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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:27:00 -1300

Today Microsoft introduced beta 2 of their next update to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. As a Microsoft Regional Director and Visual Studio Team System influential, I have used and tested this future version for a while. It’s represents the first major upgrade to the Visual Studio suite since Visual Studio .NET was upgraded from Visual Studio 6.

That’s not the only news today, the official launch date for the final product is announced and will take place on March 22nd, 2010!

What I mean with first major upgrade in a while, is that previous updates (2003, 2005, 2008) have been incremental updates to the first IDE and framework. 2010 comes with a completely new IDE which is built on Windows Presentation Foundation, and there’s a new version of the framework which has some big upgrades as well.

Download now and try it out for yourself!

View screenshots to see what it’s all about!

License and Pricing

In other news today, there are some major changes to the licensing and pricing model for Visual Studio and MSDN. This is something I have worked for, getting Microsoft to understand and realize how problematic the existing SKU licensing is. It’s been hard for business’ to understand which version to actually buy and there has been an artificial limitation on features for a specific role. Many of us fill multiple roles in a project, so the functional differences and limitation has been hurtful for those not willing or able to upgrade to the full Visual Studio Team Suite. It has not been a simple task to convince anyone the premium upgrade to Team Suite, if all you need is additional tester or architect functionality that you normally don’t use on a daily basis.

Good news for all of us, this is changing!

The biggest change is a streamlined upgrade path for developers and reduction of the total numbers of SKUs. Existing Team Edition licenses will be upgraded to the Visual Studio Ultimate, which previously is the same as Visual Studio Team Suite. All existing license levels are upgraded towards something better than before.

Going forward, there will be three main versions of Visual Studio 2010:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium is a complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional is the essential tool for basic development tasks to allow developers to implement their ideas easily.

For more information on the new packaging, licensing, and pricing of Visual Studio 2010, visit this site.

MSDN Developer Center

Last but not least, there is a full redesign of the MSDN Developer Centers. The new design is easier and more logical than the previous and it integrates content from many sources very seamlessly.

Go check it out!

Going forward I will be blogging more about Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 and how these three products represents a great new upgrade for Microsoft developers. Here is a screenshot from the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 Web Installer, there are plenty more on this Flickr photo set.

Hyper-V: Making Template Virtual Machines

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:16:47 -1300

Using Windows 7 and Windows Virtual PC has it's benefits. It's useful for managing a few virtual machines and you get decent graphical quality on the virtualized machines (Windows Aero Desktop). The biggest issues with Windows Virtual PC, is the fact that it cannot virtualize 64-bit OS. That means if you need to test Windows Server 2008 R2, you can't virtualize it with Microsoft's products but have to turn to third parties. If your need for virtualization is a bit more demanding, you can step it up with Hyper-V, which of course supports 64-bit virtualized OS. Hyper-V is only available with Windows Server 2008 and upwards.

Let me tell you how I have configured and setup my own virtual machine templates using the latest Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.

Base Virtual Machine

The first thing to do is create a couple or more virtual machines where you run a normal installation of any OS you need. I made myself two different machines, one with Windows 7 and another with Windows Server 2008 R2.

I won't go into details on how you setup a new virtual machine with Hyper-V, you just go through the wizards to create a new machine and you choose which boot device you want to use (physical DVD, ISO file, network share).

When the machine is fully installed and you're on the desktop, make sure you patch the OS fully. You can additionally install anti virus or other software if needed. Additionally you might want to install the Integration Services, if you are using other OS than Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.

Both of those comes with Integration Services pre-installed. Avoid everything that you don't want to have on every new machine.

Step #1: Shut down your machine and make a backup copy of the VHD. This is useful when you in the future want to re-create the base template. Do this copy before you run sysprep.

Step #2: Boot the machine (not the copy you just made) and run sysprep. Sysprep is now included with the latest versions of Windows, you will find it under C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SYSPREP\SYSPREP.EXE.

Step #3: Configure sysprep to do an OOBE, make sure you check the Generalize button or else it will not create a new SSID. Choose Shutdown in the Shutdown Options.

Step #4: Copy your VHD once again, this time you are making copies of all the new machines you want to create. My advise is to make the finished sysprep image read-only, so you won't boot and destroy the finished base template.

Creating Virtual Machine From Base Template

Now it's time to create new virtual machines that will use the sysprepped VHD copies we have made. I created multiple copies of the server that I will use for development and testing. One of them is for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, one for SharePoint 2010, another for Team Foundation Server 2010 and a bunch of others, even one for Ubuntu Linux.

Create a new virtual machine using the wizard as you've done before, only that this time you'll choose to use an existing virtual hard disk.

Start the newly created virtual machine and your new machine will start and ask you a few standard questions like machine name. After a few minutes, you should have a completely new machine that is distinct from the base template, it does not share the same SSID or network MAC address.

Final Notes

I was amazed how simple and easy it has become to make your own template machines, with both Integration Services and SYSPREP now pre-installed with the OS (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). This makes the management, testing and development with various instances of the OS much easier than it ever has been.

Visual Studio Galore

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:31:00 -1300

Today I want to introduce you to a wide range of extensions and additions to Visual Studio. Lots of developers are not aware of the potential of your existing .NET skills and experience and how you can utilize them across multiple devices, form factors and platforms. This is an introduction to some of the add-ons you can get, there are even more available but these are the high level packages that gives you a lot of value.

Taking a look at how Microsoft enters various vertical markets for developers, you’ll quickly realize that they often come into new areas that have previously had problems with the tooling, integration and skills required to enter those markets. This walkthrough will show you how they not only delivers the tools you need, but deep reference material, communities and a market for third party extensions.

I will provide you with links for downloads and a quick get started introduction to get you familiar with the tools.

Visual Studio for free

For those of you who do not have Visual Studio yet, I’ll just quickly introduce you to the free express versions of Visual Studio. These are feature limited versions of Visual Studio, that you often can use with the packages mentioned below.

There is additionally trial versions of Visual Studio Professional available and beta versions of the coming Visual Studio 2010.

Downloads is available here. To continue, you should at least get Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

Games Development

Probably one of the coolest packages for Visual Studio is the XNA Game Studio. This allows you to write DirectX applications and games running on Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune Media Players. With your existing C# skills you can write graphic intensive applications easily.

Games development have traditionally been a special field that require deep knowledge of performance and hardware optimization. Microsoft saw a potential to make a more seamless and integrated tool package for games developers. This is often how Microsoft works and makes products, as mentioned in the introduction, the same idea of an integrated package applies to other things such as Robotics Studio, which we will look at further down.

Community: Part of the XNA Game Studio is the Creators Club Online, which is a community club of games developers where you get access to samples, starter kits, forum and more. You can pay for a membership that gives you access to deploy your applications to your Xbox 360.

There are 3 different developer sites for games development, you have the XNA Creators Club Online, Xbox 360 (professionals) and DirectX (professional Windows).

Downloads

Make sure you have latest version of DirectX and Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1. Make sure you check out the Role Playing Game Starter Kit.

Get Started

Quickest way to get started is with the included Platformer Starter Kit. When you create this project, you’re going to get 3 projects included in the solution, a copy of the same game for Windows, Xbox and Zune!

This is a great starting point for hacking around with the sample source code to learn some of the more advanced concepts of XNA programming. Make sure you check the links above to find more tutorials and documentation.

Cloud Development

You might have heard about Cloud Computing before, it’s the new paradigm for hosting data and running computation seamlessly on the Internet. You can buy a small amount of money to rent computer hours, avoiding expensive investments in your own hardware, configuration and setup. The biggest players in the Cloud Computing space today is Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft’s alternative is Windows Azure, which is a platform of various features and tools that you can utilize to your benefit. It consist of Windows Azure, the operating system in the cloud, SQL Azure, a relational database in the cloud, .NET Services which is web services for access control and communication.

Before you can get started, you need to sign up for an account here. When your account is ready, you can download the tools required to start developing, debugging and testing your cloud applications.

Downloads

Make sure you get the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit, which has a lot of good presentations, hands-on labs and more. Then you can get the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools. There are some configuration you need to do to make everything work, but there is a simple solution to getting everything setup and configured automatically for you, using the Web Platform Installer. This will download and install all required pieces you need to start developing cloud services.

Get Started

When everything is installed, you start by creating a new project in Visual Studio under the Cloud Service project type.

The next dialog allows you to add one or more roles to your service. These are independent applications that will run on your service, if you need background processing you could choose the Worker Role. To get started with a simple ASP.NET web site, choose the ASP.NET Web Role and add it to the right side using the arrow buttons.

You’ll get an empty ASP.NET web site created, make some changes and hit F5 to debug your application. Visual Studio will now startup all the azure-fabric services on your local machine. Debug startup takes a little longer than you’re normally used to.

Next step is publishing your first cloud service, choose the Publish… option from the project as shown above. This will compile your code, open your web browser and a explorer window. If this is your first time deploying, you need to create a new Azure Service for your project.

When the service is created, you should click the Upgrade… button on the details page. On this page, you should upload the two local files that Visual Studio has generated and opened for you.

After a while, your service should be installed and there will be a temporary URL you can test it on. When you are happy with the results, you can choose to move your new service into production.

Robotics Development

This is a very interesting field, it has traditionally been hard to get into the robotics and machine programming field. Tooling has often only been available for specific hardware platforms, and you had to change your software tools when you changed your hardware platform. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio tries to bring the abstraction level of hardware and machine programming one step higher.

With Microsoft RDS you can program a wide array of sensors and actuators connected to your computer. There is 3 versions available, Express for free, Academic for schools and Standard.

Check general information about Microsoft RDS and the development site for more in-depth information.

You can get started without buying any hardware, but I suggest purchasing some cheap devices that you can control from MSRDS. For example the Lego NXT robot, which you can use out of the box. It’s a lot more fun when your application code is actually moving around in the real world.

Downloads

Go and access the downloads at Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio site. The package includes everything you need, SDK, runtime, virtual simulation environment and more.

Get Started

After the installation, you’ll get a bunch of new stuff in the start menu. The first thing you should check out to get started is the Visual Programming Language.

Launch that application, then go into the Services and drag a “Data” and a “Text to Speech (TTS)” control onto the design surface. Set the Data control to string type and write a text, for example “Hello Robot”.

Next step is to drag the right arrow onto the Text to Speech box. This will display a dialog for Connections, choose the SayText option on the right. Next dialog will ask you which value the control should speak, choose the value under Value. Click OK, you have not successfully connected the Data control with the Text to Speech control.

Click F5 to run your robotics application!

Your computer should now speak to you through the computer speakers. Congratulations, you’ve just made your very first MSRDS application.

Next step would be to play around with the simulated environments, from the start menu you can launch a bunch of environments. For example an appartment, house, outdoors, sumo competition and even a full scale city.

Closing Notes

I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough of three possible ways of utilizing your .NET skills for new types of applications. More and more features has been packed into the Visual Studio package that previously was available as stand alone like the three examples above. Windows Phone development previously was a separate download but now comes out of the box. Office development has for a long time been included. We can probably expect more to be included in the future and I would expect Windows Azure to be a built in feature in the future.

What are you waiting for? Go on and make your dream game, which uses services in the cloud and is controlled using hardware input using Robotics Studio!

Windows 7: Sensor Platform

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 03:10:00 -1300

Part of Windows 7 is a completely new platform for Location and Sensors. This is a framework that tries to remove the old legacy of COM-ports for communication with external devices. Even a lot of today's USB devices, still rely on the COM protocol to communicate with the PC. The Location and Sensor Platform in Windows 7 improves this with a modern architecture for arbitrary hardware sensory input.

One of the most important advances in this platform is the ability for multiple applications to use the same sensors at the same time, this has always been some of a problem with GPS, where only one instance of the application could read the GPS coordinates.

The first use of this platform will probably with in the laptops, which already have ambient light sensor and sometimes 3D accelerometers built into them. When these devices starts appearing, you can extend the application you’re developing to benefit and utilize these new features.

Getting Started

Since Windows 7 was just released and it takes a while for hardware manufacturers to take use of the new software capabilities, you’re only option to learn the new platform APIs is to buy a development board like the one below.

The above board is a demo board from Freescale that I have connected to my desktop computer using a USB cable. Board has sensors for ambient light, 3D accelerometer and there are 8 touch buttons on the back. You can buy the device from here: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=JMBADGE&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false

Troubleshooting Driver Installation

When you first connect the board to your Windows 7 computer, it will recognize the device and install in the device manager. This does unfortunately not work, at least not if you’re running 64-bit version of Windows.

The sensory board will be installed as a HID-compliant device and does not appear in the Sensory Control Panel. The best way to find the Sensory Control Panel is to type “sensor” in the search field.

When a sensory device is installed it has to be enabled in this control panel, but without manually configuring the correct driver nothing will appear in the above control panel.

To enable the correct drivers for the board, you need to download the “Sensor Development Kit for Windows 7” from the Windows Sensor and Location Platforms on MSDN Code Gallery. Inside this file you will find a folder called Drivers and within that a folder called Binaries. Depending on your bit platform, you should choose the adm64 if you have a 64-bit version of Windows or the x86 if you have a 32-bit version. This is the location at which we will find the right driver for our device.

Going back to the Device Manager, right-click on the HID-compliant device and choose “Update Driver Software…”. Choose the second option in the dialog, the “Browse my computer…”. Pick the second option again, which says “Let me pick from a list…”. This is because we need to “force” Windows to accept a different driver.

In the select the device driver dialog, click the “Have disk…” button and locate the correct driver. Eg. C:\Users\Sondre\Downloads\Windows 7 SDKs\Sensor_Development_Kit\Driver\Binaries\amd64.

As you can see in this screenshot, the driver is not digitally signed so you will see a warning when you try to install this. Accept the warning and the device will be installed properly.

The device should now appear under a separate node called Sensors, if installed correctly.

Note: There is a more correct way of installing the device, though I’ve never successfully managed to do it on my computers. The process is to run the SensorKitDriverInstaller.exe that comes with the Development Kit BEFORE you connect the device to your computer.

Enabling Your Sensor Device

After a successful installation of your device board you can now enable it from the control panel.

By default, everyone has access to the device. Restricting access to the device can be done using the Change user settings.

That’s all to it, there are no other features for the sensor device in the control panel. There are some extra features for location devices such as GPS, which I’m not covering in this article.

Reading Sensory Input

Included with the SDK is a simple diagnostic tool (Tools\DiagnosticTool\Binaries\SensorDevKitDiagnosticApp.exe) which you can run to validate that everything is installed and configured correctly. Make sure this application works properly before you start programming against the device.

This application shows the current position of the board in a 3D space, how much light it’s seeing and whether any of the touch areas on the back are on, as you can see the bottom right is currently pressed.

SDK includes documentation, source and examples on how to do to different features with this new functionality, so I won’t cover everything in this post. Instead I will give a quick explanation on how you can start reading sensor data.

Programming Sensory Input

Create a new Visual Studio project, I called my project WhereAmI as the purpose of the application is to figure out if I’m sleeping, working or outside in the sun. Choose any type of project, I’m using Windows Forms for this example. The form will have nothing but two label controls, which will display a status message and the value.

When the project is created, right click on the solution and add existing project. Located and add the project called Windows7.SensorAndLocation, which has the API wrappers for the sensor and location. Add a reference to the Windows7.SensorAndLocation from your own project.

There are many ways you can get the list of available sensors, in our example application we will hook up an event handlers to the form load event and find one instance of the AmbientLightSensor. Alternatively you could look up the TypeId or the CategoryId, for simplicity we’ll use the FriendlyName. The freescale board has 4 different sensors, they are named Accelerometer Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor, Left Switch Array Sensor, Right Switch Array Sensor.

DataUpdated is the event you can hook up to on a specific sensor to receive messages when the data of a sensor changes, remember that the event handlers are called from a separate thread than the UI-thread so you need to ensure that you call Invoke properly.

The final result, it will display 3 different statuses depending on the light level where the sensor board is. See the full source at the bottom of this post.

Windows 7 for Developers

This is the second of many posts I’m writing about Windows 7 for developers, some of these posts will be featured in my technical presentations that I do at events such as the Norwegian .NET User Group and MSDN Live.

1: Windows 7: Virtual Windows XP
2: Windows 7: Sensor Platform

Source Code

Here follows the full source code for the sample.

