|
|
World over Microsoft conducts lots and lots of events every year. Their flagship events are two – Professional Developer Conference a.k.a. PDC (this is where they announce the next big thing like .NET, Windows 2000, Longhorn, Windows Azure and so on) and Tech Ed (this is more hands-on current technologies for IT Professionals with some Developer content) happening almost every year in USA and then replicated across the world. About five years back in 2006, they announced a new event by name “Mix” which for the first time tried to bring 3 stakeholders into one event – Business Managers, Designers & Developers. It was started to promote Web development and Microsoft’s new designer tools family Microsoft Expression. This was the first Microsoft event where you got to hear Microsoft’s competitors like Yahoo! & Amazon (Microsoft wasn’t in cloud yet in 2006), which I found to be quite useful to get a sense of where Web technologies are going in general. And the lunch-table discussions I had with such a variety of audience were very interesting.
 
As a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and as a Microsoft Partner for many years, these events have become annual fixtures in my calendar.With the new “Build” event that happened last year (instead of a PDC) where they announced Windows 8, it was clear the existing Microsoft events landscape was changing. And indeed it has changed. First casualty was PDC and today they officially acknowledged that there will be no Mix in 2012. Though I feel sad for an event that offered variety and fun, in the last few years unfortunately Mix was made into yet another Developer event by Microsoft. So it was time the event got killed and merged into a unified better event.
In this moment of our prayers for “Mix” and for its soul to R.I.P I I will like to look back at some of the moments I have experienced around this event.
Mix ‘06
Bill Gates announced and kicked off the very first Mix at the Venetian, Las Vegas. The big announcement was WPF/E (which became Silverlight later) and demonstration of it on a Nokia phone which never got released.
Mix06 was my second or third trip to Vegas so I didn’t understand well on how lodging in Vegas works. I ended up blowing money (literally) by booking a $400/Night (concessional rate for attendees!) room at the venue itself (Venetian).
Mix ‘07
This event was all about Silverlight!. I am sure most of us .NET enthusiasts remember the demo where Silverlight in a browser with C# code-behind winning over Java Script in a game of chess. Looking back (from a world of Node.JS & Chakra) I was not sure on what we were smoking back then in May 2007.
I found the BBC Radio 1 and Windows Live Messenger social co-browsing (called Messenger activity then) & sharing to be quite cool. Unfortunately it never got released outside UK (just like most of the good stuffs from BBC which are available only to UK Residents due to a antiquated theory of UK Tax payer funding).
What got me thinking was a quote made by “The Economist” Publisher Mr.Andrew Rashbass on a panel discussion (which alone was worth my travel to the US from India). The quote was on how Portable Reader devices replacing paper. Andrew said “it will not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term and that BillG can use one, but no one else will use it”
I think this year Microsoft started to highlight that Mix was a “72 Hour conversation”, a tag line I liked & which I consider to have captured the essence of what Mix ‘06 and Mix ‘07 were. The evening party on one of the days was fun and colourful.
After blowing my money staying in Venetian, I realized how lodging works in Vegas – you can get rooms from $40 to $1 Million per night, it all depends on what you are looking for. From this year, I was booking myself a room at $40 in the Stratosphere Hotel. Although it is on the other end of the Strip, it was a good 30 minutes walk in the evening after you finish your dinner near by to Venetian like in the Food court at The Capital Grille.
Mix ‘08
This year the keynote was by Ray Ozzie who outlined Microsoft’s investment in IE and Silverlight, Web Slices and more. Lots of demos this year.
Then it was Dean Hachamovitch talking about how great IE 8.0 was (do you remember this IE?)
Lot of coverage about live streaming capabilities of Silverlight during the then upcoming Beijing Olympics
My fellow RD Scott Stanfield’s company Vertigo demoing the “Hard Rock” app they have build using Silverlight and Deep-Zoom technology.
Coca-Cola sponsored UEFA Euro 2008 & Windows Live Messenger community (what was that I don’t remember other than the photograph below?)
On the corridors of the show, I gave an audio interview to Scott Hanselman on Outsourcing (the hot topic then because of a Presidential Election year in USA).
Mix ‘09, 10, 11
Due to the onslaught of recession, travel budget constraints and thanks to great live streaming of the Keynotes by Microsoft, the next three years I decided to watch it from Home, only trouble being the need to have loads of coffee to keep me awake through the Night in India. I didn’t miss out the individual talks either – all the session videos were made available from Channel9 for download in few days of the event getting over.
