.
The book is now headed out through distribution channels in North America and Europe. Just as soon as the book shows up on Amazon, I'll be the first to let you know.
Merry Christmas!
Rob
- Windows Mobile Partner Summit Day 1
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The Windows Mobile Partner Summit is going great and the event looks to be twice as big as last year. It's always nice to reconnect with our partner community. Steve Hegenderfer was kind enough to allow me to bring my rack of servers to his event. This time, I have a much lighter, 24U half rack which is much easier to move around. At the Dev Connections conference, I used a new stress test designed to push the number of row changes per sync. At that event, I used 300 concurrent Subscribers to perform 23,330 syncs per hour and make changes to 7,000,000 rows per hour. Each complete row change consisted of 116 bytes of data which meant I changed and replicated 812 MB of data per hour.
This time around I decided to double the number of concurrent Subscribers to 600. Keep in mind that each Subscriber is equivalant to a Windows Mobile device. I used 6 servers running 100 Subscribers each to create client load, 3 load-balanced IIS servers, and a separate SQL Server Distributor and Publisher. With 600 concurrent Subscribers contending for resources, I managed to perform 22,401 syncs per hour which is slightly fewer syncs than I saw when running only 300 Subscribers back in Vegas. The important story here is that I almost doubled the number of rows I changed and replicated per hour:
- Rows changed: 13,440,600 per hour | 322,574,400 per day
- Data replicated: 1.45 GB per hour | 34.8 GB per day
Just like in Vegas, the IIS and SQL Servers where just chilling out throughout this test:
- IIS1: CPU: 7% | Mem: 188 MB | Network Utilization: .69%
- IIS2: CPU: 8% | Mem: 187 MB | Network Utilization: .88%
- IIS3: CPU: 5% | Mem: 185 MB | Network Utilization: .95%
- SQL Distributor: CPU: 5% | Mem: 994 MB | Network Utilization: .77%
- SQL Publisher: CPU: 36% | Mem: 4.11 GB | Network Utilization: 1%
This is truly incredible and further proves that SQL Server 2005 + SQL Server Compact 3.1 + Merge Replication is the most powerful data sync technology on the market today.
- Rob
- Journey has a new lead singer thanks to YouTube
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In the eternal quest to find a lead singer that sounds like Steve Perry, Neal Schon found a band called "The Zoo" from the Philippines on YouTube. They play lots of 80's songs including Journey covers and the lead singer, Arnel Pineda, is a vocal dead ringer for Steve Perry. If you close your eyes and listen to this guy sing, it's hard to tell the difference between him and Steve Perry.
On December 5th, Neal Schon (guitar), Jonathan Cain (keyboards), Ross Valory (bass), and Deen Castronovo (drums) made it official on their Journey website that Arnel Pineda is their new lead singer. Apparently, when Neal Schon tried to contact Arnel via a message on YouTube, he thought it must be a hoax, but now the rest is history.
Check out this YouTube of Arnel Pineda and "The Zoo" playing "Don't Stop Believing."
I can hardly wait to see them on tour next year.
- Rob
- What can we learn from the new Amazon Kindle?
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As an author and admirer of iconic mobile devices, I’m totally jazzed by Amazon’s new Kindle device. For those of you who haven’t read about this, Amazon just launched its own mobile reading device today that uses a high-resolution, electronic paper display to read books, newspapers, blogs and magazines on-the-go. Obviously, we’re not strangers to the ebook business since we equipped our earliest Pocket PCs with Microsoft Reader and ClearType technology. Unfortunately, the ebook marketplace just never took off. How is Kindle different and why might it succeed where so many others have failed?
Electronic Ink
The Kindle’s new electronic paper and ink technology looks just like you’re reading real paper and ink and doesn’t require a backlight. You can even read books on this device in direct sunlight which doesn’t work very well with computer screens (with the exception of the OLPC XO laptop). Not requiring a backlight means that this device and last for a week without a recharge.
Wireless Everywhere
The Kindle comes equipped with built-in EV-DO wireless so you can download a book, newspaper or magazine in less than a minute no matter where you are. You don’t have to hunt down a Wi-Fi hotspot. What’s more, there’s no monthly subscription, service plans, commitments or bills to deal with for this wireless data access.
No PC Required
Since the Kindle is a wireless device, it doesn’t require a computer and you don’t have to hassle with cables or synching. You don’t have to download content to your computer and then copy it over to your device.
Bookstore Included
The Kindle includes a built-in store that allows you to purchase content OTA from Amazon directly from your device. Books cost just $9.99 and you can sample the first chapter for free.