Note: If you don’t have a card connected to the computer, the application won’t be able to get any sensors but instead crash, this is probably a bug in the code from Microsoft and will be fixed in the future. Until then, I suggest wrapping the GetSensors call inside a try/catch.

namespace WhereAmI
{
    using System;
    using System.Windows.Forms;
    using Windows7.Sensors.Sensors.Light;
    using Windows7.Sensors;

    public partial class MainForm : Form
    {
        AmbientLightSensor _sensor;
        float _illuminanceLux;

        public MainForm()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void MainForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            AmbientLightSensor[] sensors = SensorManager.GetSensorsByType<AmbientLightSensor>();

            if (sensors.Length == 0)
            {
                label1.Text = "No Light Sensor Detected.";
            }
            else
            {
                _sensor = sensors[0];
                _sensor.DataUpdated += new SensorDataUpdatedEventHandler(_sensor_DataUpdated);
                AmbientLightSensorDataReport report = (AmbientLightSensorDataReport)_sensor.GetDataReport();
                _illuminanceLux = report.IlluminanceLux;
                UpdateStatus();
            }
        }

        private void _sensor_DataUpdated(Sensor sensor, SensorDataReport dataReport)
        {
            AmbientLightSensorDataReport report = (AmbientLightSensorDataReport)dataReport;
            _illuminanceLux = report.IlluminanceLux;

UpdateStatus();
}

        private void UpdateStatus()
        {
            if (InvokeRequired)
            {
                Invoke(new MethodInvoker(UpdateStatus));
                return;
            }

            if (_illuminanceLux < 10)
            {
                label1.Text = "You are sleeping in your bed.";
            }
            else if (_illuminanceLux > 300)
            {
                label1.Text = "You are outside in the sun.";
            }
            else
            {
                label1.Text = "You're busy working.";
            }

            label2.Text = "Value: " + _illuminanceLux.ToString();
        }
    }
}

Windows Live ID Logon Dialog

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:23:00 -1300

Working with the Live Services are not always an easy task and they are changing and evolving. It’s not always the documentation is updated and it’s not always the infrastructure works the way it’s suppose to. Additionally there are different teams with varied release cycles, which adds to the problems when you’re working with such a major Web 2.0 infrastructure that Windows Live Services really is.

In the recent years, there has evolved various technologies and standards for user identification, authentication and authorization. OpenID is one such mechanism and another one is OAuth which is a relatively new standard on how you can delegate the authentication of the user and do authorization on content that the user owns between different services.

Microsoft’s technology for identification is Windows Live ID and it’s what you use to authenticate with Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and other services from Microsoft.

There’s only a slight problem with a lot of these mechanisms, they rarely focus and give good support for rich clients that runs on the desktop. OAuth is currently only useable for delegate between different web services.

Client SDK

Microsoft released back in 2007 something called the Windows Live ID Client 1.0 SDK. This is a small API that contains the application logic needed to authorize the user with Windows Live ID and it can be used to generate tokens that is used against the various Windows Live Services that is available.

It was very easy to use this SDK, though the dialog that you get for logging on is not perfect. The Windows Live logo is clearly highly compressed and the controls perhaps not according to the look and feel of your application. Here is a screenshot of the dialog:

Unfortunately, this API doesn’t seam to work together with the latest Live Framework SDK, which is the new and preferable way of communicating with the Live Services. The Windows Live Contacts is the service I’m interested in communicating with, but the infrastructure (“Windows Live Contacts API Beta 1.0”) is being decommissioned in the future.

After some hours of working with the SDK I started to realize it was not going to work the way I needed it too and it did not integrate with the Live Framework SDK, which uses a different form of token, so I had to find an alternative…

Custom Dialog

After some searching I couldn’t find any better alternatives so I figured it was time to write my own custom dialog for user authentication.

There are different reasons why I was reluctant to make my own dialog, one is security. There are plenty of insecure and poor examples on the web that teaches us developers poor practices when it comes to storing and handling passwords. If I was going to write an example, it had to be something that anyone could copy and use straight away with a minimum layer of security that protects the end users.

Here is the end result of the custom Windows Live ID Logon Dialog:

All the source code is available in the MSDN Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsLiveIDLogon

The code includes two project, the primary one is WindowsLiveID which contains the dialog and all the application logic to handle persistence of username and password. If the user chooses to remember their password, it will be stored in the application configuration file in an encrypted form. Encryption is handled by the Data Protection API (DPAPI) which is a framework for encryption built into Windows since Windows 2000. See a quick example on how to use this API from .NET.

Other project is WindowsLiveID.Test and is a standard Windows Forms project that works as an example on how you can enable silent automatic logon in your own application (when the users chooses automatic sign in).

If there are any questions or problems with the above code example, either leave a comment on my blog here or the discussion forum on the code example.

Windows 7: Virtual Windows XP

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:35:00 -1300

Today’s post will explain the new Virtual Windows XP mode that is available as a separate download for Windows 7 (release candidate). Downloading Virtual Windows XP will allow users to run a full Windows XP environment in a virtualized instance within Windows 7. This makes Windows 7 very much backwards compatibility with older applications and it opens up the possibility for Microsoft to remove and innovate on their next Windows release.

Including a “copy” of an older operating system and running it through virtualization is nothing new, this is exactly what Apple did when they made their move from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X – which was a major transformation and there was no way that Apple could have made OS 9 application compatible with OS X.

Last year I predicted that Microsoft will eventually have to include an virtualized copy of Windows when they some day in the future (possibly) will make the move to a different kernel for Windows. This new kernel might possibly be Singularity, which is a research project by Microsoft Research. Singularity is still very much an experimental operating system, but it’s built from ground up with a more modern architecture and built without the regard for any legacy architecture, framework, libraries or software. We can only speculate when the time comes for such a drastic change, it’s probably a long way into the future.

I did not expect my predictions to become true already with the release of Windows 7 – on which Microsoft is releasing a virtual copy of Windows XP.

What’s the point?

While I don’t know all the goals that Microsoft have behind the release of Virtual Windows XP, I know that it’s a very handy feature that my father requires. He is dependent on a very old Java-applet that only runs on Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. This virtual machine software is no longer supported and it’s not easily available. It’s also a problem that the computer cannot have to activate Java-runtimes, so when you install Sun’s latest Java runtime, it will override the Microsoft JVM. This has caused a lot of headache on configuration and issues getting the Java-applet running properly.

With this new Virtual Windows XP, I was able to successfully install and configure an old version of the Java-runtime and make the web application work when my father is within the virtualized environment. Not only this this work seamless, the performance was not too bad. We tested this on an laptop with 1,6GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, Windows 7 automatically configure the Virtual Windows XP to have aprox. 503 MB of RAM available, and both the virtual machine and the local Windows 7 was relatively smooth. It will probably become a bit slower as the hard drive is filled with additional software.

So one of the main benefits you get is the backwards compatibility, and it can make you be more secure. Running old and outdated software can often be a problem in regards to security, but if the virtual machine is only used with known software and a few selective websites, the attack surface will be much less than if you are running an old version of Java on the local machine that you use to visit all your websites.

Installing Windows 7

Windows 7 is available through the Microsoft Connect Beta program, MSDN Subscribers Download and very soon to the public (5th of May). Booting from the Windows 7 DVD and installing the OS is a very straight forward task, which is dramatically faster than it was with Windows XP. If you happen to have your computers configured like we do, you should be able to format and install a new instance of Windows without first having to clean up files or configure tedious backups. I explained how you can use Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh to run a seamless synchronization of all your important files across your home network computers, in my article Digital Lifestyle 2009.

It took me 19 minutes from the initial boot from the CD to the desktop was fully loaded on the Sahara Slate Tablet PC, installed with my old external USB DVD player. Hint: Before I started the installation, I removed the computer from both my Windows Live Sync website and from Live Mesh. I also made sure that all computers was fully synchronized before I started.

You no longer require to fill out the product key during installation, this can be done later on when the installation is complete. You also get the option to configure the network on the computer before you enter the desktop. When my computer loaded the desktop for the first time after 19 minutes, it was online and ready for use. It automatically started to download updates. It found an definition update for Windows Defender and updated drivers for my fingerprint reader and my Intel Chipset. Almost all drivers was included and loaded with Windows 7, that means my tablet digitizer pen worked out of the box, Bluetooth worked, wireless and wired network. After the updates, my finger printer reader worked! I’ve never really used the reader before because the third party software for it never integrated well, now I’m using the built in functionality in Windows and it works smooth and seamless. Everything installed, no reboot required.

Installing Windows Virtual PC

The software that was previously known as Microsoft Virtual PC has been renamed to Windows Virtual PC and is now an integrated part of the Windows experience. There are no separate standalone application – it’s integrated with the Windows Explorer shell. Windows Virtual PC allows you to not only run the pre-configured Virtual Windows XP, you can create any virtual machine you’d like.

Installation is packaged as an Windows Update installer and is a ~5 MB file (Windows6.1-KB958559-x86.msu) that you can download from the same place as you get Windows 7.

After you’ve installed the Windows Virtual PC (required a reboot on two of my computers), you can install the pre-configured Virtual Windows XP. This is a bigger installation file on 445 MB (VirtualWindowsXP_32_en-us.msi), though all it does is copy the virtual hard drive to your computer and make a copy of the virtual machine definition under your local profile. Downloads are available in multiple languages.

Starting Virtual Windows XP

At the end of the installation, you can choose to Launch Virtual Windows XP. If you do this, Windows Virtual PC will launch and configure your new virtual machine. At the first start, you will have the option to specify a password for the virtual machine.

The first run setup takes a little while to configure…

To get started manually, go to your profile folder (e.g. C:\Users\UserName) and open the folder called Virtual Machines. If everything is installed correctly, you should have a Virtual Windows XP machine ready here. As you can see when you locate the Virtual Machines folder, there is a button embedded directly into the Windows Explorer shell that allows you to create a new virtual machine. The dialog that appears is integrated into the shell and is not a separate application as you might be used to. This makes the whole Windows Virtual PC an very integrated experience, one which even my father is easily able to use.

After the initial configuration, you will be presented with a window that contains your Virtual Windows XP. You can resize the window to have the desktop resize and you can go into full screen mode, which will make your computer appear to be running Windows XP. There seems to be better USB support than previously, which was greatly missed in the old Microsoft Virtual PC.

Running applications

You can now launch and use the older Internet Explorer 6.0 or you can install any third party software that no longer compatible with Windows 7.

With the default settings, you will get an application shortcut on your local Windows 7 instance when you install applications in the Virtual Windows XP. These applications can then be launched from the Windows 7 start menu and when they start, they will automatically launch the virtualized Windows XP in the background and you will be able to work with the application directly on the Windows 7 desktop.

Here is a screenshot that shows how I’ve launched WinRAR from my local start menu and it’s opened up the WinRAR application with the Windows XP style application window.

Unfortunately you cannot run both the virtual desktop and virtual applications at the same time.

Extra: Biometric Fingerprint Sensor

Since Windows 7 now has better support for biometric sensory input and it automatically found the driver for my Tablet PC, I decided to write this extra little section on how to configure and use fingerprint reader on Windows 7.

Open the Devices and Printers link in the Start menu. This should display your Fingerprint Sensor if you have one and it’s installed properly. Right-click and choose Biometric. Now you can start to enroll your sensor with your Windows account. The following screenshots is from my machine which has a AuthenTec sensor, this will probably look a bit different depending on your make and model.

Get Windows 7 today!

If you have not tried Windows 7 yet, you should seriously consider to download and install. While it’s still not complete yet, it’s very stable and the performance is great. It works great on older computers with less memory and even better if you have lots of RAM. Make sure you take backup of all your important files before you format your hard drive with a new copy of Windows. Enjoy!

Update: You can now download Windows Virtual PC and the Windows XP Mode (Virtual Windows XP) beta: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

The “Windows 7” logo is taken from the eHomeUpgrade site, used without permissions.

Windows 7 for Developers

This is the first of many posts I’m writing about Windows 7 for developers, some of these posts will be featured in my technical presentations that I do at events such as the Norwegian .NET User Group and MSDN Live.

1: Windows 7: Virtual Windows XP
2: Windows 7: Sensor Platform

Flickr Downloadr

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:24:00 -1300

Flickr Downloadr is a simple and efficient tool to download photos from Flickr.com that runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. It’s an open source project that I have been working on for a while, on and off. Only recently have I made the required changes regarding photo licenses. All tools that uses the Flickr API is required to respect the copyright license of photographs and that means you’re not allowed to download photos that are marked with All Rights Reserved. Unfortunately that is the default license on Flickr, so a lot of photos are off-limits for a local downloaded copy.

Project is open source and licensed under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and is hosted on CodePlex website. On the project site you can discuss the project and you can suggest new features and report bugs.

http://flickrdownloadr.codeplex.com/

How does it work?

As a quick introduction to Flickr Downloadr, I recorded a video that demonstrates how to use it. View the video by clicking the image.

Go here to download Flickr Downloadr.

Screenshots

Here is a collection of screenshots that shows the tool in action.

Contribute

If you would like to contribute to the project, you should join the discussion forum on the project site and report feature suggestions in the issue tracker. Feel free to leave a comment on the blog as well.

I know your passwords

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 08:36:00 -1300

Computer security is one of the hardest things in computer science and engineering. It’s easy to make software today, anyone can do it. Though, not everyone knows how to develop security into their software. Every week I come across insecure solutions and it frightens me, it gives me the willies.

Was looking for a provoking title for this post as I want people to read it. I hope it worked and please keep on reading.

Today I only want to touch upon one issue; passwords. This is an area that affects every one of us and is pretty easy to explain. If you’re a software developer and you read this, make sure you don’t make the same mistakes. If you’re a consumer, make sure you tell your service provider that they need to change their practices. This is a major industrial issue, please raise your voice. If you have little time, please skip forward to the “Learn by Example” section.

Stubbornness or Cluelessness?

Whenever I come across a web site that has a potential secure issue, I contact the offenders and try to explain the problems I’m seeing.

A lot of time, I’m only meet with ignorant support personal that doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

That’s OK, I’m a pretty technical guy and I don’t expect everyone to understand this, there’s no reason for it. But, when they for some reason argues with my request to forward my message to someone technical and responsible for security, I’m baffled.

Many don’t seem to take their customers privacy seriously, and they are reluctant to react to issues.

Next time you come across a web site that has problems, like those I’m about to elaborate, I hope you take the time to let them know you won’t use their service until they improve their systems. What does all of this have to do with Tom Cruise in the photo? I found him when I searched for a tech support photo and he looks just like a tech-support :-)

Username and Password

In the beginning of the computer industry, we rarely cared much for the security on our local machines. We shared the same user accounts and we mainly used different usernames to individualize the computer. We were disconnected and the way we distributed software was with diskettes and later on using CD-ROMs.

The information we stored on our computers was often school and work related, it didn’t contain much personal details or communication. No matter what you put on the computer's hard drive, it required someone to physically steal it to peek at your data.

Then came the local network, where we hooked up computers in offices and with our friends for a LAN party. Information was spread freely on the networks, sharing games, videos, music. Just as we previously burnt CDs and recorded tapes with music and videos on VHS, we could now share our stuff must quicker and more cheaply than ever before.

Enter the Internet.

Suddenly our local insecure computers are connected to the online digital world. A myriad of software and services was created, in a global mess of information that makes it impossible for anyone to really know who or what you can trust. And everyone want your username and password, it’s their way of distinguish You from Me.

We’ve all heard the lesson that you should make sure your password is a hard one to guess, yet many of us have a hard time coming up with any sensible password that we’ll remember easily. It’s also important to don’t reuse the same password everywhere. As you will understand if you read on…

Please Enter…

Please enter your username and password, and we’ll open the door for you and let you into our fine establishment. That’s how it starts, if you’re not already registered on the web site you’re required to fill out, often an extensive, form that tries to capture some personal details from you. Part of this process is filling out your username of choice, password and email address.

This is where the problems starts…

Let’s start with Google’s GMail as our first example. Creating a new account involves filling out the first name, last name, desired login name and password. Additionally, Google wants' you to pick a “Security Question”? What’s the purpose of this, you might wonder? Does this make you more secure? No, it doesn’t.

There are only four default security questions proposed by Google, and they have a help page that explains what type of question and information you should avoid. Things like your mothers maiden name and other information that is easily discoverable about yourself. You can write your own question, but my advice is to completely forget about the security question, it’s way to easy to put something that someone can guess or figure out.

Then we have a field called secondary email. This is a very nice solution to be able to restore access to a new email account, it’s better than the security question.

If we look at how we humans work, you’ll quickly see that most of the time we will fill out all fields in a registration form, even though we probably don’t need too.

So the issue with this Secondary email field is the following: People without existing email addresses might fill out something in this field, just because they intuitively think it’s required information.

Important: Always make sure you enter the correct email address.

Let me give you a very scary example on what might happen if you write wrong email address when registering a new Gmail account (please excuse the screenshot being in Norwegian).

As the above screenshot is in Norwegian, I will just quickly explain it.

