September 24th, 2009

Microsoft makes Web development tools available for free

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:03 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Expression Studio, Mix '09, Open source, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Web, Microsoft Corp., Web Development, Tool, Spark Program, Productivity, Channel Management, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has been on a “Spark” roll lately, rolling out discount programs for students (DreamSpark) and startups (BizSpark).

On September 24, Microsoft added another Spark program to its list: WebSite Spark. The newest Spark program is aimed at getting more Web developers to use Microsoft’s Expression and other development tools. (As Seattle Times blogger Brier Dudley noted, Microsoft hasn’t been bowled over by Expression sales/usage. So trying to seed these tools among developers makes sense for the Redmondians.)

On the same day, To emphasize the company’s not only intent on getting Web devs to use Microsoft-branded tools, the company also rolled out today Version 2.0 of its Web Platform Installer and Windows Web Application Gallery, which provide developers with a one-stop shop for third-party dev tools, including a number of free, open-source dev tools that work on/with Windows. (Microsoft announced the beta of the installer and gallery at its Mix conference this year.)

If you’re wondering how the new Spark program stacks up against the already announced ones, here’s a comparison. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

July 7th, 2009

What is Microsoft's Web platform (and what's Chris Wilson's part in it)?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:20 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Expression Studio, Google, Internet Explorer, Mix '09, Open source, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Web 2.0, Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC), Yahoo

Tags: Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Web Platform, Chris Wilson, Installer, Web Browsers, Channel Management, Productivity

Those who keep close tabs on what Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) team is doing no doubt heard that IE veteran and Platform Architect Chris Wilson left IE back in May.  He’s still with Microsoft but has a broader though equally challenging role: Helping the company flesh out its “open Web platform.”

Wilson, who first joined the IE team back in 1995, has spent a lot of his time on the hot seat. Wilson has represented Microsoft — a company many have come to see as throwing a monkey-wrench into Web standards, rather than championing them — as part of various standards groups. Wilson has been part of groups forging standards for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through various W3C working groups, and currently remains co-chair of the HTML working group.)

Wilson’s new job is Principal Program Manager of the Open Web Platform in Microsoft’s Developer Division. In that role, Wilson reports to John Montgomery, who is group program manager of the year-old browser programmability and tools unit. The new post marks the first time that Wilson hasn’t been part of the Windows client division (IE is part of the Windows unit) since he joined Microsoft.

In his new role, Wilson is part of the team building the JavaScript runtime and tools for IE, he said. He still will be working closely with the IE team as it moves toward developing IE 9 and its successors. But he’ll be broadening his focus, too.

“There’s been a recognition (at Microsoft) that the Web platform is a programming platform and runtime APIs (application programming interfaces) are super-important,” he said.

So, what, exactly, is “the open Web platform” in Microsoft’s view? I’ve only seen it described fairly vaguely as something encompassing core Web products for developers, designers and end users.

The open Web platform is not a single, definable entity, Wilson said. “But to me, it’s CSS, HTML 5, JavaScript and other APIs developed by the W3C,” he said.

At the Mix ‘09 conference, Microsoft officials rolled out a new test version of the company’s Web platform installer (version 2.0), as well as a gallery of third-party Web-development tools from both open-source and closed-source vendors. Is this part of Microsoft’s open Web platform, as well, I asked Wilson. The Installer provides a single download for everything from Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, to IIS 7.0, to PHP (Community Version 5.2.9-1). Microsoft may make a follow-up announcement about the platform/installer at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) next week in New Orleans.

“We have disparate pieces that aren’t tied together at Microsoft,” Wilson acknowledged. “We need more than debuggers. We need to explain ‘how do I sit down with a blank slate and write Web apps’?”

In other words, it’s not just the server-side components upon which Microsoft largely focused at Mix ‘09, but also tools like Expression Web — “whch isn’t seen right now this way, but is actually an open Web tool,” according to Wilson.

What do you think Microsoft should do to help developers who want to write Web apps? What kinds of tools, products and standards (other than the obvious, like HTML 5) do you want to see the company offer? and support?

