Cook Computing

I just tried to install the del.icio.us Firefox extension onto a Firefox 1.5 installation. A message bar appeared saying "To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (del.icio.us) from installing software on your computer". The Firefox extension page at del.icio.us instructs you to click on the accompanying Edit Options button and change the configuration to allow installation of extensions. But you can't do this in Firefox 1.5 because the option is no longer there.

The solution is to edit the Firefox configuration manually. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit Enter. Find the xpinstall.enabled setting, which should be false if the above problem is occurring, and double click on it to set it to true. I think you then need to restart the browser.

Tim Sneath has posted about an MSDN evening event on Windows Presentation Foundation at Microsoft Reading 15th February. I'll be working in the office in West London that week so I've signed up for it. Registration is free and the details are here.

I'm moving the index.xml feed for this blog from RSS 0.91 to RSS 2.0 so I apologise if that results in any problems with your aggregator. I've also changed the layout of the blog, including a move to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. There are some posts which are not valid yet so these may appear as new posts when I fix them.

Via the Microsoft Team RSS Blog news that the Simple Sharing Extensions spec has been updated. The post mentions that an issue I raised relating to replication of heirachical items, in this post to the FEED-TECH mailing list, has been addressed.

Driving home to Yorkshire last Thurday night I listened to In Business on BBC Radio 4. The program was titled "Down with Hierachies", available for download until Thursday, and was about how companies could become more effective by getting rid of corporate hierachies. Not the best edition of the program - it came across a bit like a cut and paste job of material from old programs - but I was amused by an example of how non-technical people can see operating systems when the discussion came round to Microsoft. Ricardo Semler, well known for advocating radically different company structures, got onto the subject of new companies in Silicon valley and said that even they adopt the traditional ways of doing things. Peter Day commented that:

You see that very vividly at Microsoft which is as old-fashioned an organisation from the organisational side of things as its possible to imagine.

Semler added:

...you bought Windows 95, then you bought Windows 2000, then you say it took 20,000 of the smartest people in the world five years to make the difference between that program and this program, and the basic changes are silly, then essentially you realize that once these things are in place they learn how to live the old organisational way and once they do that no innovation comes any more from them.

I somehow don't think Ricardo Semler will be very impressed with Vista and the time it will have taken to get to market, even though there are many good new features.

I've just installed VS2005 on the December CTP version of Vista. The installation from DVD failed with an error relating to the "Suite Integration Toolkit". I copied the installation files from the DVD to the local disk and installed from there successfully.

Yaniv Pessach is asking for exotic WCF[1] channel ideas to follow on from his Carrier Pigeon channel. I'd like to suggest a mailboat channel. Even slower and less reliable than pigeons but also based on a tried and tested technology.

A St Kilda mailboat is a wooden 'boat', containing a letter, usually sealed in a cocoa tin. A sheep's bladder acts as a float. The first mailboat was sent out as a distress signal in time of famine by John Sands, a journalist, who was stranded on St Kilda during winter of 1876. It was later used by St Kildans as a tourist gimmick.

Mailboats are now sent by St Kilda work parties as part of the ritual of visiting St Kilda. They are carried by the Gulf Stream and usually reach land in Scotland or Scandinavia. Records of mailboats, and where they were washed up, are published in the St Kilda Mail.

A recent mailboat sent with greetings to the new Scottish Parliament arrived within a few weeks!

[1] WCF = Windows Communication Foundation

Via Mike Taulty I came across an article by Richard Grimes - Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn and Vista - which puts my posts earlier this week about Windows DVD Maker into context. I've not been following the Longhorn/Vista saga too closely - its dragged on for far too long to remain interesting - so I was surprised by the extent to which .NET has been downplayed in Vista, at least according to Richard's analysis. I remember reading that WinFX was going to be a new managed sub-system alongside Win32, not on top of it, and that much of Longhorn/Vista was going to be built on top of this, but I must have missed a lot of news since then if Richard's conclusions are correct:

Finally, there is the issue of WinFX. Initially, this was called the Longhorn API (LAPI) and it was intended to be the foundation of all the applications in Longhorn. Microsoft have retreated significantly from this position. WinFX was not provided as part of any of the builds of Vista, so the clear implication is that Microsoft intends to develop Vista with native code (and possibly with a little bit of .NET through the framework library) and not to use WinFX at all. I cannot stress how significant this retreat is. Microsoft have so little confidence in their own application framework that they will not use it even in their own managed applications.

