It is with some sadness that I write this post as my last for the Redmond Diary blog on the Redmond Developer News and Visual Studio Magazine Web sites.
Eleven days ago, I started a new blog for ZDNet covering Big Data, at http://zdnet.com/blog/big-data. There’s been a ton of interest around Big Data in the industry lately and the topic ties into the database and BI work that I’ve done throughout most of my career. So when I was asked to write the blog, I really couldn’t say no. I agreed to write three to four posts a week at a minimum for Big on Data (the new blog’s name) and that just doesn’t leave me enough time to keep Redmond Diary fresh. If we kept the latter going with me posting only occasionally, that wouldn’t serve RDN’s and VSM’s readers well, at all.
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Posted on 03/12/20123 comments
In the development of line-of-business (LOB) applications, there has long been a certain tug-of-war between tools that automate development, or frameworks that accelerate it, on the one hand; and the notion of coding from scratch, perhaps with the aid of code libraries developed in-house (or by the sole developer), on the other.
This is typically put under the rubric of a zero-sum game before the debate even starts. Downstream project managers, analysts and users don't want to pay the tax of having the same old LOB plumbing code reinvented repeatedly. Developers don't want to use someone else's code or be boxed in by the application paradigm on which a commercial framework may rest. Honestly, both sides have fair points to make here. And because only one-side can prevail, the other party typically ends up unhappy. Regardless of the winner, this is bad for the project because developer morale, user buy-in, and/or requirements analysis quality will almost certainly suffer.
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Posted on 02/23/20123 comments
Last week was big for Windows 8 news (given the relative secrecy around the whole project). At the beginning of the week we learned that the Consumer Preview (a.k.a. the "Beta") of Windows 8 will be released at the very end of the month in concert with the Mobile World Congress (MWC) conference in Barcelona. Then on Thursday, Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky uploaded an 8,600-plus-word post to the Building Windows 8 blog detailing Microsoft's plans for Windows on ARM (i.e. Windows for devices using the same low-power processor designs used in virtually all smartphone and tablet devices today). It's probably worthwhile to deconstruct these two developments a little, as I think they are two sides of the same coin.
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Posted on 02/13/20126 comments
I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to follow and cover Microsoft, both in terms of its announcements at the show, and those of its competitors. From that standpoint, and since Microsoft announced that this year’s CES would be its last, I attended again this year and I think it was the best CES Microsoft’s had since I started attending. But the reasons for that are unexpected and surprising. Let me give you a little more context and explain why.
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Posted on 01/12/20128 comments
The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary. IT interests intentionally live in the past. On the other hand, developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech's future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it. Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of "it takes all kinds." Different subcultures have different tendencies. So be it.
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Posted on 11/28/201137 comments
The much ballyhooed release of Nokia’s first Windows Phone handsets finally took place Wednesday at the Nokia World event in London. There had been a lot of anticipation building up to this “reveal,” and it is genuinely a watershed moment for the Windows Phone platform. That’s because Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone brings several firsts:
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Posted on 10/27/20114 comments
Last week, at the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit in Seattle, Microsoft held a coming out party, not only for SQL Server 2012 (formerly “Denali”), but also for the company’s “Big Data” initiative. Microsoft’s banner headline announcement: it is developing of a version of Apache Hadoop that will run on Windows Server and Windows Azure. Hadoop is the open source implementation of Google’s proprietary MapReduce parallel computation engine and environment, and it's used (quite widely now) in the processing of streams of data that go well beyond even the largest enterprise data sets in size. Whether it’s sensor, clickstream, social media, location-based or other data that is generated and collected in large gobs, Hadoop is often on the scene in the service of processing and analyzing it.
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Posted on 10/17/20110 comments
As I write this post, Microsoft’s Windows 8-focused //build/ conference has just ended. The apprehension so many developers had around the show is now dissipated, the developer platform and tools have been detailed, and we have all been able to work with the operating system, and develop apps for it, on a touch device, for about 72 hours now. Most people, myself included, like what they saw. The OS is touch-friendly without being an iOS copycat; our developer skill set investments are nicely protected; a new generation of developers trained on the HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack of Web technologies can join the party, and Windows will continue to run on a greatly diverse set of machines.