The other day I got an email from Microsoft Certified Learning reminding me to sign-in to the site. It has been over a decade since I last visited the site. When I logged-in I was pleasantly surprised to see they have data about my certifications done in 1996, 15 Years back. Now you know that I have programmed in Windows NT Server & VB 4.0 
When MS Office 2010 came last year, the first thing I did in my Work PC’s MS Outlook was to switch off some of the new Panes and Add-Ons. I noticed when you are reading an email either in preview or full-screen you got a window at the bottom that showed all the conversations, activities, tasks associated with the sender of that email. I didn’t understand the need for it, immediately switch it off and never thought about it again. Few days back while using my Home PC, I noticed this Pane again, spend some time with it and thought it might be useful to have. Instead of switching between Inbox/Sent items and so on, you got all the details in one convenient window. Now I wanted this feature back in my Work PC but didn’t know its name and it turns out I couldn’t find it nor could my System Administrator.
After few Bing! searches it turns out the feature I was looking for is called “People Pane”.
But I couldn’t find the button in Ribbon to turn-it ON. The button & feature appears only if you have installed and enabled Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Add-On (File->Options->Add-Ins->Manage:COM Add-Ins). Enabling it I got the feature and I am giving it a spin for few days before deciding on retaining it.
I have two PC’s in my house. One is my primary desktop which is the family PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. The other is used a Media Center Server (lets call it MCPC). After I got my iPhone, iPad and AppleTV I have moved all my digital media from Zune to iTunes (who knows when I buy Nokia Lumia 800 or a later Windows Phone, I will need to do the reverse all over again). My favourite application to convert DVDs and VCDs that I own into iTunes/Zune format is a free tool called “Handbrake” (that I had written about earlier).
My MCPC was about 4 years old, has outlived and needed an upgrade very badly. The MCPC had a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM and a ASUS M2NBP motherboard with NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU. Instead of throwing away the entire PC I decided to retain as much as I can and upgrade only the portions I needed to, which meant I can’t change the CPU or RAM, without changing all the three (Motherboard, CPU and RAM).
1. First item that I replaced was the 3 year old 1 KVA UPS from APC that I had been using to connect both the PCs. I shopped around for a 2 KVA with 2 Hours backup, but it turned out to be expensive (Rs.40,000 to 60,000 depending on features & brand) and huge in size to fit under my desk. Instead I went with 2 separate UPS each giving about 30 minutes backup time, first was a 1 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1000) and the second was a 1.5 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1500). Both costs together Rs.18,200 and it provided the convenience of using one of the PCs even when the other UPS dies out of its power. Both the UPS came with PowerChute client software which helps you to monitor the input voltage, set the input power sensitivity, set the voltage range and importantly shut-down the PC automatically when Power is about to run out – which ensures your drives are not corrupted. APC provides a RJ-45 to USB cable and software drivers to do this magic.
2. With the ever expanding size of my Digital Media (Music, Photos, Movies and TV Shows) stored in iTunes and as folders, I needed bigger hard-disks and also redundancy. So I replaced all the hard-drives and went in for 3 new HDDs – 1 x Seagate 500GB (Rs.2350), 2x 2TB (each Rs.4350). I didn’t choose Solid-State as they were expensive and anyway I thought I can buy a new PC with SSD in next few years. I configured the 500GB for the OS (Boot & System Partition for Windows 7) and the two 2TB as one single drive (Windows 7 Mirroring). I went for Software (Windows OS) Mirroring and not the BIOS which I was using earlier, as BIOS mirroring kept getting broken very often (may be due to the frequent Power shut-downs and problems with my UPS). It turns out this works great, only the first time I had to open Disk Management (Computer Management) and leave it open for the drives to Resync.
3. Then I went on to replace the graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU) which started producing washed out colours and lack of sharpness in the output. This meant purchasing a new add-on PCI Express Graphics Card. I selected an affordable one from ASUS called “HD 5450 Silent” costing Rs.2300 and featuring AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 & 1GB DDR3 video memory.
(Output from my old GPU, taken with iPhone4) |
(Output from my new GPU, taken with the same iPhone4) |
4. You can’t get an improvement just by changing the GPU, you will need a matching monitor as well. So I replaced my old HP 15” TFT with a new ViewSonic VA1931WMA-LED 19” Monitor which costs Rs.5390. I wanted a monitor that is not state of art (and hence expensive) and one which had a built-in speaker (which limited the options dramatically). Remember I am using this as a Media Center PC with occasional YouTube & iTunes watching, so there was no need for a real speaker or a higher resolution display. I tried to have built-in USB Hub, but I couldn’t find one.