It’s a confirmation email you receive from Google with a confirmation code that is used if you have any problems with your account in the future, for example if you loose the password. I have received multiple of these emails. With this information, I can take over someone else’s email account and read all their communications.

Scared?

You should be and this is only the beginning… I receive invoices, usernames, passwords, photos, personal messages and what not…

Phone subscription invoices…

Lego account activation… what if your kid filled out personal details, like their full names, address, birth date and other details? That information will be accessible by the person who receives this email.

Online Game registrations that sends passwords in clear text…

Property descriptions… that probably was suppose to go to someone, somewhere…

I could be a Gladiator… I loved the movie, I already hate the online game… and you can see why I hate it.

Love to watch photos… especially the dull and boring family photos from last Christmas.

Guess he won’t see that flat after all…

I’ve received invitation to board meetings, mobile MMS messages sent by mail, photos, responses to job applications, all kinds of crazy stuff. Let me give an example where I actually, for the purpose of this article, click the activation link just to see what kind of information I could stumble upon.

Learn by Example

Disclaimer advisor: I would never try to hack or steal anything from anyone. My intentions in this example is only to show how vulnerable you can be when a service provider doesn’t care about your personal information safety. This is the first and only so-called activation link I’ve clicked that did not belong to me. When I went through with this example, I was scared how easy it was and it was only one of potentially many examples I could do. I had to censor the names, details, URLs to protect the innocent.

1. You register on a website, by filling out your personal details. Potentially information like full name, home address, phone number and finally your password. Which you probably used before on another website as well.

2. This is where things get’s problematic, I own the email address that the user supplied. If I where an evil system administrator, I could potentially steal this email as it hits the servers. There are many ways I could potentially get hold of the specific email or the users email account. Do never presume that your emails are secure.

3. Someone receives your confirmation email about your account. Sometimes this email contains the original password in clear-text. Sometimes it require you to activate the account to “prove” that you are the owner of the email account.

4. After clicking the activation link, I come to the website. Some services actually automatically log you in at this step. This service did not, so I had to use the “recover my password” functionality.

5. I then receive email with a password. Some service will NEVER expose your original password, which is what they never should. When you forget your password, a service should return you an auto generated password. The service in question, returned me the original password that another person had used.

6. Login to the website and check out the users profile too see if there is any interesting information. What I got from this service was full name, birth date, phone number and at the end, there is a empty field for bank account number.

7. I was surprised to see there is a password and confirm password text field on the user profile page. It made me think that possibly the website renders it’s users passwords in the HTML source. And surely they did.

8. I know have this individuals full personalia. Since I have the persons phone number, I can validate that everything is correct, and it is. There are so many ways one can utilize this type of information. The person had an income of approx. $53,000 in 2007, thanks to the public Norwegian tax lists. I know what interests he has and what he looks like, from his Facebook profile photo.

9. I’m not going to take this any further, what I potentially could do is to login to the individual’s Facebook account, as he is probably using the same password there…

Example Conclusions

The scary part of this whole example is that this was done using an online auction website, which probably have a lot of traffic and users. There are just so many security mistakes done on this example that I’m not believing it. They handle VISA and MasterCard transaction, they don’t use HTTPS/SSL for anything. They have probably outsourced the VISA/MasterCard transactions, I hope.

Can you consider what would happen if their database was stolen, with all this information available for all their customers?

Clear Text Passwords

This is the most common mistake made by developers, and it amazes me that there are services out there that still relies on storing your password in clear text. Let me illustrate how this works.

1. User enters a web service and registers with the credentials.

2. Credentials are sent over the Internet, often over an secure HTTPS (SSL) connection. Never fill out important information on an HTTP connection.

3. Credentials are stored in the database.

4. The user comes back to the website to authenticate, password is again sent to the web service and it’s validated against the value that is stored in the database.

When you have trouble remembering your password, those services that store your password as clear text, often allows you to retrieve insecurely them by email. Just because you can’t retrieve the password by email, doesn’t mean it’s stored securely, it can still be clear text in the database somewhere.

Secure Password Communication

With the above example in mind, I want to quickly give you an example on how the web service should handle your passwords securely.

1. User enters a web service and registers with the credentials.

2. Every data is sent over a secure HTTPS connection.

3. The web service generates a non-reversible hash based upon your password and any type of hidden secret (algorithmic salt).

4. The hash of your password, which is not reversible except with an awfully powerful computer and a lot of time, is then stored in a database.

5. The user comes back to the websites to authenticate, password is again sent to the web service, but this time it will generate the hash all over again, retrieve the existing hash from the database, and compare those two values. If they are the same, you are authenticate.

There are absolutely no reason why a service provider should require to store your password in clear text. If they have a reason, it better be a very good one.

Simple Passwords

A lot of web services demands that you enter a fixed password length, sometimes between 4 to 12 characters (Finn.no) and American Express has limited your password too 6-8 characters. Characters and numbers is required, not sure if they allow non-ASCII characters. You don’t need to be a mathematician to understand that a brute force attack on American Express is easy, considering the requirements for user passwords.

You’ve been Hacked!

How do you know that your service has not been hacked or leaked customer details? Every month there are news stories about information that has been lost and systems taken down by hackers. I promise you that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg in this regard. Do you really think that hackers will tell anyone that they’ve gained access to your information?

Spotify was recently hacked and they published a letter to all their subscribers. Luckily for us users, they follow best practices and did not store your passwords as clear text, only as an cryptographic hash. This ensured a minimal consequence of Spotify being hacked. There is today more than a million users on Spotify, consider the consequences if they didn’t do security properly?

If you uncover a service that has a potential to leak any personal information, please inform those in charge and make sure they change their practices. I do it all the time, and it does make a difference.

That’s it and make sure you follow some best practices regarding your passwords.

Copyright disclaimer: “Passwords are like pants” photo by Richard Parmiter and licensed under Creative Commons. Photo of "Tom Cruise by banky177 and licensed under Creative Commons.

One degree of separation

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:17:00 -1300

For the last hundred years, humanity has rapidly been responsible for shrinking the world through our technological advancements. We are closer connected to those we care about and to total strangers. We are moving towards a society where you can be connected with just one degree of separation.

You might have heard the term Six degrees of separation which refers to an idea coined by Kevin Bacon (yes, the Hollywood actor). It’s this concept that refers to feeling and saying “it’s a small world”. Have you ever had the experience that you meet a stranger and after talking to them you quickly realize that people in their network is in some way connected to your own social network?

There has been a lot of research on the validity of this idea with Six degrees of separation and there are no conclusive results, though there are many that shows 6 to be a very good approximate.

By the name of this article I’m not trying to tell that we are moving towards a one degree of separation with everyone on the Earth, which is somewhat the principle behind the 6 degrees. I want to talk about the ability to connect with anyone of your interest more easily than before. You can today connect directly with individuals that a few years ago were untouchable and unreachable for us mere mortals. Things have changed and the change will continue.

Work, Hobbies and Interests

It’s our jobs, our hobbies and interests which is the binding glue for our social networks and interactions. You normally don’t have interactions with individuals that work in a totally different industry or has opposite interests of your own. We are a social race and we continuously seek the acceptance and approval of our peers, both in our professional careers, and our online communities where we participate with great passion and energy.

It’s a human urge to share our experiences and knowledge. And we do this on an ever increasing rate through social networks, Web 2.0, email and instant messages like SMS, online chats and services like Twitter. The amount of information we create is mind-boggling.

A quick search on Flickr photo service for Bill Gates returns 11,402 results (Google Image search returns 4.1 million hits). Doing the same for Steve Jobs returns 12,564 results and Barack Obama gives us 226,947 images. That is mostly photographs taken by individuals like you and me, and shared freely for anyone to experience (and share alike if licensed under Creative Commons).

With our hobbies and interests in mind, we seek out likeminded individuals on forums, blogs and online chats. We’re able to find people that share our similar interests in a very short time, and due to the fact that we are a lot more trustworthy with communication going through our computer than with other humans in the physical world – we sometimes connect very fast and on a very deep level.

Mental overload

There might be physical consequences on the brain from having huge social networks that we do not yet fully understand. While it previously was the domain of kings, royals and famous people to have thousands of first hand contacts – this is becoming commonplace for many C-celebrities, bloggers and online personalities.

This effect can be easily experienced if you travel to a place like Hollywood which is crowded with celebrities many of us has seen on television. Even though we’ve never shared a single word with these actors and actresses, we somehow feel like we know them – and know them very intimately.

It is a very strange feeling when you walk down the local street and you see the winner from the latest Idol contest, everybody is looking, pointing and talking about them. Some might dare to ask for an autograph. Yet one thing everyone around them has in common, they feel that they know them after watching a full season of Idol or "So You Think You Can Dance?”

We’ve watched them (actors and actresses) week after week for many years and been with them through the tough and hard times, and through love and romance. We know more about them than our local friends. While not everybody is able to travel to places like Hollywood and Mumbai (the heart of Bollywood), and not everyone is lucky to meet famous people on the streets, we are now getting a new way of connecting with everyone. Not only can we connect, we can influence and we can be heard.

Blogging and Messaging

There are today millions of blogs that you can read and subscribe too. Blogs are an easy way for anyone to speak their mind, share their thoughts and experiences. The problem with blogs has long been their inability to have a decent two-way communication with its readers. Websites in the good old days of the Internet was nothing but a one-way communication channel. Corporations and people tried to convince their visitors to buy the products and read their stories. Blogs arrived not a long time ago and has been the new craze for a while. It opened up to a more social and personal form of communication, still it’s been mostly one-way communication. Most blogs has the ability for readers to add comments (I would argue that a blog without comment functionality isn’t a blog but a website). Some blogs have been very good at involving its readers in a two-way communication, yet it’s far between them.

Keeping a blog interesting and updated is a lot harder than most people think and it’s a form of communication that takes time and effort.

Micro-blogging.

Few years back, a new service arrived that forced users to limit their messages to a maximum of 140 messages. That service is called Twitter. Millions of users are using Twitter today and the service is just a few years old.

Micro-blogging is the clue that makes online communication more accessible to anyone. It doesn’t require much effort and is synonymous with mobile SMS message. I can pretty confidently say that everyone that reads this article has sent SMS messages before. And we send them more than ever, yet it’s an old technology and it’s still very expensive. During the 2008 holidays, we sent a record of mobile messages to everyone we care about. SMS is a one-to-one communication protocol and doesn’t work well for things like New Year celebrations. Another analogy to the mobile messages is the instant messaging, where you can connect and keep connected with your friends and contacts and has sporadic chats and dialogs. Instant messaging is a great tool for keeping in contact after the initial connection over blogs, email or Twitter.

Twitter is a way for you to send messages to everyone you care about (and by default everyone else can read it as well). And it’s absolutely free.

There are a lot of other interesting Web 2.0 services out in the online computer Cloud, services that makes it easier for individuals to share information. They are beyond the context of this article. One concern I want to mention is services that has the sole purpose of allowing you to share your travel plans and current whereabouts. That’s details you probably want to keep a close lid on, as you will realize later in this article.

Connecting with your Idols

Micro-blogging has lowered the bar of entering online collaborative communication so that anyone can join in. It’s so simple that even your grandmother would probably be able to figure it out.

Combine the simplicity of the service and the current media hype behind Twitter, thousands of new users sign up every day. Many of which are celebrities and important individuals. Artists, philosophers, politicians, presidents, technologists, futurists and everyone else. They are all there and more will come.

In every field of interest and hobby, there are certain high profiled individuals that everyone listens to. We read their books, we read their online publications and now we can read their tweets. While books and publications (or music or art or any other form of intellectual creation) are a good form of education and learning deeply about the concepts and ideas that those people has – twitter is a way to connect on a more personal level. As I mentioned before, we trust computers more than we trust people. Hence, we tend to write too much, say the wrong words or put all the facts out there. That can be dangerous, but it’s also an interesting opportunity to learn the real faces behind the public personas.

With the fear of forgetting important people, I won’t start to make an exhaustive list of those already on Twitter, but I want to mention a few. Some people are just too famous, like Barack Obama and Britney Spears. There is no way those have the ability to follow up on Twitter personally, so they have assistants that does their tweets. That’s just reasonable and we can’t complain.

Then we have everyone else, those who have a few thousand followers on Twitter and can write their own tweets. That’s your local politicians, local athletes, local news reporters and local artists.

Start subscribing to the tweets of those that you have an interest in. Don’t tweet for the sake of just tweeting; make sure you speak your mind. Nobody cares if you’re currently shaving or driving down the highway.

A quick digression from the topic of this article: If you’re in a plane that is crashing, everybody wants to hear about it. A single tweet can make a huge difference, you can go from an unknown to someone everybody knows over night. Twitters reports events from around the world, long time before the news media.

Influencing People

It’s the collaborative experience of Twitter that makes it such a success. It’s hard to write any deep thoughts and show your insight on a topic with a limit of 140 characters. Yet there are opportunities that arrive every day; the people you connect with on Twitter might have a problem or a question that you know the answer too. Things that is hard to understand for others can be easy to for you.

That makes for perfect opportunities to influence people – your insight on a topic or question, or your imaginative ideas and thoughts, will at some point be read by others. Take this hypothetical situation: Madonna is having a hard time figuring out the theme of her next music video and she writes a quick tweet on the frustration she’s feeling:

If you happen to be in the music video industry, and there is a lot of artists and directors on Twitter today, you could pitch your great idea for a theme of her next video. Maybe, you’ll even be lucky to get the job.

There is no way such an interaction could happen in the real life, neither would it happen using email and it wouldn’t be possible with a simple website. If Madonna kept a personal blog, she would probably not write such a post there anyway. Most likely would her posts be focused on her latest album and the previous music video?

Twitter is about micro-blogging in the moment.

It has very little value going back and looking at the history of tweets and discussions that went on in the past. Don’t understand me wrong on this, the history and information is important and can be used to make some very interesting analysis on patterns and trends, but the individual posts doesn’t have much value for the individual.

The power to influence others is one not to be taken lightly.

Privacy Concerns

Being anonymous on the Internet is increasingly difficult. Not only in the technical terms but also interacting online under a pseudo-name doesn’t always work. Few people will take your seriously if you’re not honest about who you really are, and trust is important to build connections.

That does not mean you need to share your phone number, your home address and your current whereabouts to others to make them trust you. That is personal information you need to keep out of reach of others.

Many twitters write about their plans to travel somewhere or they write where they are right now. That is information that can be used by anyone to harm you. They could be robbing your apartment while you’re drinking your cup of coffee. This is also a very powerful tool for sporadic and agile interactions and communication with other likeminded individuals, a very easy and cheap way to organize gatherings of all forms.

Micro-blogging is a recent phenomenon and the consequence is only beginning to take shape. It’s better to be safe than sorry and I urge everyone to think twice before you post your next tweet.

Until next time, be well!

@SondreB

References

Here follows some interesting links and references for you to dig deeper into the social web:

John Cleeses is who he says he is, twittering with us twaths :-)

Lance Armstrong, Snoop Dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore… “Kjente folk på twitter” – NRKBeta

Here is a long list of famous people on Twitter: http://thelistenerd.com/2008/05/07/some-people-who-twitter-who-might-interest-you/

There is even a special Celebrity Tweet, which aggregates famous people’s tweets. Some people think they understand twitter and the psychology behind it, and some sites reports on social media. I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand the consequences micro-blogging. Time will tell.

A co-worker of mine, Steinar Årdal, is very much into Social Media and Micro-blogging, check him out!

Remember what I said, focus on your local community and gain a connection with those that can make a difference for your life and situation.

Digital Lifestyle 2009

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:59:00 -1300

Microsoft had a vision of a computer in every home, that’s been a reality for a while now. Not only do we have a computer in every home, we have a bunch of them. And our mobile phones have become tiny computers, with speedy CPUs, lots of memory and storage and broadband connection. Keeping track of all your information and devices can be messy, especially for those not tech-savvy.

See how I’ve organized my own personal home network and how you can use my configuration as a blueprint for your own.

(Photo by betenoir, licensed under Creative Commons)

Purpose of a Digital Lifestyle

Main goal behind an organized home network is to improve the way we interact with our computer devices. How do you avoid losing important photos, memories and information? How can you easily share the data between devices, so you’re not bound to a specific device or location to get hold of your information?

How can you make the digital lifestyle an enjoyable one, without troublesome downtime and tedious maintenance tasks like backups, crashes and restores?

Learn how you can safely reinstall and replace your computer without concerns.

Here is a video that shows how the digital lifestyle should be; it should be effortless, simple, clean and intuitive. As a long time computer user, I know this is rarely the truth.

Digital Devices

A premise for this walkthrough is multiple personal computer devices. If you only have a single computer in your home, you won’t be able to do everything in the same manner. Additionally all our computers runs Windows and our focus is on Microsoft devices, but the same configuration can be done using Sony, Apple or other products.