My conclusion is that Microsoft has lost its confidence in .NET. They implement very little of their own code using .NET. The framework is provided as part of the operating system, but this is so that code written by third party developers can run on Vista without the large download of the framework. Supplying the .NET runtime for third party developers in this way is similar to Microsoft supplying msvbvm60.dll as part of XP.

Richard links to a Microsoft Watch article - The 'Dirty Secret' About Longhorn - which has anonymous developer source #1 saying:

The original plan for Longhorn was to build lots of components on top of the next version of the .Net Framework," according to one of our developer sources, who requested anonymity. "But given how late (.Net Framework 2.0) is, and how new it would be (Microsoft Chairman) Bill Gates realized it would be foolish to build important pieces of Longhorn on top of .Net.

Joel Spolsky, not known to be a.NET enthusiast, is quoted as saying:

From the rumors I've heard, the Longhorn project has disentangled themselves from .Net, so core operating system functionality will no longer require the .Net framework, which is a good thing: It's clearly not mature enough for implementing operating systems quite yet.

And finally anonymous developer source #2

Everything in Longhorn was supposed to be written in C# and to be managed code. But managed code was going to require machines that weren't going to be available for five years or more. So now Microsoft is rewriting everything in Longhorn.

Presumably when Richard says "They implement very little of their own code using .NET. " he is talking about Vista. From a wider point of view Microsoft does seem to be using .NET, as seen by this list of managed code Microsoft apps that Dare Obasanjo quoted from Dan Fernandez:

The Microsoft's not using Managed Code Myth

One of the biggest challenges in my old job was that customers didn't think Microsoft was using managed code. Well, the truth is that we have a good amount of managed code in the three years that the .NET Framework has been released including operating systems, client tools, Web properties, and Intranet applications. For those of you that refuse to believe, here's an estimate of the lines of managed code in Microsoft applications that I got permission to blog about:

• Visual Studio 2005: 7.5 million lines
• SQL Server 2005: 3 million lines
• BizTalk Server: 2 million lines
• Visual Studio Team System: 1.7 million lines
• Windows Presentation Foundation: 900K lines
• Windows Sharepoint Services: 750K lines
• Expression Interactive Designer: 250K lines
• Sharepoint Portal Server: 200K lines
• Content Management Server: 100K lines

However the fact that .NET has apparently such a small role to play in Vista itself does suggest a loss of confidence in .NET, or problems encountered with its usage, or different opinions about .NET within its various development groups.

It seems to me that a Dave Winer specification is often seen an invitation to free-for-all improvisation rather than a definition of how a protocol should be implemented. Dave and Sam Ruby have posted about the photocasting feed format that Apple introduced this week, pointing out its not valid RSS 2.0. Similarly over the years working on XML-RPC.NET I've seen many incorrect implementations of XML-RPC. For example, in XML-RPC an integer value can be either an <i4> or an <int> element; I recently came across a server which would only accept <int>. There are two ways of including string values; I've seen several cases where an implementation would only accept one of them. <fault> structs contain a <faultCode> member with an integer value; another implementation decides that this should be a string value. Maybe its the informal style of the specifications which lure people into thinking that they don't have to pay attention to what the document says. This and the areas of vagueness in these specifications have convinced me of the need for very precise formal specification if you're going to avoid a lot of wasted time fixing problems caused by incompatibility.

Dare Obasanjo picked up on my post yesterday about Windows DVD Maker not being written in managed code. I agree with him:

I find it surprising that people continue to think that we don't use managed code at Microsoft.

That wasn't my point. Four years after .NET 1.0 was released why has a fairly small scale app aimed at end-users been written in unmanaged code? This app has UI and Vista has a new set of APIs for UI, Windows Presentation Foundation. Maybe its unfair to pick on DVD Maker but this would have been an opportunity, one of possibly many, to demonstrate not only what you can do with WPF but more fundamentally that good end-user applications can be written in .NET. Many people believe that .NET is not suitable for this type of application and a new unmanaged app like this gives them more ammunition.

Last week Eric Gunnerson mentioned that he has been working on an application for Vista: Windows DVD Maker. Yesterday he posted a FAQ for the application. The answer to question 4 was disappointing:

4: Is DVD Maker written in managed code?

A: No. Yes, it is ironic that I spent so much time on C# and then spent a ton of time writing something in C++ code. Everybody on the team is a believer in managed code, and we hope we'll be able to use it for future projects.

Given that there is a whole new set of APIs in Vista for writing managed applications - Avalon, WinFX, etc - why has a new self-contained app like this been written in unmanaged C++? Actually writing real applications, instead of just samples, with the new managed APIs would be far more convincing than any amount of hype from Robert Scoble.