5. Now it is time to to focus on USB ports. The built-in USB ports tended to be slow and flaky (may be due to MagicJack or many other USB devices that I connected over the years). Getting new USB ports was the easiest and cheapest, it costs about Rs.250 to buy a 4 Port USB 2.0 add-on card. To get the USB ports in the front (instead of bending and reaching in the back of the PC) I purchased a Belkin 4 Port 2.0 Powered Hub for about Rs.800.
6. The next item was to look at the Network equipment (Ethernet Switch). I was using a 100Mbps Switch to connect my Wireless Router, Desktop, MCPC and other Ethernet ports in the house (like the one going to Apple TV or Daisy Chain). I upgraded this with a faster switch – a Netgear GS608 8Port Gigabit Switch which costs Rs.2475, this gives a smoother playing from iTunes Home sharing.
7. The last item was a WD 1 TB USB External HDD which costs about Rs.5000. This is to carry select media that I will be interested to have during my travel trips.
Overall the PC now manages to get about 4.0 (from 3.0 or so earlier) in Windows performance rating:
Final steps was to setup Windows to auto-login, launch iTunes automatically. I did the first using “User Accounts” (instructions here and here) and the second was done using Task Scheduler with a Trigger “When I log on”.
In my main PC at work where I store most of my documents and data, I have been using Hardware RAID for mirroring between two 500GB Seagate Hard drives for last 3 years. This provides me with automatic redundancy and minor performance benefit while reading large video files. All was well till last week, when on boot BIOS warned that the Mirror is broken. Having seen this happen few times before I quickly updated my backup to external drive and then rebuild the mirror. Yesterday I got into the same problem, I decided and moved to Windows (Software) mirroring. Today afternoon Windows 7 showed me the below dialog and warned me that S.M.A.R.T. data is indicating an impending failure/error in one of the drives. The warning was just about useless beyond that – no indication on which Physical drive is having the problem.
On searching for this issue in Bing!, I found this free utility called DiskCheckup which can read the S.M.A.R.T data and provide more information, which it did. I found one of the drives was having high “reallocated sector count” which was told me by few hardware blogs to be bad. But since both my physical drives were the same model their class names displayed were same, which didn’t help me in isolating the failed one. So I went to computer management and broke the mirror. Reran Diskcheckup few times (disabling one drive after another in Device Management) and identified the failed one. Since I didn’t have a spare 500GB to replace, I fixed a 1TB drive in place of the failed one. Fortunately Windows 7 didn’t mind setting up mirroring between two drives of unequal size. I managed to select the 500GB, Add Mirror to a portion (which Windows created automatically) of 1TB and setup everything, the balance space I could create another simple volume. Windows is currently Resyncing the mirror between the drives.
Just like the other 4999 attendees of Build Windows Conference, I am too happy to have got a test Samsung Tablet running “Developer Preview” of Windows. Having got a touch netbook previously in PDC 2009 towards launch of Windows 7, I should say I was expecting something like this.
The tablet looks great, feels a little heavy compared to iPad but has a USB port, plays all media formats that Windows Media recognizes (and for those it doesn’t you can always run VLC Player) and starts up in less than 2 seconds (awesome).
The machine specifications were impressive too and ships with SDK & Visual Studio to develop Metro style Apps.
And I was surprised to see some “Humour” in Microsoft EULA for the tablet. When was the last time you read anything in a Microsoft material that you can understand?
In this post let me write about some highlights about Metro UI that I saw in the Big Picture sessions of Day 1.
(Update: You can watch the entire keynote here )
The default templates shipping in Visual Studio whether it is for C++ or C# or JavaScript, they all do a great job in handling all the layout complexities and do the heavy lifting for building Metro UI
Microsoft has done lot of user study to see the most ideal and convenient position in the screen where user’s thumb can reach and they are in the edges. As a result it is good practise to put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edges
When you are porting your existing Windows Apps UI to Metro, best is to start from scratch, when you can’t even simple things make a lot of improvement (like removing the lines and borders, more spaced out, large icons and so on). See in these four steps from left to right:
 
 
Touch is direct, so performance issues are felt more directly and viscerally. Animations when content is appearing of changing helps a lot in the feeling of fluid to the users. Metro Apps require assets in 3 sizes (100%, 140% and 180%) and better still you can provide them in vector formats (SVG) or CSS primitives or XAML.
Your content needs to adapt to multiple screen sizes and orientations:
Contracts are the glue that bind Metro style apps together and to the system UI. There are many contracts, but the three of the most fundamental are Share, Search and Picker.
