In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Nothing in the release mentions the browser.  In fact the part that says “apps do not download any code” seems to imply not allowing RIA at all.  This part is a bigger pain point for users.

But if the Silverlight runtime (full .NET?) or Flash can be used to built full applications, that is pretty cool.

904 days ago I posted Counting the days till Silverlight announced for iPhone.  That sure was more than I expected, but how many more days now?

Mike Arrington says Google Voice Is A Hot Mess Right Now:

About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt.

He goes on to say that sources tell him there won’t be a quick fix to the problem.  Like I said, I’m not having any of these problems, but Google has sold me on the value of such a service – I would even pay for it!

So if this becomes a problem, I’ll probably jump over to Ribbit.  They actually are a telephone company.

Anyway, this new Google feature was enabled on my account yesterday.  While it holds some promise for me once GV is moved into GAFD, it has too many caveats today.  Why?

Because the in-browser VOIP phone is a flawed premise for receiving calls:

• Hunting for the incoming call dialog within a browser tab is a terrible user experience.  Perhaps they can fix this through an extension that allows a non-modal, “always on top” popup for notification of incoming calls. 
• What if your browser stops working, is restarted, etc?  You don’t get your phone call.  Of course, you can say the same thing for the Skype client (i.e., if it isn’t running you don’t get your call), but I restart my browsers several times a day.  And browsers crash a lot more than Skype (or Google Talk), for that matter. 

Google really should resuscitate the Google Talk client – or the Google Voice Desktop App – and enable the same functionality there.  In fact, I’ll go further and say that they will have to release a native Windows client if they want enterprise adoption of GV / VOIP.

Granted, the in-browser premise is great for the casual user, making outgoing calls, or as a backup when away from your actual work environment, but it just doesn’t work as a Skype replacement.

Does anyone know if the the GV Desktop App is actually dead?  The last reference I find to it is the Arrington post: Google Voice Desktop App Launch Delayed, May Be Scrapped.

PDC’s are quite valuable to attend (access to Microsoft product teams, exposure to their roadmap, opportunity for light-bulb” moments, etc).  That said, I may decide not to go after the session list is released – a simple balancing of priorities.

Anyway, I’ll likely keep my registration – I would actually love it if Microsoft could change my plans about Azure this October.

Are you going? Or not? If so, please share your reasons.

I was never particularly interested in doing it.  Even though I have been frustrated with the unnecessary limitations of the iPhone imposed by Apple/Jobs.  I know this surprises people who know me – they’ve told me so.  Why haven’t I?  Because over time I have transformed form a gadget-happy tinkerer to someone who just wants these tools to work.

This is in-part due to my experiences with a particular kind of tool: the smart phone.  On Windows Mobile and BB smart phones, I would try 3rd-party software and then quickly delete after crashes and negative battery performance.  I’ve had few similar experiences like that with the iPhone.  The 3rd-party tools add significant utility to the phone but generally don’t break it.  This change in my thinking isn’t just for phones:  I’m shipping back my PopBox today.  Lots of promise, but it just doesn’t work for me with my video formats, and my NAS. 

But I digress.

There are a few things that have bothered me about the iPhone.  None of these are hardware problems, just things I think it should be possible to do with a non-jailbroken phone:

• I don’t want to unlock my phone to see if I have any email. 
• I want notification profile support like on the Blackberry.  I loved the feature where you can put your phone into the silent profile and have exceptions.  Travelling and don’t want your phone to wake you up, but want to accept calls from your family in case of emergency?  No problem.
• I don’t want to navigate around to change a simple setting (like turning off Bluetooth or WiFi).
• I want to use a Google Voice native app.  The mobile Web app is quite good, but it takes too many steps to make a call – and too much time waiting for the page to load. 

Long story short, I now can do all of these things and I am much happier about my phone. 

The full story, though is that I jailbroke before a week of vacation during which I had no way of restoring my phone.  As a result, I kind of screwed it up and didn’t feel like risking uninstalling some apps without a failsafe.  I got home and fixed it (without the failsafe).  All good, but it does leave me feeling that jailbreaking really isn’t for everyone.  As easy as the jailbreakme.com site is, it certainly makes the phone more complex.  I’m OK with the increased complexity – I’m still a gadget-happy tinkerer deep down – but I couldn’t imagine a non-techie dealing with it.