Content Push
Your magazine, blog and newspaper subscriptions are pushed to you. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll find that your New York Times, Wall Street Journal or other morning papers have been pushed to you overnight and are waiting for you. Magazines arrive on Kindle before they show up at the newsstand.
Check out the details and launch videos at the link below:
http://amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_5873612_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=049SQ69H0WEFBSX1P9N1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=329252801&pf_rd_i=507846
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
Rob
- New Mobile Merge Replication Benchmarks
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I just finished up a week of teaching attendees at the Dev Connections conference how to setup and use mobile merge replication to sync data between their Windows Mobile devices and SQL Server 2005. As usual, I brought along my favorite teaching tool, my portable data center, to take attendees on deep dives of the 4 different tiers of my replication architecture. This time around, I changed the way my stress test harness works. In the past, my goal has always been to see how many Subscribers I could connect to the system at the same time. With the new test, I'm stressing the system to a much greater degree with my software to push the envelope in regards to how many table row changes I can make per hour.
With an eye towards the stress testing system that has helped give iAnywhere's ASA database and MobiLink replication server a dominant market position, I built a similar test where the amount of data in each row changed is exactly 116 bytes each time. I think the iAnywhere stress test used 92 byte rows. I used 3 servers to create client load, 3 load-balanced IIS servers, and a separate SQL Server Distributor and Publisher. The results I got from my test harness performing 23,330 syncs per hour are nothing short of spectacular:
- Rows changed: 7,000,000 per hour | 168,000,000 per day
- Data replicated: 812 MB per hour | 19.4 GB per day
Now check out how the IIS and SQL Servers where just chilling out throughout this test:
- IIS1: CPU: 5% | Mem: 216 MB | Network Utilization: .44%
- IIS2: CPU: 7% | Mem: 147 MB | Network Utilization: .13%
- IIS3: CPU: 8% | Mem: 170 MB | Network Utilization: .42%
- SQL Distributor: CPU: 5% | Mem: 2.15 GB | Network Utilization: .58%
- SQL Publisher: CPU: 17% | Mem: 4.25 GB | Network Utilization: 1%
Not bad! Thanks to Loke Uei, we were also able to give away 300 copies of my new book that walks you through the construction of this scalable mobile merge replication system. Lots of Windows Mobile developers and IT Pros are now empowered to "mobilize" their organization's data out to mobile field personnel. Just as important, they can take the proof back to their respective organizations that this technology is build to perform and scale!
I'm just getting started with this new test harness. Come to the Windows Mobile Partner Summit in December to see me push this system even further and break new replication records!
- Rob
- Mobile 2.0
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The second annual Mobile 2.0 just wrapped up. The key takeaways are:
- Mobile Web (iPhone Safari Webkit sets the standard)
- Mobile Advertising (4 out of 10 Japanese click on mobile ads)
- SMS (Dominant and growing messaging technology but still underutilized by mobile apps)
- iPhone (Shape of things to come and raises the bar for all other handsets)
- Mobile Social Networks (Perfect for personal nature of phones)
- U.S. is out of touch on mobile data due to cheap flat rate pricing
- Speech/Audio (unexploited technology)
- Flat data roaming prices needed
The words "Microsoft" and "Windows Mobile" were never uttered at this conference which I find strange based on the tens of millions of devices we have in the marketplace. If I based my view of the mobile landscape on this conference, I would believe that people only carried iPhones and Nokia Nseries devices. One of the speaker panels pushed the notion that truly rich and innovative apps can't be acheived until mobile Linux with open APIs takes hold of the mobile OS marketplace (I guess the Yahoo! guy on the panel hasn't seen his own company's Yahoo! Go application for Windows Mobile yet). While we wait for that to happen, speakers at the conference conveyed that the primary form of mobile app development was web-based (I guess the offline strategy was just a fad). Questions about mobility in the enterprise went largely unanswered. For the most part, the only kind of mobile apps people talked about were for social networking. I wonder how many social networking apps we need?
I often felt like I was in an alternate mobile universe. I came down to San Francisco to avail myself of differing mobile viewpoints than I might have by working for the Windows Mobile product group. I've learned a few things and plan to reach out to this mobile community to better educate them about what Windows Mobile brings to the table.
Rob.
- Chapter 1: Getting Started with Merge Replication
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The non-linear fashion by which I've been writing this book reminds me of the way Pulp Fiction jumps around. Chapter 1 is ready to go so you can get started with Merge Replication for Windows Mobile devices. In addition to obvious technology walkthroughs, I also decided to add a bunch of scenarios that illustrate how mobile data synchronization can add tangible business value to existing endeavors.
The book is called "Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1" and it's being published by Hood Canal Press. Click on Chapter1.pdf below to download Chapter 1 on getting started with Merge Replication.