There are many styles of Live tiles. You can choose the one that suits your app. Live Tiles are updated using your “Local” logic, Scheduled or Push using Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)
In-box controls that ship in Windows 8 for Metro style apps are shown below:
Metro style apps when making calls to WinRT those calls go directly to Core OS or though a broker (only on select cases). All running Metro apps are suspended by the OS when the user switches away from it, this is done to preserve the battery live and give maximum performance to the foreground application. This means Apps get about 5 seconds to save their state before the OS puts them on Suspend. Apps when in Suspend are still in memory but no CPU cycles are spent and Windows kernel never schedules those threads. Apps are also terminated when there are low resources, in those cases Apps never notified at all.
Five main design principles of Metro style apps are
- Pride in craftsmanship
- Be fast and fluid
- Authentically digital
- Do more with less
- Win as one
Let me begin by saying this first, I am blown away. What got announced in the Keynote today morning by Steven Sinofsky, makes it absolutely clear that Windows8 is a big bold step by Microsoft and as been repeated many times it is an OS that is definitely “reimagined”. You can download the Developer Preview bits of Windows 8 and SDK for free from here.
Steven Sinofsky in his keynote mentioned some interesting facts about Windows 7:
- Approaching 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold
- Windows7 consumer usage greater than Windows XP
- 1502 non security product changes delivered since Windows 7 shipped
- 542 Million people signing into Windows Live services every month
Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs on Windows 8. Sinofsky demoed a 3 year old Atom Netbook running Windows 8 just fine, same machine actually used less CPU, Memory and Number of processor than Windows 7. Windows 8 now has great Multi Monitor support (finally) even when you are remoting, Task Manager Application improvement, Windows Explorer improvement (long due).
In the keynote he demoed several apps built for Metro UI. Interestingly these were build by college interns. There were 17 groups of them, 2-3 people in each team and worked over 10 weeks time.Quite impressive considering most of them were new to Windows and were working on moving builds of Windows8.
Steven Sinofsky pulled a good one on competition (Google Chrome) when he said “Chrome”less content when he was showing off that Metro apps are full screen with no Titlebar or Windows. Obviously he didn’t say “Window”less that would have minimized Window brand.
There are lot of great stuff shown here, instead of repeating everything I will just cover few highlights:
Metro UI, the new UI in Windows8 is fresh, innovative & futuristic. I liked the Semantic Zoom feature (that shows a reduced view of tiles when you pinch in) that makes it easy to quickly navigate the start screens. Windows8 touch language is certainly a new thinking brought by Microsoft into this space, shows they are not simply copying from others. By being late to the game Microsoft has benefitted from preceding works and learning from them.
Windows 8 has a new App Model that is restrictive (Windows Store distribution only, no app side loading) but one that ensures security for users preventing rogue apps. What I liked in the Windows Store it supports trial mode. Store manages (as now common with iTunes, Android App store and so on) all the security, authentication, payment, delivery, rating and so on. Current Windows Apps (Win32, .NET) say like Quicken you can still list them in Store, but it will only show a link to your website, you will not get any of the features of Store for that app.
Windows 8 has a new Runtime called WinRT (common runtime available for C++, C# or VB, JavaScript) that is a sibling to aging Win32. This is not a layer on top of Win32, but a first class native runtime
Metro Style Windows Live applications like Mail & Photo Gallery are all in development and not made available now but was previewed. What I liked was the Skydrive powered access to drives & folders in remote PCs, a super cool feature through which you can get the files in your office/home PC remotely from any Windows8 PC without syncing or anything.
As a side note I couldn’t help noticing a difference between Apple’s Launch Keynotes (yes I know, Steve Jobs is a legend here) & Microsoft’s launches. Apple focus on lifestyle & experience and technology takes an important but back stage, but Microsoft keynotes are more about technology. Though Windows8 is about touch and new form factors there was no mention on Music, Movies, Games (except one demo) and communication.
I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post  .
Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.
I am an ardent user of Microsoft’s free command line utility “Robocopy” for copying folders between drives or perform a manual backup of my documents to an external drive. I have been using this for more than a decade now. Over the years the folders that I want to be excluded while copying has increased and I have never bothered to check the parameters. Today I realized I have been inadvertently copying few system folders and a folder named “Microsoft” containing all Tech-Ed & Mix event videos, this happened due to wrong parameters. After few minutes of debugging with /L switch in Robocopy, I realized Robocopy doesn’t like the trailing slash (\) after each folder path that you want to be excluded, remove the trailing slash and everything works fine. I am giving the command that worked for me as an example, needless to say I have changed the drive names to protect my PC’s privacy.
ROBOCOPY X:\ Y:\DESKTOP /XD "X:\System Volume Information" "X:\WINDOWSIMAGEBACKUP" "X:\MICROSOFT" "X:\TEMP" "X:\$RECYCLE.bin" /MIR /R:2 /W:2
|