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Posted on 09/19/20115 comments
There are plenty of posts and articles out there that provide retrospectives of, and pay homage to, Steve Jobs’ tenure as Apple CEO. I’m not an expert on Apple or Jobs, and this is not one of those posts.
But Steve Jobs’ resignation from the CEO post does mark the end of a related era I know something about. It’s the era that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs defined together. And now that both of them have ended their CEO runs and receded to roles as Chairmen of the Board, it’s important to consider just how much these two men did together to pioneer the industry we now all work in and define ourselves by.
Yes, I identify the era with both men, despite many seeing them as perennial adversaries who led companies that approach computing very differently. The fact is that the two men, and the two companies, have a long and storied shared heritage. It dates back to 1977 when 8-bit computing became hot and when Microsoft BASIC ran on each leading machine of that time. I started working with computers a year later, at the age 12. I didn’t own an Apple II, but I used one at school, and remember distinctly the presence of Microsoft BASIC on that machine, albeit branded "AppleSoft BASIC." It’s a fitting name, and drives home an underpinning to this industry that many don’t realize or have chosen to forget.
I could pontificate some more on that, but it’s more effective for people to hear it in context. With that in mind, I recommend to all as required viewing a 2007 interview of Jobs and Gates by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at that year’s All Things D conference. Here’s a link to the video:
http://t.co/c0aclsd
It doesn't want to play full-screen, but your browser's zoom function should mitigate this problem.
Watch the full length interview video if you can; it’s really quite stunning. It shows how much more these two companies have in common than they do anything in conflict, and how much the two men share in career history and mutual respect. There are also humbling ironies here, including numerous references to how much bigger Microsoft is than Apple, and Jobs talking about how Apple gets excited if its market share increases by 1 point. (Another irony is that it's a Flash video and won't play on an iPad.)
Best of all though, if you advance to the 37:00 mark, you will hear Bill Gates speak (with Jobs politely listening) of a future where people will have multiple devices, including a tablet (which they will use extensively), a phone ("the device that fits in your pocket") as well a more conventional machine with a screen and keyboard. Then Jobs adds commentary on how resilient the PC is and how its death has been exaggerated.
Jobs continues by discussing post-PC devices, illuminating a difference in the two men’s outlooks that is not insignificant. But by and large, it's as if they are of one philosophy. In highlighting that broad unity, the interview kicks the whole polarized industry paradigm and leaves it on its behind. I look at that as just one more valuable contribution to our field.
Posted on 08/25/20113 comments
I'm on vacation this week, and I didn't intend to write a blog post. But after the sea changes in the mobile computing industry and, ironically, my extra time to ponder it, I really couldn't stay silent.
In the space of four days, Google may have effectively taken Android "private" and HP seems to have euthanized webOS in public. It's really hard to believe all of this is happening. But we can at least have a go at understanding what it means and what might, or might not, come next for Microsoft as a result.
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Posted on 08/19/20111 comments
I've written about Visual Studio LightSwitch several times in this blog and in my Redmond Review column, including this month's piece, LightSwitch: The Answer to the Right Question. All throughout, I've been pretty clear in my support of the product.
A little over two weeks ago LightSwitch shipped, and I think it's off to a very good start. To help it along, I wrote a series of five whitepapers on LightSwitch for the product team, and they were just published by Microsoft. You can find them all by looking around the product's site, but here are direct links to the PDFs for each paper:
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Posted on 08/12/201111 comments
I just got back from Microsoft's 15,000 attendee-strong Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, and I have to say, the company and its partners are pumped. How can this be, given the number of people who have written Microsoft's eulogy of late? If Amazon owns the cloud, if Apple owns the consumer, if Google owns search, if Cisco owns unified communications (UC), if EMC/VMWare owns virtualization, if Oracle and SAP own ERP and if Oracle/Siebel and Salesforce.com own CRM, how can Microsoft be ambulatory, let alone doing jumping jacks and running races?
