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.

I like those guys.  They are smart and do excellent work.

Anyway, they released the sample earlier today.  From their site:

As of version 1.5 (which is currently in beta), the world’s coolest spreadsheet can use Digipede Network grid computing to distribute and execute workbooks in parallel. The example on the Exchange is based on the excellent IronPython sample created by Robert W. Anderson of Digipede. The Digipede Network is a brilliant way to get distributed, parallel computation on Windows. It only took a few minor changes to convert Resolver One to run on the Digipede Network and to get the IronPython sample to execute Resolver One workbooks.

Giles gives some more background to the path that got us here on his recent post, Resolver One and Digipede.

The combination of our two products offers a pretty elegant solution.  Like I said before,

Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .

. . . like Excel and Windows HPC Server.  No, don’t. Trust me.  It is really hard, complex, and brittle.

I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.

The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.

I am making this statement for completeness.

They used my IronPython Worker sample and customized the front-end Python code, leaving the C# adapter as-is.  With very little coding they had an elegant grid-enabled spreadsheet.  Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .

Giles said they will have support for this in Resolver One 1.5, coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Very cool. 

I’ve just installed Resolver One to take a closer look.  Already I’m impressed, but I’ll leave that for a future post.

Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.

This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon.  In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7.  The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.

That is the wrong approach.

The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit.  The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows. 

Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case.  The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.

BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.

Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR.  According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).

Google:  when are you going to put the effort into this?  The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.

Rob Chambers: how easy is this really?  You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.

So now, I’m using IE8.  Google Docs with WSR works great there.