1. The entire event we will be about how users are wrong – that is, there is no problem if you just hold the phone correctly.
2. A dizzying array of evidence will be presented concluding that the iPhone 4 has the best antenna of anything ever.  And that users are wrong.
3. There will be a direct attack on Consumer Reports for their apparent flip-flop and the validity of their tests will be questioned.  After all, the Consumer Reports testers are users and, well users are wrong.  
4. Apple will provide a free bumper to those who request one, but it will be clear that only quitters and the non-worthy actually need one.
5. No recall will be issued; however, a design change is certainly in the works and that won’t be mentioned at all.

I can sum this up as follows:

The Apple response will be that there is no actual problem aside from user error.  Or as I’ve said to a few people, the real problem is that some iPhone users have left hands and they insist on using them.

• The intrepid John Powers dives into it more in his post, Digipede Network 2.4 — Beyond the Press Release.
• Also, Michael Feldman of HPCwire wrote about the release here Digipede Sticks to Its Grid Computing Roots. 
• The press release (this is a link to the PDF).

Those paying close attention might ask "what happened to 2.3?"  The answer is Digipede trivia.

• Part of a failed experimental branch? No. 
• Is 2.4 actually numbered 2.3.1 under the covers? No. (A minor dig at Windows 6 R2).

The actual reason dates back to the days when .NET 2 was released.  Back then, we were ready to release Digipede Network 1.1 with .NET 2 support.  To avoid naming confusion with .NET 1.1, we decided to skip the “.1” and went straight to “.2”.  Was it in fact less confusing?  Probably not materialy.

So, why no 2.3?  It is an ever so slight (and obscure) homage to those early days: for .NET 4 we decided to release something that ends in “.4”. 

Like I said: trivia.

I was helping my Dad with a piece of hardware that just doesn’t work with Windows 7.  The manufacturer’s instructions say that it will work if you turn of UAC, but it doesn’t.  I had just about given up, and then remembered that Virtual PC is supposed to have better USB support.  I really didn’t believe it would work, but had nothing to lose.  After much downloading, installing, a little rebooting, and more installing, I was able to attach this USB device to an XP Mode VM.  The corresponding software also launches correctly on the Windows 7 x64 desktop. 

It even performs well.  All cool.

The only annoying part of it is that I can’t figure out how to stop the running VM instance without opening the VM and then closing it.  The VM gets started automatically when running the XP Mode application, but there is no simple way to stop it.  I suppose that XP mode is designed for people who run it all the time, but really, no clean way to stop it?

I agree, but it doesn’t work.

At least not with compound words.  If you are authoring a reusable class library, you are bound to have compound words in literal strings.  Do yourself a favor and turn off the warning.

I had to search around to get this acknowledged, and finally found it on Microsoft Connect here. 

http://www.demo.com/fourthcoffee/entities/1

First thought, isn’t the demo.com domain owned by the DEMO conference? 

Uh, yup.

Not a good idea to use a “random” URI for namespaces.

The content for the class looks pretty good, but I’m surprised that neither Ron Jacobs nor Zoiner Tejada caught the problem namespace. 

Certainly contract-first is not the only way to build services, but it is if you are implementing a published standard.  Maybe there is some way to tinker around with the output of the tools sets to make a Workflow Service compatible with some existing WSDL, but would it be worth it?

One answer might be to put a pure WCF facade over the Workflow Services.  Kind of a headache, but maybe workable.

This makes me think that .NET 4 Workflow Services are really targeted to be internal to the enterprise or at least where contract definition is flexible and controlled by one entity.

This follows a standard Microsoft pattern: help the enterprise dev in V1 and then expand from there.  This strategy makes sense, I just want it all in VS 2010, not in V.next.

It is markedly slower than Virtual PC 2007. And startup times are six to ten times worse.  Same host, same VHD.  Painfully slow.

I have witnessed this on three different host machines.  I’ve seen other complaints of this online, but all of the suggestions of help completely miss the point.

There are some threads that suggest that it is caused by aggressive CPU throttling.  In a comment on a post, Virtual PC guy suggested that installing SETI@Home might solve the problem.  Seriously?