Here is a list of some of the devices we will be integrating together in a seamless manner:

Icon	Name	Description
	LISA, SARSA	Our two Tablet PCs both running Windows 7.
	GAMER	Our desktop computer, high-end graphics card and processor. Windows 7
	HP, CASIO	We have two different cameras, both uses SD memory cards
	2x HTC TyTN II 1x HTC MTeOR	My Windows Mobile devices, the TyTN II devices use Windows Mobile 6.1.
	Sony HDR-HC5	High-definition video camera. Connected using FireWire with the GAMER desktop computer.
	Zune 8GB, Zune 30GB, iPod Touch, JOS MP-300, Creative Zen PMC	We have a bunch of audio players that we use. Easy synchronization is important.
	Xbox 360	Connected to the surround receiver and television. Used to watch videos shared on the computers.
	SERVER	Our Windows Home Server, used for backups and file sharing.

Computer Software

Computer devices is only as good as their software, the software is half the functionality of digital devices. To be successful with a digital lifestyle, it’s important to choose software that is effective and functional for the needs you have. Apple has some very good software for Mac OS X and there are thousands of developers out there that do software for everything. As a primary Windows user (I used to be a Macintosh user back in pre-1998) I like to use Microsoft software as long as they fulfill my needs and requirements. Microsoft does provide quite a good deal of free software that you can use.

A note on the use of beta software: Many developers are releasing their products to public availability under beta-branding. This means the software comes with a limited warranty and support. There might be unexpected bugs, crashes and features that might not work. Please let this be a warning and use beta and pre-release software with caution.

Type	Name	Description
Operating System	Windows 7	Next generation version of Windows is scheduled to be released in 2009. Windows 7 has the best compatibility with digital devices of any OS and makes is very easy to share content on the network.
Cloud	Live Mesh and Live Mesh Mobile	Cloud Computing is the idea of using online computation power and storage. Storing information in the cloud ensures availability and security against hard drive failures. Live Mesh is available for Windows, Mac and Windows Mobile.
Sync	Windows Live Sync	You should consider which information you want to store online in the cloud and what you want to keep local. Videos, Photos and large files are best kept synchronized between computers in the local network.
Backup	Windows Home Server	WHS is essentially a computer without a monitor, a server, that automatically takes backup of all your computers and makes it very easy to restore in case of a disaster. Ideal solution for folder sharing. Alternative to WHS would be an external hard drive where you make a backup copy of important files.
Photo	Windows Live Photo Gallery	Part of the Windows Live Essentials and is a great software that you can use to tag and organize your photos. Use it to clean up your photo, remove “red-eye” and apply effects.
Email	Windows Live Mail	Part of the Windows Live Essentials and supports both POP and IMAP. You can use this to connect with your Hotmail, Gmail or other email accounts.
Contacts	Windows Live Contacts	By utilizing Windows Live Contacts as your primary contacts database, you can decentralize the task of keeping up-to-date information on your contacts. You will automatically receive updates as your contacts update their details.
Communication	Windows Live Messenger and Skype	Live Messenger is one of the most popular Instant Messaging software and it’s integrated with your Live Contacts. Skype is the best free voice over IP and video conference software available.

Installations

One of the first software I install on a new computer is Windows Live Essentials. Beginning from Windows 7, Microsoft have removed a lot of the included software. Windows Live Essentials includes a lot of software that fills the needs for a digital lifestyle.

Upon installation you can decide which parts you’d like to install. My suggestion is to choose Messenger, Mail, Writer (if you’re a blogger), Photo Gallery and potentially Family Safety if you have kids that use your computers. At the time of writing this post, Movie Maker is in an early beta and not very functional. I like to keep my web browsing experience as clean as possible, so I always avoid installing toolbars. Included with the package is Windows Live Sync.

Next installation is Live Mesh, this is software that allows you to sync and share data. The information you put in your Live Mesh folders is automatically synchronized with servers online, making that information accessible from anywhere, anytime. There is an overlap between Live Mesh and Windows Live Sync, but they can be used to fulfill different needs as I will demonstrate. Live Mesh is additionally more than just folders and files; it’s an operating environment for building lightweight applications that is distributed between devices and can be executed locally or in the browser.

Here is a table that explains some of the differences between Live Mesh and Windows Live Sync:

Live Mesh	Windows Live Sync
Files Stored Online	File Stored Locally
Remote Desktop	Remote File Browsing
Rich Applications	Only Folder Sharing
Always Available	Requires PC to be on

With Windows Live Sync, you can enable remote access (in the settings dialog) which gives you the ability to access everything on the computer. This only works if the computer is connected to Internet and the software is running. This is a functionality I don’t use as I don’t want to expose my whole computer to the Internet, yet if there is an occasion where I need this functionality, I can use Remote Desktop support in Live Mesh and enable this remote access from a remote location.

Here is a comparison of the two alternatives. Biggest change in the future is that the Live Mesh will have support for custom applications and not just folders.

Sync Files

Every year we produce an immersive amount of data. Storage capacity on computers has followed this trend, and most laptops comes with a few hundred gigabytes of storage. This makes it easily possible to walk around with all your files at any time.

Note: To avoid any major sync conflicts, the public folders are only configured under one of the local user accounts.

Documents

Documents that I write or collect are important and I often work on them on different devices. It’s therefore important to have them available everywhere. This is why I use Live Mesh for my documents. Research and science papers, PowerPoint presentations, Excel budgets ++.

Photos

Every month I take or collect hundreds of photos, they take up a lot of storage space. The way I organize all my photos is with folders of Year/Month/Event. Additionally, I try to tag my photos as much as possible, making it simpler to find them in the future. Photos are normally not edited after they have initially been saved and they take up gigabytes of storage, so I’m using Windows Live Sync for those files.

Videos

Videos I have created on my own and funny clips that I find online, I have in my videos folder. This folder is synced with Windows Live Sync. I keep a copy of the videos I’ve uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube in this folder.

Movies and TV Series

These are usually bigger files than what I keep in my videos folder. This folder is kept on my desktop computer only. Instead of copying these files everywhere, I use normal folder sharing and Windows Media Connect.

Music

All our music is synced using Windows Live Sync. It’s a problem that the rating we give to our music is stored as metadata on the files, as me and my wife have different tastes in music. That’s a minor pain for the ability to have a simple structure for all our music. A lot of our music is ripped using a lossless compression, this takes up a lot of space (400-500MB pr. CD) so we’re considering changing this, possibly put a lossless copy only on the Windows Home Server. We have music content that has DRM license, both from iTunes, Zune and MSN Music. Biggest problem with DRM is that they require a license to be activated on a computer, and there is a limit on how many computers you can have activate. Which is problematic, considering we reinstall our computers multiple times a year.

Folder Structures

Here is a description on our folder structures and how we keep our files organized. Keep in mind that currently, Live Mesh only supports 5GB of storage.

Folder	Software	Size	Description
C:\Users\Public\Music	Live Sync	~40GB	Our shared music and podcasts
C:\Users\Public\Photos	Live Sync	~30GB	Our shared photos
C:\Users\Public\Videos	Live Sync	~10GB	Our shared videos
C:\Users\Sondre\Documents	Live Mesh	~2GB	My personal documents
C:\Users\Katrine\Documents	Live Mesh	~500MB	Katrine’s personal documents
C:\Users\Sondre\Desktop\Mobile	Live Mesh	~100MB	Synced with my Windows Mobile decides. Includes backup of SMS messages, photos, software and more.

Mapping Windows Folders

Depending on how you want to organize your files between the family members, you need to decide if you want to have a personal music, video and photo folder for everyone. We decided to go with a shared environment, to simplify everything.

Note: The following instructions is only useful if multiple individuals share a computer, if everyone have their own computer, the easiest way is use the normal folders.

This means moving files to the public profile (on Windows Vista and/or Windows 7). From Windows Vista, you have the ability to make special folders like Music, Photos, Videos. To change these folders, go to the home folder for your user by clicking the logon name in the Windows start menu. This should show you a list of special folders. Right-click on one of the folders and open properties. Select the Location tab and click the Move… button. Change the path from C:\User\User\Music to C:\User\Public\Music.

When you change this path, you might see two confirmation warnings, accept both of these to continue moving existing files to the public profile.

When you do this, the Pictures and Videos folders might appear as Public Pictures and Public Videos in your home folder. You can rename those names by going to C:\Users\Public using Windows Explorer.

Configuring Live Mesh Folders

There are two ways you can create a new Live Mesh folder. One is to right-click on any and choose Add folder to Live Mesh option, or you can create the folder first on the Live Mesh Web Desktop. When the folder is created on the Web Desktop, an shortcut should appear on your desktop. Double-click this icon to map the mesh folder to a local folder.

Configuring Live Sync Folders

If you are setting up a home network with multiple devices and users, my advice is to configure Windows Live Sync folders from a primary account and then share those folders with other users. Additionally you can only map the same folder once on the same computer, so if you use the C:\Users\Public profile for Music, Photos and Videos, you should map it with the user that is using the computer the most.

The first time you start Windows Live Sync, you will have to navigate to the following path and launch the application C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Sync\WindowsLiveSync.exe. When you run this on the first computer, it will tell you to run it on another one before you can start to synchronize files. When you load Windows Live Sync on a second computer, you might see a dialog like this:

My advice is to cancel this dialog and instead setup everything manually, it’s not very hard, let me explain how.

Launch the Windows Live Sync website and login with your Windows Live ID. When you are logged in, click the Create a personal folder.

Pick which computer you want to start from and you will be presented with a selection of folders on that computer. You can pick any folder on that computer.

When you’ve gone through these steps, you can select additional computer you want to map the new folder to. Go ahead and select your secondary computer.

If you want to share one of the new folders with your family members or friends, just go to the main page on Windows Live Sync and select one of the personal folders. At the bottom of the page, there will be a Invite new members link that allows you to enter the email address of those you want to share with.

That completes the configurations of folder sync and sharing!

Managing Contacts

Contact information is very important to us, it’s the basis of our professional, personal and social networks. Though it’s historically been hard to keep a well organized contacts book. I have previously used a service called Plaxo, but that required all my contacts to sign up for the same service.

Windows Live Contacts has grown to and improved to become a good alternative for contacts organization. It’s integrated with all the Live Software and Services, so it’s the perfect solution.

You can access the rich application to manage your Live Contacts from the Windows Live Mail. The trick to automatically receive updates is “Subscribe to Contact Updates”. You can select multiple contacts at the same time and enable this feature.

Another way to access and organize your contacts, is the website http://people.live.com/. From there, you have the option to export, import and clean up contacts. The clean up contacts will find duplicate contacts and allow you to easily merge them into one. This functionality is very useful when you’re merging phone contacts and Live contacts for the first time.

To be a good net-citizen, you should make sure your own Live Profile is always up-to-date, so your contacts will have the correct information at any time. Go to http://profile.live.com/ to edit your details.

Organizing Photos

Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) is a very good application for organizing photos. It has good support for tagging and it can automatically recognize faces in your photos. When it recognizes as face, you can tag the person from your Windows Live Contacts. This makes it effortless to add personal tags to photos, without the tedious work of writing names, just point and click. If you have configured your home network with Windows Live Sync, you should now be able to enjoy your photos everywhere.

You can now use any of your computers to import photos to the collection! WLPG has very good support for importing photos from cameras and will handle everything automatically for you.

Tying it all together

I won’t go into details on how to connect everything together, if you own an Xbox 360, you’ve probably already figured out how to connect it with your computers. With the above configuration, you should be able to playback video, photos and music from any of the computers.

If you happen to own an Windows Mobile phone, you can install the Live Mesh Mobile, which gives you access to files and sync between the cloud and the phone. This is very useful for photos captured on the mobile phone and for copying new software to the phone. Read my blog post on how to bring photos with you on the run with Live Mesh Mobile.

All you need to do to get your contact list on the phone, is to logon with the Windows Live software that’s included in Windows Mobile. This will sync your email and contacts, and there is a mobile version of Windows Live Messenger.

Windows Live Essentials is a big suite of software and it’s improving on every release. Read more about it in my blog post on the Windows Live Essentials 2009 RC.

If you’ve gone through this walkthrough, you should by know realize that for all the software and services, you’ve only required to have a single identity. With your Windows Live ID; you can access and share all the information you need.

Please share your own stories on how to live an optimal digital lifestyle!

Open Public Debates

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:14:00 -1300

This evening I attended an open debate (in real-life) on “debates on the net”. While I won’t go into that topic on this post, I got some ideas in regards to how to apply technology to emerge more contributors.

Premises of what I’m about to explain is that it has to be easy to do and fairly cheap, if not free, to do. It has to bring value to the discussion without taking over; the local debate with real breathing humans has to be the main focus.

Internet has created a way for anyone to air their voice. It’s totally different from the previous generation of media, which includes newspaper (books, ++), television and radio.

While the old media technology is very easily controllable, the net is virtually incontrollable. It has to be formed by its (net-)citizens. You can’t control individuals, but you can create the mechanisms and environment for constructive dialog and debate.

Before I move on, I would like to mention that the old forms of media are still very much alive in the sphere of a global network. You have online television shows, you have online radios and you have online newspapers. Additionally, we see the creation of new types of media communication, through blogs, micro-blogging and podcasts.

The Internet is an evolving and almost biological mechanism that continuously evolves and takes new shapes and forms, we are so fortunate to be alive at this moment in time and we can have an impact on its shape and form.

Please excuse the incredible length of this post…

(Photo by Gaetan Lee and published under Creative Commons license)

Traditional Debates

The traditional way a debate with a panel works is that a moderator controls who’s allowed to talk and keeps the debate on topic and makes sure it progresses forward. They have an very important role; their role is the same as a blog or forum owner. If you are unable to moderate the discussions, you are not fit to be in charge of the debate. You should not be running a forum you are not able to moderate it. There are no excuses.

Let’s start by illustrating how a traditional panel debate is arranged.

A panel debate can take many forms that are beyond the context of this post. Let’s take the simple example on a group of experts that will debate amongst each other, while the moderator controls the whole show. In some instances, the microphone might be opened up for the audience. It’s normal courteousness allowing your audience to speak their minds, given that they have taken the time and effort to come and listen to you.

Not allowing your listeners to speak can be compared to how some blogs that doesn’t allow comments; you’re being ignorant towards your audience. To earn respect, you need to go into a mutual agreement of trust and allow them to contribute with their thoughts. Only through an open dialog can you earn credibility, or just being incredible intelligent.

Technology is our friend

It’s created by us to help us, you should accept technology with your open arms and embrace the endless possibilities it opens up. The days of Internet and Computer Technology being accessible only to high degrees students and geeks is long gone. Even grandparents are now becoming active net-citizens, keeping contact with family and friends using email and web services.

Some parts of utilizing technology has become mainstream and it’s those we’re going to utilize to improve the way we arrange open debates.

The Value Proposition

Defining the return of value from anything we do is important, both for your own personal gain and for the value of your local and our global society. When you write a blog post, a forum comment or talk actively in a panel debate, you have to consider what kind of value your words and text are bringing.

There is more than enough negative, counterproductive and useless information being actively created and published on the Internet every minute, so make sure your contribute counts for the creative, positive and valued side of this global experiment called humanity.

My value proposition with this post is opening up the debate to a wider array of contributors, enabling the moderator (or the owner, host, etc.) to receive valuable feedback on what’s being debated. It’s important not to be afraid of the forces applied on the Internet. They can be daunting and exhaustive, in the forms of flooding, spamming, trolls and forum debates whose sole purpose it to wreak havoc. Those are, in most instances, pretty easy to control and manage.

Technology makes it simple for someone to contribute (both negative and positive) to a dialog, and technology makes it easy too moderate that dialog. Though, it isn't a walk in the park to moderate a heated debate and it’s a thin line between to much censorship and too little management. The brains behind any good debate is the moderator/host :-)

Humans trust computers and online personas more easily than we do with people we meet in the real world. We are more easily fooled on the net and we are more open with our thoughts, ideas and feelings. This can be harvested in the context of retrieving honest feedback during and after a debate. Standing up in front of an audience and speaking your mind doesn’t come natural to many, so lowering the entry for having a voice is very valuable.

Moving Forward

I have a background from software development, so a lot of my thoughts and experience is formed from the industry, conferences and online content that apply to software engineering.

So I would like to bring forward a recent conference I attended as a background resource for what I’m elaborating in this post.

Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles in October 2008 was a groundbreaking event in the feats it achieved. Every single session on the conference was published online within a day or two, freely available to anyone who has an interest.

Two other very bold feats from the PDC was the direct publication of photos from the event. Anyone who uploads a photo tagged with #pdc2008 on Flickr can potentially have their image displayed on the PDC web site.