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Posted on 07/18/20113 comments
Microsoft has revealed some things about Windows 8, and revealed a part of the developer story for new Windows 8 "tailored," "immersive" applications. In retrospect, very little was shared. The bit that
was
revealed to us is that those applications can be developed using a combination of HTML5 and JavaScript. Not much else was said, except that additional details would be revealed at Microsoft's
//Build/
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Posted on 06/23/201118 comments
Yesterday, at the Wall Street Journal’s "All Things D" conference, Microsoft’s President of Windows and Windows Live, Steven Sinofsky, showed the world a preview of Windows 8 (officially, that’s the code name). And in a YouTube
video
, Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for Windows User Experience, provides his own detailed Windows 8 demo that you can check out right now. What both men showed us was an early preview of a next version of Windows that looks a lot like Windows Phone 7, complete with Live Tiles and a superior touch UI. What this new version of Windows
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Posted on 06/02/201111 comments
For Microsoft these days, great things are happening at the macro level, and yet there's fits-and-starts progress down below. This year's Tech-Ed North America conference represented, in event-form, that very duality.
On the one hand, this was the largest Tech-Ed in my memory, with 10,000 attendees. But the customary Microsoft 2-day, all-morning keynote format was shortened to a Day 1, 90-minute talk on Cloud and Visual Studio. Microsoft's cloud push reached an almost fever pitch; but various new Azure features, like the VM Role and Azure Connect, are still in Beta, with no production release date announced. The keynote featured a cameo by Amir Netz, showing off the hyper-cool data visualization and ad hoc analysis tool, code-named "Crescent;" but we still don’t have a public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server "Denali" that includes it. And the hands-on lab (HoL) for Crescent showed up on the HoL workstations as "cancelled."
The bring-me-up-bring-me-down phenomenon of Tech Ed 2011 doesn’t end there. For example, the keynote was full of references to the "public and private cloud," but all the private cloud talk was about Hyper-V virtualization and we still have no new info on the Azure Appliance. We got a glimpse of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) advances coming in Visual Studio "vNext" (yes, they are actually, officially, calling it that), but not much detail on when that will ship. Meanwhile, Microsoft featured ample breakout content on the "Juneau" SQL Server relational database tooling that will ship with Denali. But that won't be out for a while yet and, when it is, it will seemingly reside inside of Visual Studio 2010.
The one breaking news item that coincided with Tech-Ed was the Verizon Wireless announcement that it will be offering the HTC Trophy, running Windows Phone 7, to online customers next week. Finally! Too bad that phone has a smallish, non-AMOLED screen, no 4G LTE support, and is generally viewed as the "budget" WP7 handset. (I guess the trophy is for "most frugal.") I’ll buy this phone, since it’s the only VZW WP7 option, but I'd really like to hear that Microsoft will embed Skype into Windows Phone and let me buy a Nokia-made, carrier-free handset, before the 2-year commitment I make to the Trophy runs out. Too bad Microsoft had nothing to say at Tech-Ed about the Skype deal.
So Tech-Ed showed us that Microsoft has some good overall momentum, but it still leaves us wanting more. That's reflective of Microsoft's situation today. Windows 7 is good, but we want to know about the Windows 8 tablet story. We like what Silverlight has become, but we expect an undisclosed HTML 5 plan may change our strategy there. The Nokia partnership is great, but we don't know when we’ll see a handset. The Azure story is rounding out, but we still pine for more pieces of the on-premise stack to go to the Azure Platform as a Service. (And we'd like a more robust Azure Infrastructure as a Service story to tide us over.) Office 365 looks neat, but we're still using BPOS, and suffering its occasional hiccups. Kinect is cool, but what are the plans around a next-gen Xbox console?
And so it goes. Tech-Ed was in Atlanta this year, but it's headed back to its default location of Orlando in 2012. That's a pity. We'd like Microsoft to leave its comfort zone, rapidly explore new territory and be successful as it does so. Now's no time to be timid. We want a one-two punch, not three steps forward, and two steps back.
Posted on 05/19/20111 comments