Virtual PC 2007 didn’t suffer from this problem, so I’m not going to bother with that.  It would be great if I could find confirmation that either:

• Microsoft decided that Windows Virtual PC needn’t support laptops.
• There is a new bug or major flaw in Windows Virtual PC that is going to be fixed.

I have rolled back to Virtual PC 2007.  I shouldn’t really care, except that I prefer the integration in Windows Virtual PC.  I suppose I should move onto VMWare, but I really don’t want to hassle with this anymore.  It works well enough for now.

Microsoft, are you acknowledging the problem?  Perhaps you can blame it on the laptop vendors, but the customer experience is just terrible.

BTW: I recorded a video of starting a Windows 7 guest using Windows Virtual PC, but a 3 minute video of a crawling progress bar seemed intolerable.

• 1% battery life.  If Apple is willing to cripple the phone with no background applications to save battery, then I can believe that disallowing Flash supports this same cause.
• 1% of this is that Flash is “lame” or proprietary or any of that nonsense.
• 98% of this about the App store.  Apps delivered through the browser can’t be monetized (and to a lesser extent controlled) through the App store.  If Flash was enabled on the iPhone anybody could write apps for the iPhone without Apple’s permission. 

That’s it.

The iPhone is as open as is useful to Apple.  I’ll bet that if they could get away with shutting off Javascript on the iPhone they would do that too.  Of course, that would also cause an enormous uproar, so they won’t.  Javascript in the browser is the leak in the App store.  Their only defense is to make their browser lame (or be slow to adopt new standards). 

One thing that backs up my point about the App store is that neither the Flash nor Silverlight runtime is actually banned from the iPhone.  You just have to build it into an iPhone application for the App store and you are in business.  Miguel de Icaza and his excellent team proved that last year (with Mono anyway) as has Adobe with Flash.

What do I think about this?  I find it irksome to say the least, but I didn’t buy the iPhone thinking it was anything but a closed platform, controlled by someone who thinks they know best.  I’m OK with that for now – the phone works pretty well.  Eventually something will work just as well without the restrictions. 

And then I’ll jump ship.

• Hosting HTML
• Context menus
• WCF and REST enhancements
• Support for RIA Services
• Drag & Drop
• Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
• Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4

Lot of other things too.  I’m excited to start using this.  Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.

Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.

He did announce they are giving away laptops to all attendees, though, so I suppose it was worth it. 

• Model-first development.
• Lazy loading through relationships (i.e., no longer have to call Load)
• POCO (i.e., define your own data classes against a model).
• POCO only (i.e., define the model fully in code).
• Code Generation options using the new T4 facility of VS 2010.
• Testability improvements through IObjectSet
• Can override SaveChanges
• Better disconnected workflow (both by writing a little code and a no-code option that uses a different code generator).
• Much better SQL (more compact, more efficient)
• Execute arbitrary SQL
• Easier Stored Procedures
• Functions (a little strange how this was implemented, but now they are available).
• Foreign Keys in the entities (no more manual interpretation of the Reference!)
• Better Binding for forms apps and WPF

Pandelis, what do you think?

It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner. 

This last point is an important one.  Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud.  While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit. 

The offering was rich then, but since then Microsoft has continued to push these offerings forward dramatically. 

At the time, my biggest concerns were the one-size-fits-all approach to their provisioning model and their lack of full trust (two things that could make it harder to deploy the Digipede Network onto Azure).  Today those issues have been taken off the table and help support many more use cases, opening up Azure even more to non-Microsoft technologies and fortifying the extremely important IT bridge.

So what are the improvements in openness?

Allowing full trust opens up the door to, well anything.  Unmanaged code,  PHP, MySQL, Java, TomCat, etc. can all run on Azure.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic demonstrated a WordPress instance running that way.  Kind of anti-climactic, because it would have been a big deal if wordpress.com was moving to Azure.  Simply running a WordPress instance isn’t really that interesting.

Custom VM images are also coming to Azure which will make it much easier to put whatever you want on a VM and deploy it efficiently.

For IT?

Too many items here to enumerate.  SQL Azure integrating into SSMS; Azure integrating into MOM; SQL synchronizing with cloud instances; (this list really does go on and on . . .).