The second is publishing tweets from Twitter on the walls in the main auditorium. My good friend Gregory Rendard was fortunate and had one of his tweets displayed on the big wall, visible for the thousands of attendees at the conference. I just happen to be SondreB on Twitter, in case you care enough to follow me.

It’s the combination of these two communication forms (video and audio together with text based responses) and additionally live transcribing as I experienced in the debate (“Debatt om nettdebatt”) I attended earlier today.

No Excuses

Before I get into the technical details and services you can use to broadcast your debate on the Internet, I would like to make a point that there are no excuses to be made for not opening up to the world.

If the topic of the day is one that awakes people’s interests, there will be plenty of volunteers who will be willing to help out. Someone from the audience can be in charge of live transcribing, another can stream the debate live with video and audio. Depending on the size and popularity of your debate, you might need someone to filter the tweets coming in and deciding which ones are constructive and valuable enough to be brought into the live debate.

Wireless and/or wired network access to the Internet is nearly always available, so you’re out of excuses.

Live Video Streaming

The simplest form of spreading the words of your debaters is to stream the video and audio live. There are various free services on the Internet that makes it easy for you to stream video. You don’t need to invest any money in expensive infrastructure and servers, which is one of the promises behind Cloud Computing. Enabling businesses, organization and individuals to build and use solutions and services, without expensive investments.

One of those services is ustream.tv. This is a service that allows you to create different channels, your own TV channel on the Internet. All it requires is a cheap web cam, a microphone and you’re ready to go. There are no software installations (it’s dependent on Adobe Flash) and no tricky configurations. Register with your details, hook up your equipment, and click Broadcast!

Here is a photo that shows the interface while I’m broadcasting from my home “office”. When you start broadcasting, you activate a text chat where your viewers can comment and communicate back to you.

Cover It Live

Another service you can use to provide an easy mechanism for opening up a debate is CoveritLive. This is a service that enables you to publish text, photos, video as the debate is progressing. And it enables you to interact with your listeners.

Here is a quote from the CoveritLive website:

When you use CoveritLive’s software your commentary is streaming live onto your web pages or blog, so your readers hear from you immediately after that election result comes in, or that terrible play gets called or the next time an actor gets bleeped at the Oscars. Because they can instantly get their questions to you as well as participate in polling questions you create, there is a reason for them to stay online for a long time...not just check back in once in a while. Once you add in some pictures and videos all in real time, you’ve created an event worth watching.

With CoveritLive, you can get tweets straight into the live timeline of your ongoing debate. This is very useful and helps make the transcript better for historical purposes. My next section will explain a way to actually get live questions to the debaters using Twitter.

Tag, You’re It!

Twitter is one of many micro-blogging services. Micro-blogging is the concept of writing short and concise messages. It’s hard to keep a deep dialog using a micro-blogging service, which is some of the strength it has. Since there is a restriction on the lengths, it opens up more room for everyone to make their statements. It doesn’t take much effort to read a bunch of tweets and you can easily keep track of your favorite twitters by subscribing to their updates.

Within the micro-blogging sphere, a concept of tagging was created. The way it works is to put a specific word within every tweet you make on a specific topic. Usually you use the # sign to declare a topic.

Here are some examples on how this has been used:

DoItWithDrupal, 3 days seminar: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23diwd

PDC 2008, 4 days conference: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pdc2008

MIX 2009, 4 days conference: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23mix09

“Debatt on nettdebatt”, one hours open debate: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nettdebatt

In preparation of any event, you should come up with a distinct key word that can be used to tag tweets. That’ll ensure tweets not getting to fragmented.

Live Tweets

All of the above brings me to the final concept of ways to improve an open debate, live tweets. That involves projecting tweets directly from the Internet an onto the wall in the debate room.

Depending on the volume of tweets, you might require someone to filter which tweets should be displayed. My suggestion is to leave all related tweets on the topic and allow the audience to see the stream of feedback.

Though you should have someone (assistant to the moderator) that picks which tweet contains questions that is good enough to be raised to the debaters in the panel. You should do your best to avoid the focus of attention going over to the tweets. The tweets is nothing but interesting background noise, they shouldn’t be allowed to distract or otherwise make the time unpleasant or wasted for the debaters.

Conclusions

If you go back and take another look at the first photo in this post, you might notice more details. There is a project on the right which displays video feedback and possibly an agenda. This could be used to display the live scribing from CoveritLive. Then you have the windows, which in the photo is static, but in the future I could foresee huge walls that are digital screens. That’s a good spot to display random tweets from the audience and it doesn’t matter if the audience is there in real life or connected through the Internet.

Stream video and audio.
Collect feedback.
Involve your audience, offline and online.
Be creative with the media that exists around your topic (aggregate photos, video, tweets and other information and randomize it on the walls)

Please feel free to leave comments and your own ideas on how to improve the way we traditionally do open and public debates.

Here are some photos from tonight's debate:

The importance of good design

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:59:00 -1300

For as long as I can remember, I’ve said that design is half the solution when you’re building software. The same can be said to sound and music in a Hollywood movie: The experience of the sound is essential for a good experience.

Some people tend to think that design is not important, a lot of the time these are old developers that has a history of making incredible poor user experiences. In a recent article in InfoWorld, a journalist put forward a hypothesis that good design is hampered by the current economics crisis. My opinion is that this is false, and that good design is even more important today when there is less economic freedom. It’s when the times are good, we can afford doing poor design.

What I tend to hear a lot from developers, is that interface on internal tools, internal software and management application doesn’t matter. They take it for granted that the individuals that will be using their tools knows or easily learns how to use what they are building. Additionally, we tend to think our application that won’t be used often, so we tend to take shortcuts. I’m as much guilty in this as anyone else.

Good design is important. More so in software that is used on a regular basis and with a large user-base.

(Photo by wasabicube, licensed under Creative Commons)

Why is design important?

Let’s track back a bit and see if we can figure out why design is important and why it’s essential that it’s good. To really understand what’s going on with us on a physical level, we have to look at the esthetics of our software. Aesthetics is the study of our reactions to sensory input, how we are mentally effected by the experience of art, music, nature and so forth. Aesthetics(!?), you might ask? What does that have to do with building computer software?

Everything.

In today’s society, computer software is being used by virtually everyone on the planet. We use it to fill out our tax-returns, reading email, keep in contact with family and friends, fill out time reports at work and play computer games. Every time you use any piece of software, we have an experience, one that is shaped by how the application works and performs. If the application is sluggish, slow and crashes, you will have a negative experience. We all know how infuriated we feel when our computer crashes and freezes up. This infuriating feeling can be spawned by the smallest of things. A button on the wrong location, the wrong text in a dialog, error messages when you didn’t do anything wrong, and so forth.

There are many steps and guidance that can and should be used in a project that develops computer software, that is unfortunate beyond the scope of this article.

Another aspect of the human psychics is our pretentious tendencies. When we do the same tedious tasks over and over again, we tend to avoid reading all the text in dialogs, windows and even error messages. We’ve seen them before and our brains recognize them and categorize them accordingly. Have you ever experienced closing a window dialog, only to quickly realize that you have no idea what you actually accepted or declined?

To show an example on how we prejudiced from our experience and living on a society, have a look at this homework assignment turned in by a 1st Grade Student:

(Image taken from the following reference)

What was the first thing entering your mind when you saw the drawing? Many of you probably draw the same conclusions. That is how we are wired and there’s nothing negative about that, the only important thing to realize is that our first impressions and our prejudice shouldn’t be a deciding factor on your opinions, whether it’s another human being, a company or any other entity.

Use time for design

It’s important to use time and resources to work out a good design for any computer software. How much time and money should be decided by the user-base of your software. The more widespread it’s use will be, and how many hours a day it will be used by those users, is the two metrics you should use.

Every second you can shave of the time a task inside your software takes, that is seconds saved by the individual and the corporation that is dependent on your software. If you make a design that doesn’t follow industry standards, your users will require specialized training to be effective. Additionally there can occur situations that’s “attributed to human errors”. Human errors costs billions of dollars every year and it’s a reason for thousands of humans deaths every year (Looking at the human society as a whole, not just specifically the software industry).

Saved time is money saved.

What worst possible case is when an employee’s job is to use a piece of software that is so bad, that they won’t stick around for long. Would you be able to keep calm and quite if you wasted hours every single day due to computer software problems?

This might possibly strike a nerve in one of the problem spaces in computer software engineering – we don’t share our customers pain. It’s a demanding job to successfully and fully understand the problems of a customer and user, and it’s often not a prioritized task. Especially not on the list of developers, who in many instances is not allowed to communicate with the customer or is separated to be able to concentrate on the task of developing the software. That can end very badly. It’s essential that developers understands the needs, requirements and wishes of their users.

Make sure you have time for design and it should not be an afterthought, it should be the first thing you do in the process of developing any software that is directly used by a human being. There are many industry processes for capturing user requirements through mock-ups, wireframes and so forth, all of which is beyond the scope today. My suggestion is to find some good articles and books that teaches the practices of building good user interfaces and how to capture the user requirements.

Why should you care?

So the moral of the story is, design is equally important to function. If those are in unbalance, the chances of problems are increasing. If your functions are lacking and poor, it doesn’t help if your application has an amazing and fancy interface. It will probably help you sell more licenses, but in the end it can become extremely costly – both for you and your customers.

And I want you to care (as a developer, project manager, decisions taker, designer, etc.), because as a software engineer I take pride in the work that we do. Yes, I said what we do. We are all together in this and together we are progressing, and moving forward.

Everyone can make a difference and if you’re currently in a project that is lacking in design and focus on usability, make yourself heard and everyone will be more happy with the end results.

Is it just me, or is it hot in here?

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:35:00 -1300

Let me introduce you to the quickest and easiest way to start reading sensory data from your Phidgets Interface Kit. In the name of the title, we’re going to make an application that allows us to read the temperature. I own an PhidgetsTextLCD board which is two circuitry boards in one, you need to get your own. This is a fairly simple introduction, so DON'T PANIC.

The first thing you need to do is obviously get yourself one of the interface kits from Phidgets. If you’re lucky and you already have a card, please read on.

Preperations

The very first thing you need to do before you connect the interface kit to your computer, is to download the drivers and software from Phidgets. Go to the following link and download the “Phidgets 21 MSI”.

After installation of the software, you should see a new icon in the tray bar on your start menu. The icon is one with orange letters that says Ph. You can double-click this icon to open up the control panel. Do this now to validate that you’re computer has recognized the interface kit correctly.

Now you can double-click the interface 8/8/8 item and you should see a debug window that allows you to analyze the values received from your interface kit. If you have no sensors attached to your kit, the values will obviously be 0 for everything. My example screenshot below shows values from 3 different analog sensors, it’s an Sharp infrared sensor, temperature sensor and the third is a touch sensor. Use this dialog to validate that the values changes when you manipulate your sensors.

Next step in the process is to obtain an tool to do your programming. My programming language of choice is C#, but if you’re more familiar with others, there are a bunch of examples available on the Phidgets website.

The primary editor for programming C# on Windows is of course Microsoft Visual Studio. For the purpose of this exercise I’m going to use free version that you can download yourself.

Configurations

Now it’s time to have a look at the code we need to write that allows us to read the sensory input. First item of action is to create a new project in Visual Studio. We’ll make a Windows Forms project and call it Mostly Harmless. Now you can add a reference to the Phidget21.NET.dll.

If out of coincidence you are using 64-bit version of Windows, there are two important differences from those still running the older, outdated (and potentially a target for the Vorgons) 32-bit edition. They are as followed:

32-bit path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Phidgets\Phidget21.NET.dll
64-bit path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Phidgets\Phidget21.NET.dll

If you are using 64-bit version of Windows and Visual Studio Express, you can begin to panic just about now.

Next important difference is that you need to ensure your application is running as a 32-bit process. If you don’t do this step, you won’t be able to run it. As it happens, Microsoft did the silly mistake of removing the target option from Visual Studio Express. This means you need to get your hands dirty by editing the Mostly Harmless.csproj file using Notepad – only if you happen to be running a 64-bit version of Windows.

Start by saving everything within Visual Studio and close the tool. Open Notepad and locate your .csproj file. Search for the word “WarningLevel” and you should find two PropertyGroup sections where you need to add an extra element.

Add the following element below the WarningLevel elements within your project file:

<PlatformTarget>x86</PlatformTarget>

For those fortunate and lucky with Visual Studio Standard or better, you can set the build target from the project properties.

That was probably not the oddest thing in the universe, but let’s hope Microsoft makes it easier for those using new technology in the future (consider that a Visual Studio SP2 feature request).

Coding

It’s not without coincidence that the first thing you should do now is not coding, but you can start by designing yourself a modern and good looking interface. Drag a Label control onto the surface of your main form. I named it labelDegrees for further reference. If you want a more fancy UI, you could have a status label that indicates the current connection state of the kit.

Let’s start coding! Go into source view from the form.

First, add a using statement to the top of your source file:

using Phidgets;

Then add a property to your Form class:

public InterfaceKit Kit { get; set; }

Within your forms constructor, add the following lines with code:

public Form1(){    InitializeComponent();    Kit = new InterfaceKit();    // The event handler for the analog sensor.    Kit.SensorChange += new Phidgets.Events.SensorChangeEventHandler(Kit_SensorChange);    // Open connetion to the Phidgets kit.    Kit.open();}

Finally at the end, we add our code to update the label on the form to display the correct sensor value. Remember the Control Panel I mentioned earlier? From that dialog, you should check what index your temperature (or any other sensors you have) sensor is located at. You can see the same index number on the interface kit, so it’s very easy to find the correct index that you need for the next few lines of code.

void Kit_SensorChange(object sender, Phidgets.Events.SensorChangeEventArgs e){    if (e.Index == 1)        labelDegrees.Text = ((e.Value - 200) / 4) + "°";}

And there you have it, your very own computer based temperature gauge! I said don’t panic, it’s actually that easy! I leave it to you to come up with some fancy UI.

Notes

Some final notes about this project.

It’s important to notice that there can be only one application connected to the interface kit at any time. While your application has a connection to the kit, you can’t use the debug tools in the Phidget Control Panel. This works both ways, so if you have the interface kit debug dialog open, your application will not receive any sensor values.

There are additional events on the InterfaceKit object that you can listen to, some important ones are Attach, Detach and Error. These can be useful to update your UI.

When I first started working on this example, I had some code that tried to clean up after the form was closing, by calling the Kit.close method. After some testing, this seem to hang the application a lot of the time, so I removed it. There seem to be no problem allowing the .NET framework to do it’s garbage collection like it should.

I hope you had fun reading this quick introduction to Phidgets communication. Now go and read a book!

Microsoft Tag

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:37:00 -1300

Recent new (beta) technology from Microsoft called Microsoft Tag is a new way of using colorized barcodes to imprint information anywhere and can be read by any device that has a camera. In the future, you will probably see these Tags everywhere. Please read on to hear about my concerns and why Microsoft has to make this open and free to be successful.

Update: After further investigation and thinking, it seems that it’s important to distinguish between Microsoft Tag and HCCB (High Capacity Color Barcodes). HCCB is the specification used by Microsoft Tag to encode an identifier, which is then used to query Microsoft for the real content. Problem with character sets is probably related to the server implementation at Microsoft and not the HCCP specification.

What is it?

It’s simply a way of storing information in a visual barcode. We are all familiar with the normal barcode that has lines in it; almost all products you buy in stores today are marked with one or multiple codes. These are identifiers for the stores to more easily register the products while checking-out.

In recent years there has come up many competing standards for barcodes and the latest update to the scene is High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCB) which comes straight out of Microsoft Research.

To create your own tags, you can visit http://tag.microsoft.com/ and from there you can generate files as PDF, XPS and WMF. I seriously hope Microsoft will be quick to add GIF, JPG, PNG and possibly SVG support very soon.

There are four different types of tags you can make: URL, Text, vCard and Dialer. What’s interesting about this is the way your mobile phone can intelligently react to the various types and information that is stored in the tag. If it’s a website, you can easily launch the URL on your phone. If it’s a vCard, which is an open specification for sharing contact information, your phone will ask if you’d like to add that person to your contact list. The dialer will allow you to quickly dial the company or person that is encoded on the tag.

So what does it look like? Have a look at my own contact tag, or visit my friend Lars Wilhelmsen:

Internationalization

I have a special interest in internationalization as I live in a country in Europe. I live in Norway, and here we have 3 additional characters to the alphabet: ØÆÅ. Additionally, I have worked with customers in countries like Saudi-Arabia which require the use of Unicode at all times to have proper storage and manipulation of information.