April 2nd, 2009

Microsoft releases more code under an open-source license

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:35 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Mix '09, Open source

Tags: Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft Corp., ASP.Net MVC, .Net, Middleware, Open Source, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Enterprise Software, Software

Microsoft is continuing to parcel out products and technologies which it is willing to license under an approved open-source license.

The newest addition to Microsoft’s open-source-licensed family is ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) Version 1.0. Microsoft is making the source code for the product available under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), one of the two Microsoft source licenses which has received the Open Source Initiative (OSI) stamp of approval. Microsoft announced its decision to release the code under an open-source license on April 1, just a couple of weeks after releasing Version 1.0 of ASP.Net MVC to the Web.

ASP.Net MVC is the MVC framework built on top of the ASP.Net runtime. As Microsoft explains it, ASP.Net MVC “is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms.” For developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript, MVC is said to make the building, testing and maintenance easier.

Microsoft recently released its Web sandbox runtime under the OSI-approved Apache license.

March 26th, 2009

Users already honing their IE 9 wish lists

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:04 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, Mix '09

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., IE8, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft released the final version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) to the Web exactly a week ago. But that doesn’t mean users and developers are satisfied. Instead, many are champing at the bit to get Microsoft to commit to their favorite missing features for IE 9.

Microsoft, for its part, won’t say anything about IE 9, other than it’s in the planning stage. During an IE 8 Expert Zone Web chat on March 25, members of the IE team reminded participants that Microsoft isn’t ready to talk at all about IE 9 dates or features. The team really isn’t ready yet to accept officially ideas from the user/developer base for Microsoft’s next browser update.

(”We will be placing a new form on [the Microsoft private test site] Connect for improvements for the next version of IE. We will send out an email to the Technical Beta participants when it is available on Connect,” one Softie told chat participants yesterday.)

Microsoft’s attempts to slow things down isn’t stopping users from pitching their top priorities from their IE 9 wish lists. Among the features participants and other users with whom I’ve spoken are mentioning: a file download manager, support for various Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Version 3 features, an XML parser, sounds for Web Slices, better RSS support, and more granular control over JavaScript pages.

One chat participant opined that password save/confirmation shouldn’t force an IE page load/login.

Kymberlee Price, a Program Manager for Security on the IE team, responded:

“Password management is something we looked at in IE8 but ultimately had to cut. As a user I totally understand why this is a popular and compelling scenario. But as a security person I see it as fraught with challenges to implement. Login with a single master password for example - differentiation of passwords is beneficial to protecting sensitive data like bank accounts separate from less sensitive data like Twitter accounts.”

Another chatter said XHTML+MathML support would help students and others who need to publish math-centric content on the Web. A Microsoft official said Microsoft is hearing “lots of requests for this feature, as well as for scalable vector graphics (SVG), “both of which add richer presentation to the Web.” But he made no promises that these would be part of IE 9.

Participants in the ExpertZone chat also asked Microsoft officials about recently reported problems between sites running in Restricted Sites zone (like SpywareBlaster, Spybot, etc.) and the final IE 8 build.

Eric Lawrence, IE Security Program Manager, responded:

“This was a side-effect of a recent change to better support non-standard top-level-domains which are becoming more common. You can read about the general issue with non-standard TLDs on http://publicsuffix.org. IE8 maintains an internal public suffix list. That list changes IE’s handling of ‘known’ special TLDs. Unfortunately, the Zones registry format has a dependency on TLDs, which means that we must recalculate the registry against this new TLD list. That works fine in the general case, but fails badly when there are thousands of sites in the lists. We’re working on this issue.”

(Again, no official word on when a fix might be coming. I’d doubt this one will have to wait until IE 9, however.)

I asked Zhu Yan, who runs the LiveSino.Net enthusiast site, what he’d like to see in IE 9. He had a wish list a mile long already, including everything from the aforementioned download manager, to online Favorites service and Windows Live Gallery synchronization. He also said he’s wishing for better rendering, more compelling third-party add-ons and integration with Morro (the OneCare security service replacement that Microsoft hasn’t said anything about for months).

What are you hoping to see in IE 9?