Another important part of this IT bridge?  Not Microsoft’s new App Server, AppFabric.  Though I am excited about this – it is something that has been missing from the Microsoft stack – the key point here is that it runs on premises and in Azure.

Conclusion?

These new features in Azure push Microsoft out even further than the other cloud vendors.  No one else has the depth and breadth in tool support and service offerings.  No one else is innovating so quickly on so many parallel fronts. 

Will Amazon and Google cede the space?  Of course not, but I think they’ll need  to reposition their cloud brands.

I’m going to PDC 2009 November 17th – 19th. 

Aside from releasing Azure, I expect it will be mostly about VS 2010.  I’m sure there will be a “reveal” or two to get excited about too.  At least I hope so.

The best part of conferences is meeting new people and catching up with friends and colleagues.

If you are going too and want to meet up, let me know. 

email me: robert at rwandering dot net.

GAFD is pretty cool.  It allows you to put many services (i.e., mail, calendar, docs, sites, chat) behind your own domain.  Other Google services don’t exactly fit this model, and so they aren’t supported.  For example while App Engine does allow you to use your own domain, you probably don’t need to host your App Engine development portal from within your domain.  Not too big a deal.

But for the services that use your contact list (e.g., Voice, Wave, and Reader), I really don’t want to use my GMail address and certainly not the contacts list I have there.

I am at a loss to understand why Google doesn’t have a corporate policy that products must support GAFD.  Isn’t GAFD an important part of Google’s business model?  Obviously not as important as trying to sell us things we don’t want, but certainly strategic against Microsoft.

What gives?

First some background.  There are two Beatles box sets (i.e., The Beatles Stereo Box Set and The Beatles Mono Box Set).  One contains the stereo mixes, and the other the mono.  Several people have asked me why I would want the mono recordings.  The mono mixes are interesting because they were the top priority back when these recordings were originally released.  Great care was taken to get these mono mixes right.  The stereo mixes took a backseat.  They got less attention, and the Beatles / George Martin weren’t always directly involved.  So does this only matter to audiophiles?  I don’t think so.  In many cases, the stereo mixes involve different source tracks – e.g., the vocal or guitar are just different.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the mono set is way nicer than the stereo one.  Remember though, these are non-audio opinions – I’ll post those later. 

Stereo Set

I first opened the stereo set and was struck by a few things:

1. The whole box is inside of a paper sleeve that looks just like the box.  My first thought was “am I supposed to put it back in that sleeve or throw the sleeve in the recycling?”  I’d rather there were no sleeve.
2. Inside the box, the discs are stacked in two piles.  You can’t get any but the top one out without pulling out the whole stack.  Kind of lame.
3. Each disc is in its own shrink-wrap.  Why?
4. The covers have a white stripe and the Apple / The Beatles logo on them.
5. No extra book, though there is a documentary disc.
6. No Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet (though included as a page in the booklet).

All in all, I’m thinking they should have done better. 

Mono Set

1. The sleeve is sturdy cardboard and slides off of the inner box.
2. Once the sleeve is off, all of the discs’ spines are available to pull out the one you want.
3. Each disc is in its own resealable wrapper. 
4. The covers are replicas of the original releases.  No superfluous Apple logos on pre-Apple records.
5. A nice book that talks about the mono recordings and goes into details on the “Mono Masters” disc that is included.
6. The Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet.

Simple, yes, but much nicer than the Stereo.

That is as much of a pre-announcement as I can make . . . vague and conditional as it is.

Instead of going to the IIW yesterday, I got pulled into a meeting to help work through some client issues.  The actual problems were completely tangential to my role on the project, but given my background I was happy to help. 

That morning meeting became contentious.  After the fifth time of hearing the same inadequate solution with a dose of attitude . . . well . . . I don’t cotton to that.

Kind of a mess, really.  I wouldn’t have done it at all except that I was helping out a friend.

And now, off to the IIW 2009A, day 2.

It runs Monday, May 18th through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I’m a bit overbooked this week.  The song remains the same.  I’ll be there as much as I can and at the dinner Monday night at the Tied House.

If you want to meet up, contact me at robert at rwandering dot net or use the form at =rwandering.

I’ll post more on this later . . . as time permits.