So here is the rub with the current implementation of HCCB on my mobile phone: It only supports the top 126 characters in the ANSI codepage. At the current stage I don’t know if this is a flaw in the implementation or a flaw in the specification. That’s impossible for me to know as there is no openness around the specification of the HCCB.

What does all of this mean? It means when you scan the tag I provided earlier, your phone will ask you if you want to add “Bjell?s, Sondre” to your contacts. It is unable to process the character å in my last name. It doesn’t work much better with other characters that are outside the top 126 characters.

Why I even concern myself with these is anyone guess, as Microsoft have often had a tendency to first release their products and services in the US and later to roll out internationally if they have success. With the Xbox, Microsoft did pretty much a world wide release and it’s been very successful. The Zune on the other hand, has not yet been released outside of USA and Canada.

This is what Microsoft states in the FAQ:

Q. Will the Tag beta be available outside of the U.S?
At this time Microsoft Tag will be available to commercial publishers and the general public in the U.S. We have not made any announcements about the availability of Microsoft Tag outside of the U.S., but we will explore the possibility of making the Beta available in other countries.

So I shouldn’t really be blogging about this technology, as it’s not something that’s available to us. Something similar happened when Microsoft released Windows Live Mesh Technology Preview. It was only available to users in the US, though after massive pressure from the online users, they expanded their support to more countries.

With the birth of the Internet, we’ve seen how little country borders really matter. We are all living on the same planet and experiencing the same Internet. We watch the same news and can access the same services, from anywhere and from any computer (if we ignore the fact that certain countries filter, blocks, hide and alter content).

There is always government policies and regulations to blame on, when in fact you don’t want a service to be used certain places; though a company as big as Microsoft, with all their international resources and experience; they do not have the luxury of such an excuse.

Privacy Concerns

Privacy is important and we’re losing it more and more. As identity thefts have become more common (and very easy to do) we need to always concern ourselves with the information we give away.

One thing I discovered with Microsoft Tag is the following: if you name the tag within the creation website with international characters, the mobile phone software will be unable to recognize the tag. I must admit that I was baffled by the fact that it didn’t even handle that. This got me thinking that the actual name of the tag on the website might possibly be imprinted on the tag itself. That’s a major privacy issue and there is no mentioning of this on the Microsoft website.

Then we have the reporting. When you scan a tag, they are sent to Microsoft for analysis. It’s not the mobile phone that does the recognition of the tag photo, it is Microsoft servers. This should be a privacy concern for the consumer that “reads” these tags on their mobile phones. The mobile software actually asks you if you want to publish location information to the tag owner as you scan the tags.

While this is very convenient for the companies that does advertisements, it will be a blocking issue for many other usages.

Costs and Open Standards

I would think there is a lot of money involved in these types of tags through barcodes. I tried to dig up some information on costs for producers that print barcodes on their books and groceries, but I couldn’t find anything. Though from what I know of barcodes, they are very simple and basic protocols. In my current project at work, we’re actually imprinting two tags on some automated document generation. We’re relying on the Barcode 39 and Barcode 128 standards for our need.

Another alternative barcode is the Semacode, which uses Data Matrix specification and is an open ISO specification for encoding URLs in the tag. The Semacode website states that Semacode tags are an "open system" and that tag creation is "completely unrestricted," with the SDK software tools being free of charge for non-commercial use.

Data Matrix is in the public domain for many applications, which means it can be used free of any licensing or royalties. The widely use standard in Japan is QR Code, which is protected by a patent but its rights is not exercised.

So to cover the costs aspect of Microsoft Tag, they state the following in the FAQ:

And in the event that Microsoft decides to charge publishers to use Tags, any Tags that were created and used during the beta, will continue to work, free of charge, for at least two years.

When it comes to the specification of the HCCB standard I was unable to find anything on the web. This is somewhat a concern for me, considering the fact that HCCB has the potential of becoming a mainstream protocol of data tags.

It’s essential that technologies likes this is based around open principles that allows for a vibrant ecosystem to evolve around it, with services, products, gadgets and so forth all coming together.

Why might it fail?

I’m predicting that the Microsoft Tag technology might fail within a short time if it doesn’t go through some drastic changes. These are my reasons:

Lack of open specification.
Lack of commitment to royalty free use.
Requirement to acquire a license to use the technology.
Dependent on centralize server technology.
- If the Microsoft servers are down, your phone won’t be able to recognize tags.
Lack of international support through Unicode.

It has to be decentralized and it has to work locally. The phone should analyze the tag and no communication should be sent to Microsoft, that way it will actually work deep inside a basement or at the cinema which might block mobile traffic.

Let’s hope for a better tomorrow and I will continue to follow the progress of Microsoft Tag from its current beta stage and hope that it’s use can be applicable for more than just publishers of books, DVDs, etc.

Technology Prediction for 2009

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (SondreB) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:03:00 -1300

Read about my technology predictions for 2009 and how I did for 2008.

As a Microsoft Regional Director and Technology Leader at Capgemini in Norway, part of my responsibility is to see and predict trends and change in the technology and software industry (I wrote this sentence without reading what I wrote last year, and to my surprise it’s almost identical). When I went back to look at my 2008 predictions, I realized that I didn’t really make any concrete predictions. So for this year I will actually make a whole bunch of concrete predictions, many which is very obvious, but all of which I’m bringing to the table to make a point of what’s going on.

We’ve always been pretty bad at predicting the far future, we still don’t have flying cars or personal robots that assist us – yet these are ideas that were thought to be with us a long time ago. Though we are bad at predicting the far future, we are much worse at predicting the consequences of change in the immediate future. Few predicted that everyone would have computers when it was first invented, who could have predicted that there would be more mobile phone subscriptions that citizens in Norway? This happened years ago, who knows what the next major change in technology evolution will be.

I’m pretty sure we can all say that 2008 was the year of Web 2.0 and Social Networking Services like Facebook and micro-blogging through services like Twitter. What the major players in 2009 will be is yet unknown, but here is my attempt to “predict” what will happen and how the shape of our industry will be at the end of 2009.

(Photo by rutty, licensed under Creative Commons)

The Obvious

Computers have become the essential tool and companion for millions of people in today's society. The price, quality and performance of our computers is essential for us to be successful in our jobs and tasks. If the computer keeps hanging, crashing and reboot, you’re not going to be happy. If you’re battery life is less than optimal, you’ll be plugged in more often than is effective.

So in 2009 we will have computers with 8-cores, that mean on a single CPU, you will essentially have the power of 8 individual computer processors. While the performance from multiple cores is not linear, it opens up new abilities for software programmers to utilize the simultaneous computation capabilities. Software has been lagging behind CPUs for a while now, but with innovations like the CCR and DSS Toolkit (technologies that forms the foundation for Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio) which is now available standalone separately from MRDS and the Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework will hopefully rectify some of this and make it simpler for programmers to do better CPU-cores utilization. CPUs will now enter 32 nm production and further reduce the power requirements and heat leakage/production.

More GPGPU’s (programmable general purpose graphics processors) will be made available and many custom computer builders will make their own super-computers in their homes. These super-computers will be used for both good and bad. GPUs will come with 16-cores and a total of 64 threads.

In terms of memory capabilities, we will see laptops that will take is into the range of 16 and 32 GB of RAM. Most laptops today is limited to 4GB, and if you’re running a 32-bit operating system you’re not even utilizing the full 4GB.

Windows 7 is now out in the first beta and is looking very strong. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into improving upon the Windows Vista foundation and have done a very good job so far. My prediction is that a lot of corporations and users will jump directly from Windows XP to Windows 7, and those who’s already on Vista will quickly migrate over to 7.

Computer prices have up until 2007-2008 been pretty stable, for the exact same money you could get an improved computer of which you had purchase some years earlier, but 2007-2008 changed this and made the whole computer landscape more fragmented. Today you can buy top laptops that are in the top-range of $1500-$2000 and in 2009 I predict we will see $199 netbooks.

The Problems

2009 will represent many new peaks of problems, just as 2008 did. The production of computers and digital equipment is not good for the environment and as more people have improvements in their ways of lives (China has today more dollar-millionaires than the USA) they will want to buy and acquire the latest gadgets and computers. It’s very important that we keep a pressure on the manufacturers to respect the environment and the safety of their employees.

That prices are going down is positive and makes equipment more available for poorer regions of the world, yet it will further drive the buy-use-throw mentality of richer countries. An $199 netbook doesn’t even account for 10% of the monthly salary of most of us, yet the countryside of China which has more than 800 million people have an average income of $560 a year. Yet their income is increasing at an annual rate of more than 10 percent.

As everyone goes online, we will see an increase in the need for education on netiquette for everyone. Who’s there to explain new computer owners how to use their computers and how to act in the online digital world? When you see how many individuals that are tricked in the daily life and have their money stolen or tricked from them – buying useless stuff and participating in “help programs” which could be a scam.

When we use a computer, we tend to be a lot more trusting than in the real world. We are more open to the idea of exposing ourselves and we gladly communicate intimate details to “strangers”. Part of this trust comes from a concept I’ve coined morphi. Read more about that on the link. I will write more on morphi in the future.

Identity thefts will become more common in 2009. In 2008 you had your Windows Live ID that protected your Live Messenger and Live Mail (Hotmail), yet in 2009 when Microsoft releases Windows Live Mesh, many will begin to store a lot more than communication on the Cloud. Considering the amount of personal information that can be stolen by guessing (or hacking) a users password, it’s scary that we still don’t have a good solution for this problem. We need a better architecture for authentication than usernames and passwords.

The Good

Never before will you be able to meet likeminded people on the net. You’ll quickly make new friends and share thoughts, experience and ideas on a global scale.

Your information will become to move into the Cloud and you’ll never lose anything due to a computer crash. All your photos, e-mails, communications, contacts and so forth will be stored in the Cloud. Settings and configuration of your applications can also be stored online, so when you get a new computer or mobile phone – they will be able to sync with the Cloud and retrieve your personalized settings.

More devices in 2009 will be GPS and wireless network capabilities built into them. You’ll be able to capture and stream video, photos and audio from the action where it’s happening and share it with your online communities. These new devices and the simple procedure of actually publishing video logs, I predict we will see an explosion of lifecasting in 2009. Lifecasting is the communication form of streaming your experiences life onto the net for anyone to see. They can become your third eye and share whatever you are doing. This cheap form of video distribution will open up the ability to watch virtually any sports event in the world for free, without a TV subscription or even a computer. You’ll be able to watch the local football game on your mobile phone on the bus – since someone at the match decided to share the game.

Another area we will see changes is the music industry. Music industry has messed up miserably with their online and digital efforts. They have tried to stop the unstoppable and ignored every opportunity to go forward and being innovative. If services like Last.fm and Spotify is any indication on what’s going on, I’m sure the labels needs to reconsider how they will distribute music and earn money.

What’s cool about Spotify is their online (“Cloud”) stored playlists. Additionally they have collaboration playlists, which allows multiple individuals to contribute to the same playlist.

Here is a scenario you will experience many times in 2009: You go to a party and connected to the stereo is a computer laptop. It’s running Spotify and music is streamed out through the speakers. You step up to the laptop and login with your own account and starts playing your private playlist of the best party-music in history.

2009 will mark the start of the death of the MP3 players. While this is not entirely the truth, it does represent an evolutionary step towards something new. Synchronizing music between computer and music players is something everyone hates. It takes an awful long time and it basically feels such a useless task. Manufacturers have for many years had the ability to earn extra money on top-range devices; getting 16GB of storage on your iPhone instead of 8GB costs you money. What if I tell you that storage on music players will go away?

It will all be streaming based and you will be able to access your full music library from anywhere in the world, directly on your digital entertainment device. I say digital entertainment device because I know there will be a huge array of gadgets available for us. Portable gaming machines, music and video players, communication devices, mobile phones – they will all be viewers into the online Cloud storage you accumulate.

As you might have figured already, I think Cloud-based Computing will be the biggest thing of 2009 and it represents a new form of software and services delivery. It will not replace anything we have today, but it will extend our ability to choose how we architecture and run our software.

The Bad

We are currently in a race towards point unknown. We’re in a race against the machines and we are doomed to eventually loose on all accounts.

It’s becoming increasingly complex and hard to work in the field of technology. The life of software programmers is especially hard with the increasing number of people with havoc and chaos in their intents. Hackers lure all around the web and they will try their best to exploit a failure in the solution we are building. Computer security is very hard and all it takes is one small mistake. While we won’t be writing bug-free computer software any time soon, there are ways of building mechanisms around that supports your solution with security, failure and so forth.

Yet what I mean with this race against the machine is that we have become an information based society. More of our daily jobs require us to know the latest frameworks, latest software and latest patterns & practices of doing our jobs. Yet, there are few corporations that have taken the steps to change themselves and realize that it’s not an easy task to keep you in-shape for the tasks of tomorrow.

Combined together with the fact that in 2009 we will produce a mind-blowing amount of information and you will receive more e-mails than before, we’re set for disaster unless we do something about it. What we will need is a personal digital assistant. Today we have non-intelligent spam-filters that can throw away some of the noise that comes over the network, yet our human brains are not good at distinguishing which e-mails are important or not. Not until we actually sit down, read through and analyze. This is something we hopefully can handle to our software-based assistants in the near future. I have hopes for seeing the beginning of such software sometime in 2009.

We will see more people that is required to take days and possibly weeks “offline” to recover from the stress it puts on us participating in this economy.

Privacy is a concern for many and in 2009 it will get much worse, yet it depends on your own personal actions. If you are participating in online communities, all that you write on the computer will potentially be accessible to everyone. Make sure you protect your address, phone numbers and other personal details and only share on a need-to-know basis.

Phishing will become an ever increasing problem as more new net-citizens arrive online. How we are going to solve the problem with education of sensible computer and net use is hard to tell, yet I think the computer manufacturers have a responsibility here. They can no longer get away with just throwing anti-virus and firewalls into the systems, there has to be sensible educational material directly available before the users connect to the network.

Conclusions

I’m not able to cover even the top layer of what’s going on in 2009 and I have so many other ideas to share. Hopefully I will get back to you all on this in a somewhat different form, later this year…

So to conclude my predictions, here are the highlights:

Cloud-based Computing will be big in all its forms.
Computers will become faster and better.
Digital Entertainment Devices (including MIDs) will have a lot of focus.
We will see the beginning of intelligent and emotional software.
There will be many disasters (both nature and man-made) and everything will be covered by the media, so you can watch it anywhere.
Hundreds of thousands of new robots will be deployed and the robotics industry will grow by billions of dollars.

Windows Live Essentials 2009 RC

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:17:29 -1300

Microsoft is getting closer to the final release of Windows Live Essentials 2009 and here are my discoveries from the release candidate that was recently made available.

If you don’t care about reading my review, go over to Live and download WLE2009 at http://download.live.com/

Introduction

I have always had an interest in the Windows Live platform of tools and services. I have followed the evolution of it and covered it previously on my blog. Where does this interest come from?

If you are like me, you might be using the tools provided by the Windows Live platform. I use them every single day and they are very much essential for me to be able to communicate effectively, blog more easily, read my e-mails, follow up on other blogs and organize my tens of thousand of photos that I have stored on my Windows Home Server. So yes, I have a profound interest in the quality and features of Windows Live Essentials (WLE from now on) and it’s services.

While I won’t go into a big comparison between the previous beta and the new release candidate, I will show some screenshots on the difference where it makes sense.

Let’s first start with a screenshot of the unified installer for WLE. You can see the full list of tools in the screenshot below and in the release candidate they included the Microsoft Office Live Add-in, which is an add-in that extends Office with better support for opening and saving documents to your Office Live Workspace. Additionally there is a Microsoft Office Outlook Connector that enables you to see your Hotmail account (e-mails and calendars) from within Outlook. I’m betting on Microsoft adding Windows Live Sync to the family of WLE sooner or later and Family Safety is something I won’t cover for another years :-)

Windows Live Essentials

The whole WLE is a package of many separate tools, developed (probably) by different teams at Microsoft. It’s obvious they don’t use the same UI-library for all of them and they do have some subtle differences that becomes apparent when you use them. While I understand the difficulties of managing the whole suite and making sure that everyone is on the same page, I think it’s important to do a good job when they have decided to make this into a seamless suite of tools. I want the toolbars and menus to have the exact same look, style and possibilities, whether it’s Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Mail – you get the idea.

Going back to the beta versions, the differences was bigger and everything has become more unified now. Things will probably be even better when the final versions is released. First thing first, the suite has some beautiful new icons!

One of the biggest feedback that I see a lot of people is having, is the lack of icons and visual indicators. Everything is being “cleaned up” and Microsoft’s comment is that they want to focus on the content, the stuff that is important to you and not the application itself. While this is a good philosophy, it’s easy to overdo something that is good. I’m still not convinced that it’s a good idea to remove the icons, we humans are visual beings and up until now it has been possible to use a computer in a foreign language just because you remember locations and icons, not so much going forward. Biggest change in this regard between the beta and the release candidate is the total removal of anything called icons in Windows Live Mail. Have a look at my before and after screenshots of the e-mail folders.

There is no denying that the new version is more slick

Windows Live Messenger

When the first beta of the new WLE arrived I quickly realized which direction Microsoft is going. My initial comment was that I didn’t think “Thanks for your patience” during the login process was any useful. I know that the application is not intelligent and I know that it’s not sincere when it thanks me and when it apologies to me when something goes wrong. My feedback from Microsoft on this was that this is the direction they are going, making the applications more “social” and friendly.

A quick digression from WLE, but still relevant: I have been thinking on something for a while, how we humans attribute non-human creatures and objects with human characteristics, like feelings and intent. Dog owners think their pets understand their feelings and we tend (particularly computer programmers) to establish a love and hate relationship with our computers, mobile phones and other devices. This is called Anthropomorphism. With this basis, I formed a new concept that I have called morphi. morphi is the concept of machines, computers and software that behaves as-if they possess human characteristics and I think it’s one of the next big evolutionary steps in software, and the stepping stone towards general artificial intelligence and humanoid robots. You can read more about morphi at http://morphi.me/.

So I am no longer against this personalization and humanization of computer software, in fact I endorse it and I hope more will follow. What we are seeing today is still just tiny baby steps towards software that will truly be able to work together with you, instead of being a completely inanimate piece of technology that only does your bidding.

Moving on to WLE again, the left screenshot shows the previous beta of Live Messenger and the right shows the newly refreshed Messenger. As you can see it’s a lot cleaner, less mess and noise. The focus is on what’s important: username, password, sign in status and the button. Everything else is hidden nicely away. And it even greets you a welcome back! “Did Messenger miss me? How did it know I was gone? Well, I’m happy that Messenger likes that I’m back. It’s time to have some fun!”

Next screenshot shows the main window with my contacts, favorites, groups and so forth. One thing they did to clean it up was to make the number of unread e-mails show 99+ if you go beyond that. Right now, I have 2664 unread e-mails on my primary Hotmail account, and in the old Messenger it did not look very nice. I really don’t care if I have 1500 unread or 2500 unread, this is (99+) probably not as useful as the full unread e-mail count, least not for me, but for others, maybe?

Chat windows have been freshened up a little bit (in the earlier beta and new release candidate). Two of the most welcome features for me is the ability to clean up the UI (hide both action toolbar and display pictures) and personalized background themes. I’m sure there are some of you that have not noticed yet, but depending on the theme you pick on your messenger (changed by clicking the top-right corner of main window) your friends will see YOUR theme when you are talking with them, and you’re seeing their theme. This puts a bit more personal feel to the chats.

Notification window now has rounded corners and background shadow.
It looks pretty slick :-)

Windows Live Mail

WLM is the most important piece in WLE. E-mail is very important to millions of people worldwide and most of us sends a bunch of e-mails every day. For many, Microsoft Office Outlook has been the primary e-mailing client. I use a combination of WLM, Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Google Apps (GMail) and Hotmail (web-client). My time within Outlook has been seriously reduced the last year, thanks not only to WLM, but Outlook has become a huge resource hog. I find myself launching a browser and using Outlook Web Access more than I start Outlook, yet there are many features missing from OWA.

Mail

View by Conversation is finally working on WLM and that’s probably the best new feature for me (maybe it’s always worked, but now the option is enabled in the menu, though it changes the layout. Why can’t we have the default layout with View by Conversation? Consider that a feature-request!). The only reason why I’m not complaining about the icon removal is that it’s now changed into a list box instead of a normal tree view. Or rather, it’s a tree control with selections taking full width. Somehow it works for me, though I still wish there was icons to quickly identify Inbox, Junk and so forth.

One interesting rename is Send/receive which is now named Sync. That’s a interesting change, considering that Send/receive is something that has been with us for a long while in e-mail applications, yet we live in a different world today. We used to have POP accounts and download our e-mails to the local computer, but today, most of us use IMAP or other protocols and store all our e-mails in the cloud.

Where did the Print button go? Sure you can modify the toolbar and add it, yet it’s removed by default. Maybe Microsoft is being proactive in the IT dream of an paperless office :-)

Context menus in WLM is a bit strange. They are all different depending on what you right click on in a received e-mail, and when you’re writing a new one, there are two different menus for the To and Subject fields. Strange if you ask me. Probably nobody other than me that cares about these things…

WLW does color schemes a whole lot better now. The color is gradient from the top and the bottom and the color picker is smooth. I hope they are giving the same treatment to Windows Live Writer as well, cause it’s color picker is ugly. Have a look at the differences and I hope they add Windows Color option everywhere, I want my apps to have same color theme as my desktop. Windows Live Photo Gallery still don’t have support for changing the color scheme, how come?

Calendar

Back in some of the earlier betas of WLE there was no Calendar option within WLM. I predicted that it would come soon, and surely it did (pretty obvious it had to happen). It’s a very simple and nice looking calendar – and very obvious that it lacks a whole deal of features. You can’t for instance subscribe to a new calendar using the rich calendar tool, instead you have to login to http://calendar.live.com/ and add new calendars from there. I think we can expect Microsoft to take this tool a few steps forward in later releases and I hope it gets some focus, cause it’s an important piece of functionality.

Agenda and To-do list are two other features that is available online, but not in the tool.

Feeds

Favorites and Feeds is something Microsoft should store online for us. I don’t understand why Internet Explorer still only stores bookmarks on the local machine. There is a Live service for storing favorites, it just needs to tie into the Feeds tab in WLM and the Favorites tab in IE.

http://favorites.live.com/

Feedback: Manage Your Feeds opens the new dialog window in the primary monitor if you have multiple-monitors connected to your computer. This is a small annoyance, but it should be fixed.

Contacts

Small upgrades since the beta, nothing interesting to write about. I have decided to start using my Windows Live Contacts register as my primary register for contacts. That means I have to do some work to clean up my list, as it contains 522 contacts today and I have even more inside Outlook.

How do you manage a contact list of that many people? You don’t. Instead, you delegate the problem of keeping up-to-date contact information to everybody you know. Windows Live Contacts allows you to automatically receive contact updates. Just click the button to request contact updates. You no longer need to use third party services or tools to get this functionality.

Feedback to Microsoft: Please make it possible to delete custom metadata. What this means, is that I want anything custom details I write on my contacts to be deleted when I’m receiving updated information. If I manually enter the address to a contact and they update their profile information – I won’t get that information. It should obviously be possible to decide if you want to keep your custom information or the update details. This way, you won’t loose anything and be more in control of the information.

I’m currently working on a small utility that will help me synchronize between Windows Live Contacts and Outlook (Exchange) contacts. More on this in a future blog post.

Newsgroups

It’s been a while since I was an active NNTP user, but WLM continue to have support for Newsgroups. It’s a protocol that is still being heavily used, but I wouldn’t be able to stick with WLM if I was a heavy newsgroup user. For that it needs a lot more features, like watching (tracking) a specific thread. Simple way to see all follow-up posts in threads I participate in, some statistics and intelligent agent that helps me use it and participate in a productive way on newsgroups.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

WLPG has become a very powerful photo management tool. It’s very enjoyable to use and now it even recognizes human faces in the photographs. You can tag your photos with contacts from your Windows Live Contacts. That’s a very handy feature.

I have one big feature request to Microsoft (already said this before) and that is: please add a “full size” mode to the the browse mode in WLPG. What I mean by that is the ability to display photos in a “full-size” mode without actually “opening” them by double-clicking. It doesn’t have to be absolutely original size of the photos, but it should be displayed as big as the window allows one individual photo to take up the full screen real-estate. That would make it much faster to scroll through photos in a folder.

Here is the photo from the time I meet Steve Ballmer together with other Norwegian .NET User Group leaders. As you can see, I don’t have SteveB in my Windows Live Contacts list yet so I was unable to tag him on my photo.

Microsoft continues to expand the options for editing a photo, I just wish they had added a live-preview feature to the editing options. When the user hovers the effects, it should automatically applied the effect to the photo – instead of forcing me to apply the effect and undoing if I did not like it.

Windows Live Writer

Not much to write home about on WLW. There are some small improvements all over but no radical differences from the previous beta. My biggest feature request for WLW in the future is an open XML format. The files that WLW makes today in the drafts folder is created using Structured Storage API. I want to read and edit the WLW files using my mobile phone and possibly write some desktop utilities that parse the files and automatically adds content/changes to my drafts. WLW support extensibility through add-ins, though I would much rather like to manipulate the files directly without relying on a COM interface.

Here is a thread I started on this topic: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/writergeneral/thread/442f0687-fa5f-42ad-8a21-6f0fa2374bfa/

Windows Movie Maker Beta

This is the only tool in the WLE that is still in beta and for good reason. It’s still (as I reported earlier) pretty much a shell of a whole new engine that Microsoft has made for Movie Maker. I’m expecting that we will see more features in this tool going forward and I won’t bother writing much about it at the current stage. If you are a happy user of Windows Movie Maker, you should continue to use that or get something better.

Conclusions

So there you have it, WLE is shaping up to become a very nice suite of tools and it’s been interesting following the evolution so far. If you have suggestions, complaints or problems with WLE, you should make sure to tell Microsoft about it. I promise you, they are really listening to their users and they are primarily building WLE for us. If we are happy, then Microsoft is happy. If you’re not happy, then tell Microsoft about it!

Until next time, be safe!

Getting Started with Live Framework

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:40:31 -1300

Abstract: Get a quick introduction on how you can start interacting with the Live Framework APIs using the SDK made available on the Microsoft Connect site.

Note: You need access to the Microsoft Connect program to download the Live Framework SDK that will allow you to interact with the Live Framework (and Live Mesh) APIs.

What is the Live Framework?

The Live Framework consists of three main components. They are as followed:

The resource model: REST APIs that gives you access to Live Mesh and Windows Live information.
API libraries: Libraries for .NET, JavaScript and Silverlight that makes it easier to communicate with the REST APIs.
The Live Operating Environment: The local instance of the Live Mesh that runs on your computer and hosts the REST APIs.

To read more about the basics of Live Framework, check out the MSDN Documentation.

Above diagram (taken from the MSDN documentation) shows the resource model. The following example will demonstrate how you can connect to the Mesh Operating Environment and iterate over all your Mesh devices and using the same codebase show how you can iterate over all your Live Contacts.

Create Your Project

The first thing you need to do is create a new Visual Studio project. For the purpose of this post we’ll create a new Console application. If you have followed the installation instructions for Live Framework SDK, you should have tree .NET assemblies in the following folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Live Framework SDK\v0.9\Libraries\.Net Library

Add a reference to all the assemblies in that folder, Microsoft.LiveFX.Client.dll, Microsoft.LiveFX.ResourceModel.dll, Microsoft.Web.dll. Additionally you need to add a reference to the WindowsBase.dll, which you can find in the .NET tab in the Add Reference dialog.

Copy the following example code into your Program.cs and replace the existing Main method.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Fill out Live ID:");
    string username = Console.ReadLine();
    
    Console.WriteLine("Fill out password:");
    string password = Console.ReadLine();

    Connect(username, password);

    Console.WriteLine("");
    Console.WriteLine("Your Mesh Devices:");

    foreach (var device in _environment.Mesh.Devices.Entries.ToArray())
    {
        Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", device.Resource.Type, device.ToString());
    }

    Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit.");
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Secondly, you need a few using statements in the top of your file, some private fields and an utility method that will connect you to the Live Mesh.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using Microsoft.LiveFX;
using Microsoft.LiveFX.Client;
using Microsoft.LiveFX.ResourceModel;
using System.Net;
using Microsoft.Web;
using Microsoft.Web.Clients;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using CommunicationsConsole.Properties;
using Communications.Common;

The Connect method that you should include in your Program.cs file.

private static LiveOperatingEnvironment _environment;
private static string _meshUrl = @"https://user-ctp.windows.net";

private static void Connect(string Username, string Password)
{
    Uri meshCloudUri = new Uri(_meshUrl);

    NetworkCredential credentials = new NetworkCredential(Username, Password);

    LiveItemAccessOptions accessOptions = new LiveItemAccessOptions(true);

    _environment = new LiveOperatingEnvironment();
    _environment.Connect(credentials);
}

And that’s it, you can test your application by pressing F5 and see how your console application connects to the Live Mesh. Beware: The above example will display your password in clear text in the console application. In the source code for this post, there is code that will mask the password input.

What’s Next?

If you take another look at the resources diagram, you might come up with some ideas on what to do next. My next example shows you how simple it is to iterate over all your Windows Live Contacts once you’ve established the connection.

There is only one problem with my example here, the API call seems to only return 99 contacts. While debugging I found a possible clue that it’s doing paging, but I’m not sure how to actually query the Live Framework with the paging support. Maybe if I changed my code to use LINQ instead of a normal loop?

Edit: I found a solution to the problem with good help from Angus Logan at the Windows Live Team. You can use the .Take method to return more than the initial 99 contacts. The updated foreach is visible below.

This is how you can iterate over your contacts and display their names and Live IDs (e-mail address).

foreach (var contact in _environment.Contacts.Entries.Take(_environment.Contacts.Entries.Count()))
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", contact.Resource.DisplayName, 
                                  contact.Resource.WindowsLiveId);
}

There is a big lack of documentation, examples and walkthroughs for Live Framework SDK. It’s a very new technology so it’s not easy to find good resources yet. I hope this post was helpful for you and inspired you to take a look at the Live Framework SDK.

Live Framework Sample by Sondre Bjellås is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Bring your photos to the party

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:55:00 -1300

Abstract: Learn how to use Windows Live Mesh to carry your Flickr photos with you on your Windows Mobile phone.

For years I’ve relied on Flickr as my service for hosting photos that I’m willing to share with friends and others. Yet there has never been a good way of downloading all the Flickr photos, there has been some third party tools that used the Flickr API (I’ve developed one myself) – but these have been “shut down” by Flickr due to privacy and copyright issues.

What do I mean with the title, “Bring your photos to the party”?

It’s fine to put your photos on Flickr, but sometimes there is that special photo you want to show to someone while you’re on the bus or at a party. Yet, you don’t have internet connection or a computer easily available. That’s why I made this solution that uses Flickr .NET API and Live Mesh to do synchronization between your mobile and PC.

Installing Windows Live Mesh

If you don’t have Windows Live Mesh on your computer yet, it’s about time to get it. Live Mesh is a new tool from Microsoft that allows you to easily sync, share, and access the information you care about. You can share your photos, documents, videos, settings or whatever file you have laying around. In the future, you will be able to install and developer your own custom applications against the Live Mesh.

Open the Live Mesh site in your web browser to sign in and download the Live Mesh Client.

https://www.mesh.com/

From this website, you can register the current machine and you can access the other machines remotely. There is additionally a Live Desktop which is a rich Silverlight client that runs in the web browser and gives you access to all your content wherever you are. On holiday and need to upload some travel photos? No problem, just hit the Live Mesh website and upload without any installation (as long as you have the Silverlight plugin).

Getting Live Mesh on your Windows Mobile

If you have a Windows Mobile device, you can install the rich client directly on your mobile phone by visiting https://m.mesh.com/ and logging in with your Live ID. If you access the web site, you can choose to install the client or use the mobile version of the web interface. This means you can access Live Mesh using any device that has a web browser, for example a Nokia or Apple iPhone.

Notice: ~~Currently Microsoft have only opened up Live Mesh Mobile for customers in the US or UK. So to access the mobile client, you need a Windows Live ID that is registered in the US or the UK.~~

Update: Live Mesh Mobile is now accessible for everyone that activates it using a specially formed URL. Read about it here.

Configuring Folders

Feel free to configure your shared folders how you’d like. By default, Live Mesh Mobile will create a folder called “Mobile Pictures” that maps to your local pictures folder on your phone. This is fine and I would just leave it like that, this means all the photos you capture with the phone camera will be synchronized with your PC. My suggestion is to create a sub-folder within the Mobile Pictures called Flickr. This is the location where we will download photos from the Flickr photo service.

Example path on my computers: C:\Users\Sondre\Desktop\Mobile Pictures\Flickr

Getting Photos from Flickr

To get content from Flickr you can use their open web API directly, or you can utilize an existing .NET API developer by Sam Judson called Flickr.Net.

So to get started, let’s launch Visual Studio and create a new project. You can use your favorite UI framework to do this, be it a Console Application, Windows Presentation Foundation or in my case, Windows Forms.

With your project created you can continue by adding a reference to the newly downloaded FlickrNet.dll that you found on the CodePlex site.

Next step is to write some code that integrates with the authentication mechanism of Flickr. This is not a necessary step if you are developing this for your own project – but since there might be someone that want to download the example program from this post and just run it, we need to do the following.

Apply for Flickr API key

Flickr has started with two types of API keys, non-commercial and commercial keys. For this project we’ll apply for a non-commercial. Visit the website and apply for an key: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/keys/apply/.

On the next step Flickr asks us to fill out some details on our project.

When the submit is completed you will receive your API key and secret. These two values are important to make your communication with the Flickr API work.

There are plenty of examples on how to do the authorization of your custom application. I won’t go into the details in this post, but in the source code for this project I have done some code that will handle everything for you. All you need to do is configure your API key and secret in the FlickrService.cs file.

Edit the two following lines with your own key and secret:

private static string _apiKey = "645f3f0d9c98xxxxx1fbed70d341";
private static string _sharedSecret = "bfc2bfxxxxx1b9";

Running the Flickr2Mesh Application

When you first launch the Flickr2Mesh application, you can choose which folder you have enabled Live Mesh to synchronize. Then you need to authenticate the application to allow Read permission to your photo albums. While this step is not absolutely necessary, it will allow the application to download photos that have been tagged with access only to yourself, your friends or your family. For the purpose of this post, we do not support custom user name to be filled out in the application. Please respect the copyright of individual photographers and respect the policy of Flickr if you decide to extend the Flickr2Mesh application with the ability to download anyone's photos.

So the first step is to decide which folder the application should download all your photos. The next step is to click the authentication link at the bottom to authorize the application to access your photos.

When you click the Authorize button your default web browser will open Flickr.com and you should login with your credentials. After you’ve logged in, you will be presented with a page to confirm the authorization of Flickr2Mesh.

Once accepted the agreement, you can go back to the Flickr2Mesh application.

Click the Complete button to finalize the steps of authenticating Flickr2Mesh.

Flickr2Mesh is now fully authenticated and you should see your Flickr user name display at the bottom of the application. The download button becomes enabled and you can start downloading all your Flickr photos in Small, Medium, Large or Original. By default it’s set to Small which is a good size for mobile phones. If you have one of those fancy new mobiles with 800x480 pixels, I suggest you go with the Medium settings or even the Large. If the application doesn’t find the specified size of an photo, it skips that download.

For the purpose of this post, I won’t add any addition filters than the photo size. If you have a huge library of photos on Flickr, I suggest you add additional filters like search text, specific photoset or some properties that you can filter on with the Flickr API. My suggestion is making a photoset where you put all your Mobile photos.

Now Flickr2Mesh will proceed to download all your photos in the size you selected into the folder of your choice. On your task bar you might start to see the Live Mesh icon start to animate. This means it’s currently synchronizing the photos are you are downloading from Flickr.

If you want to start using the Flickr2Mesh application right now, you can download the finished application from the link here. The full source code is also available for those who want to dig deeper into the Flickr integration and extend it with your own features.

Source Code

Instead of doing a walkthrough on how to write the application from scratch, you can download the compiled binary or the source code. The application is pretty simple but fully functional. It’s a starting point that you can easily extend to do additional actions with the Flickr photo service. Source is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, that means you can do (almost) whatever you want with it.

What’s next?

Remember that Live Mesh currently supports up to 5GB of online storage. If you go beyond this size, files will no longer be available on the Live Desktop but they will continue to sync between your computers and mobile phone. Microsoft have said earlier that you will be able to specify if a shared folder should be uploaded to the cloud or just work with a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mechanism between your PCs. So far I have not seen an option to turn off online sync.

~~Hopefully Microsoft will open up Live Mesh Mobile to the rest of the world soon~~ (it is now available for anyone), that way everyone can experience the benefits of having a rich Live Mesh client everywhere you go.

Hope this introduction to Windows Live Mesh and Flickr Photo Service has been useful and check back later for more Live Mesh development.

Flickr2Mesh by Sondre Bjellås is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Microsoft’s bold new design initiative

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:46:58 -1300

As of late Microsoft have started a new path in their design and user experiences (UX). This is starting to become evident in their Windows Live Essentials package, Windows 7 and their websites. Why is this so important that I’m writing a blog post on the subject? Let me start with some background on my history.

Growing up I was fortunate to have a dad that worked in printing as a typographer. He was one of the first individuals in Norway to purchase an Apple Macintosh and lucky me, I was able to play around with his computers. One of my hobbies as a youngster was to design and write newspapers that I walked around and sold in the neighborhood. During this time I spent a lot of time with my farther who teaches me how to design well formed flow in the layout. Fast forward some years and I received my own Macintosh on which I formed a passion for graphical design and web sites. That’s how I got my first job, as a web designer back before the DotCom Bobble. My career as designer didn’t live for long as I quickly moved into coding and built web sites for a living. With my background I’ve always had an interested in the esthetics of just about everything from building architecture, to car design and computer software.

My vision of great software is 50% design and 50% functionality/quality. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if it doesn’t have a usable (and good looking) interface, you’ll have a hard time selling it to your customers. Design is very important in our lives, we see it every day in advertisements, newspapers and magazines. First impressions is important and in designer clothes people takes notice of you. But having a good design (aka. expensive clothes) doesn’t mean your successful, intelligent or any better than everyone else.

Which brings me on to the battle of operating systems: Microsoft have for many years had a benefit from their standardized UI guidelines. Third party developers on the Windows platform have thrived and most ISVs have followed the established guidelines. It made it easier to sell (for third parties) and easier to teach and learn by those who’s required to use the software.

Things are about to change…

With the advent of Mac OS X, we saw a new direction at which the desktop is becoming a visual design statement in it’s own right. Good design has been catching on with computers and devices for some years now (luckily we’re not all using gray dull boxes any longer), starting with Apple’s excellent hardware design on their Macs and lately their iPods and iPhones. Apple released the desktop version of OS X in march 2001 and have had great success with their sales since then (My days with Mac OS ended at version 8).

Microsoft seems to take notice on what has happened… lots of people have complained about Windows Vista and called it a failure, as much as Microsoft representatives (like Steve Ballmer) even admits they had some problems. Personally I’ve used Windows Vista since some of the early betas and I’ve never looked back. I could never use a computer with Windows XP, not as long as the hardware is capable of running the OS. It’s a known fact that Microsoft under-delivered massively when it comes to the initial visions of Vista – some ideas which won’t even make it to Windows 7. I love Windows Vista and I’m sure most users will enjoy it if they give it a try – it’s been the target of a general misconception and misunderstanding for a long while, something that Microsoft tried to show with their Mojave Experiment.

Windows Vista was a nice breath of air coming from Windows XP, but it did not represent any dramatic change in the UI (User Interface) and there was some minor changes to the UX (User Experience).

Starting from recently Microsoft have moved into a new direction that has a more dramatic impact on our computer desktops and applications. There are four big driving forces (platforms) for this change and that’s Windows 7, Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft hardware, and Microsoft Web Sites. I’m excited to see what will happen in the space of Microsoft hardware, they’ve recently rolled out some very hot products like LifeCam Show, LifeCam VX-5500 and Arc mouse as you can see below.

Another driving force is the websites. Web is very important and it’s the primary channel for information distribution and sales for many corporations and retails. We have come far from the early days of NCSA Mosaic web browser when it was all about static HTML pages with blue underlined links and animated gif files.

If you navigate around on Microsoft.com today, you’ll quickly understand how things are changing. The new Windows site has no indication on what is actually a link or what’s just static text. Site looks nice, but what about usability? I have to move my mouse all over the site to get a grip on what’s going on and what’s available.

Digging deeper you’ll find the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor page. I think this is a good example on something gone very wrong. The top part of the page is conformed of four (4) menu structures. Not only that, I’m informed that I’m currently looking at “Windows Vista Upgrade” advisor from the page title, the page headline, the fourth menu link and the sub title of the actual content…

Esthetics is all about how your emotions react to the sensory inputs. That something has good esthetics is founded in our physical bodies, although it’s a highly subjective experience, we are all bound to some of the same basic principles. Just because an artist makes something and calls it art, doesn’t make it art. At least not in my opinion. I won’t go any further on the web space, just add a comment that I’ve always thought Microsoft does great design on the web, they still have something to learn when it comes to the concept of less is more. Apple’s website have not changed much in recent years, but it’s still extremely useable. It’s a more unified as well.

Update 9th November: Recently Microsoft upgraded the UI on Windows Live Hotmail to go with the new guidelines and if you ask me I prefer the old design. Most positive feature of this new design is that it actually respects the browser text size and it scales very beautifully according to my settings. The bad thing though, is how IE7 added support for “zooming” on web sites. If you zoom in and out in the browser (this is not only an IE problem, same behavior in FireFox) you’ll see how poorly thought out the feature of zooming is in today's modern browsers. I don’t understand why we need two different concepts of increasing the size of a webpage. Text-size was enough…

Windows Live Essentials is the name of the package software applications that extends Windows functionality. Windows Vista had some of these applications built into the OS, this has been a big mistake from Microsoft. They never released any updates for them, but instead they started distributing a “clone” of the included applications under the brand of Windows Live. Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail … and the list goes on. I’m happy to hear that Microsoft is correcting this mistake with Windows 7, where they are stripping the OS down to the basics.

The following screenshot shows how the toolbar in Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Writer (all beta versions) now have close to none icons. While this obviously does turn my focus more into the content of the applications, I’m highly distracted by the toolbar when I’m about to perform an action. I think they need to consider a new concept of separators (as we’ve grown used to for years now) that puts actions within the same context together. Having “Add to calendar” and “Delete” right next to each other is asking for trouble. Windows Movie Maker is getting a total makeover and it’s receiving the Office 2007 toolbar. Which I think is a good idea and it should be explored as a possibility for all of the Windows Live Essential applications. Windows 7 applications will have the new toolbar, Word Pad, Paint and others already have the toolbar redone for Windows 7.

In the beginning, Windows Live Essentials carried the design and theme of Windows Vista but in the recent beta they redid a lot of the UI, removing almost every icon that has for many years worked as visual clues and hints. This seem to be a new guideline from Microsoft, their message is that applications should allow you to focus on what matters – your content within the applications. I was initially very skeptical to this and I’ve aired my concern to Microsoft and I’m still not sure if it’s a good way forward. Sure, the toolbars doesn’t look very obtrusive, but they are getting much harder to adapt too. The good thing of getting an early look at these applications, is our ability to give Microsoft feedback and be part of changing the future.

Have a look at how Paint is changing into a very usable application with the Office 2007 toolbar.

Let me step back a bit: Some years back my cousin had some computer problems and called me for some assistance. Upon arrival, I realized that her desktop was neither in Norwegian nor English. It was actually Dutch, as her boyfriend is from the Netherlands. Without a hitch, I was able to fix her computer without knowing a single word of Dutch. How was that possible? Thanks to a consistent UI and icons I was able to navigate through her Windows XP machine like child’s play. Will I be able to do the same feat after Windows 7? I’m not sure…

At Microsoft PDC 2008 I received an early copy of Windows 7 and I’m already running it, there are some good improvements in the UX that I welcome. It’s also quite clear that Microsoft is taking lessons from somewhere in regards to the new task bar. Icons and running applications are treated in a similar manner, with small visual clues to whether the application is running or not.

Do you think your grandmother cares if Windows Media Player is currently running or not? She just knows to click the correct icon (hey, did I mention that icons are good visual clues and that humans are more visual than textual?) and play her music. Some people predict that we’re moving into the final years of the written language and that the future will be fully vocalized. We can today record everything we say thanks to immense storage capacity and voice recognition is getting better. Which reminds me, I’m looking forward to improvements in that area for Windows 7, have not heard much yet. I’m rambling on, but I’m just trying to prove a point that having textual actions for everything will diminish the usability of the computer desktop.

Less is more is said a lot by many – it has never been followed by Microsoft. They have continued to add requested features to their products, to a degree where Office required a total UX redo with the 2007 release. We will see some of the same (reduction of clutter) happening in Windows 7. Apple has followed this recipe for years with great success – which is one of the reasons I prefer Microsoft products. They (Microsoft products) are so feature and functionality rich that I can do just about anything I want, and most of them are extensible by third party ISVs. Apple products has success with giving the minimal set of functionality that 90% of users require, but there’s always the 10% that is not comfortable with less. I’m hoping that Microsoft can do both, have a rich feature set with good design.

There is a lot of great innovations at Microsoft that is driving this new design initiative and it makes me happy as I love good design and think it’s important. Still, they will do things both good and bad. Nobody ever gets everything right or perfect the first time, but it’s much better than status quo. Some innovations from Microsoft that is driving this innovation is technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, which are foundation for Microsoft Surface and Zune.

One digression: My biggest feature request for Microsoft is “View” mode named “Full” in both Windows Explorer and Windows Live Photo Gallery that displays photos at their actual size! There is nothing I hate more than having to double-click photos in Explorer or Gallery and having to wait for the photo to load. I want to scroll through all my photos in both applications without having to open every individual photo. I want to use scroll mouse and page up/page down to scan through my photos. What do you think? Leave a comment!

It’s exciting times as a developer AND a consumer and I hope you share some of my enthusiasm for what’s coming!

Visual Studio IDE

post.nospam@nospam.sondreb.com (sondreb) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:53:20 -1300

Gøran Hansen tagged me once more, this time he want us to blog about our customization of Visual Studio IDE and third party tools we use in our daily jobs as software developers.

To be honest, I rarely customize anything. I rely on few (if any) third party tools within the IDE and just a handful of tools that runs outside of the Visual Studio IDE. My main focus is Team System and extensions f or that.

After I read Gøran’s post, I decided to start customizing and the first thing was to download and import the DistantShores Visual theme. My favorite font type is Consolas and size 15 pt.

My primary difference from some of the other people that have blogged about this, is that I always rely heavily on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. It’s the foundation on which I do all my work. It gives me features for work items, build definitions, continuous integration, reporting, source control, unit testing, web and load testing, static code analysis, performance analysis and lots more.

Testing

For my testing needs I rely on the built in capabilities of Visual Studio Team Editions. I have a license for the Team Suite, but unit test is available in the Developer and Tester editions as well. If you happen to have a Testers or Suite Edition, you get a lot more test capabilities which is not available in Developer Edition, like manual tests, web tests, load tests, ordered tests (rarely use this).

Functional web testing is done using a third party tool called WatiN. An awesome tool that automates web browsers. You might think: “Hey wait a minute, that’s already built into Visual Studio?”. Yes and no, Visual Studio has a test type called web test, but it does nothing more than simulate HTTP requests, it doesn’t render the HTML. This means a web request using the normal Web Test doesn’t load graphics, CSS or JavaScript. It’s not possible to validate if the markup is what you except. Web Test in Team Editions can be used for load tests, not for functional tests.

As a Microsoft Regional Director I have some benefits, like free licenses for lots of software and tools. Just how Jessica Simpson, Brad Bit and Britney Spears receives free clothes, jewelry and dresses from stores, we receive deals in return for promotion and us using their products in presentations, etc.

One such deal is for mocking frameworks, which I have rarely used before. For most of my mocking needs, I implement my own mocks and I use dynamic loading of assemblies using .NET reflection and configuration files. I’m looking forward to Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) which was announced at PDC2008. This should make it quicker, simpler and more manageable to write add-in based solutions.

Addins

Some addins I’ve installed a few times but I rarely use any of these are:

Clone Detective – detects duplicate code .
TypeMock – mocks objects for unit testing.
Team Foundation Server Power Tools – essential tool if you’re working with TFS.
MSBuild Sidekick – GUI utility for MSBuild scripts.
Team Foundation Sidekicks – helpful for looking at changes, locks, workspaces and more. It also adds new options to the Team Explorer and Build Definitions, allowing you to Check-Out and Edit build scripts directly from the Team Explorer.
TeamReview - great utility that helps with doing code reviews.
… and I got all the essential Microsoft bits, like Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, Guidance Automation Toolkit, SQL Data Services SDK, Windows Azure SDK, .NET Services SDK and so forth…

Shortcuts

Ctrl-Shift-B – Build Solution
Ctrl-Shift-X – Run Tests In Current Context (I remap the Ctrl+R,T to Ctrl-Shift-X)

Tools

WiX – Essential tool that I use to build all my installation packages.
Reflector – This was recently purchased by RedGate, but it’s a tool I’ve relied on for many years.
Sandcastle – Generates “MSDN” documentation from XML comments.
Paint.NET – image tool, use this for everything.
WatiN – functional web testing.

Other People’s IDE

So there you have it, nothing fancy after all… but make sure you check out some of my friends posts on how they pimp their Visual Studio IDE.