March 23rd, 2009

Microsoft readies its Web platform 2.0

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:36 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Channel, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Mix '09, Open source, PDC 2008, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Web 2.0, Windows server

Tags: Web Developer, Web, PHP, Microsoft Corp., Channel Management, Scripting Languages, Microsoft Windows, Marketing, Software/Web Development, Web Development

Last fall, Microsoft rolled out version 1 of its installer for its Web-platform stack of software. At Mix ‘09 last week, the company refreshed the installer in the form of a new beta for Web Platform Installer 2.0 and introduced a new gallery of third-party Web apps.

With the introduction of the “Microsoft Web platform,” company officials were hoping to make it clearer and easier as to exactly what kinds of products and technologies might be useful to Web developers. The first iteration of that platform was aimed at Microsoft developers; the updated version, which Microsoft previewed at the Mix conference, is attempting to be more inclusive and appeal to Web developers in general.

The newly launched beta of the Web Platform Installer 2.0 alleviates the need for developers to go to a bunch of different Web sites to download and install various Web-dev products. The 2.0 release also installs the community version of PHP (Version 5.2.9-1). Why? Lauren Cooney, Group Product Manager of Microsoft’s Web Platform, explained the decision to include PHP in the Microsoft Web Platform in her latest blog post:

“Many popular applications are built using PHP, and Microsoft wants to ensure that its customers, community members, and developers are able to use these solutions on top of the Microsoft Web Platform – and including PHP inside of the Web PI simplifies this for Web developers.”

Other products and technologies included in the beta of the 2.0 Platform Installer:

• Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.1 on Windows XP SP3
• IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 SP2
• IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008
• SQL Server 2008 Express
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Various IIS Extensions
• ASP.NET and features such as ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio

As part of the updated platform, Microsoft also is making available a third-party marketplace of Web apps, which includes a number of open-source offerings. Among the apps in the Windows Web Application Gallery: Acquia Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, dasBlog, Gallery, SilverStripe, BlogEngine.NET, SubText, Umbraco, and ScrewTurn Wiki. Ultimately, Microsoft is hoping the Web Application Gallery becomes an app store for open-source services and support, in addition to being a distribution platform.

Web developers: What do you think of Microsoft’s updated Web stack — and especially about the company’s decision to include PHP as part of the offerings that can be downloaded by the unified installer?

March 23rd, 2009

Microsoft's 'Alexandria': RAD for RIA

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:35 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Mix '09, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, RAD, Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., .Net Rich Internet Application Services, Pendulum, .Net, Application Servers, Middleware, Software Development

Continuing on its self-proclaimed quest to simplify the programming of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Microsoft has rolled out a first tech preview of its .Net RIA Services technology.

.Net RIA Services, codenamed “Alexandria,” can be described as “RAD (rapid application development) for RIA,” said .Net Developer Platform Software Architect Nikhil Kothari in a blog post on the subject. Microsoft officials took the official wraps off .Net RIA Services at the company’s Mix ‘09 Web development conference in Las Vegas last week.

.Net RIA Services is designed to bridge Microsoft’s ASP.Net platform, its Silverlight Flash competitor and (ultimately) its Azure cloud-computing infrastructure, Kothari explained. The .Net RIA Services technology will be able to take advantage of Silverlight 3’s “out of the browser” functionality, allowing users to still work in offline and intermittently connected scenarios.

The overarching goal of .Net RIA Services is to bring together the .Net programming model with Silverlight by allowing developers to write middle-tier application logic that controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. Kothari explained more in his March 20 blog post:

“As we looked at Silverlight planning, we realized RIA development is simply hard. There are too many moving pieces to manually stitch together between the client and the server. There are too many things that are un-natural, yet the norm, starting with the forced n-tier (many developers are used to writing 2-tier apps), async (when sync is the norm), dealing with latency (doing so incorrectly has the potential to break end-user experience), figuring out how to be less chatty, dealing with validation, conflicts, disconnected or occasionally connected scenarios, performing authentication and sharing user state across client and server, the list goes on and on…

“We wanted to simplify RIA development… and bring back productivity for mainstream development, in much the same way that ASP.NET 1.0 provided client app developers a productive platform for developing Web apps. The pendulum has swung, and it is time to simplify RIA-style client development.”

The downloadable March Community Technology Preview of .Net RIA Services is available now.

From what you’ve seen and heard so far about RIA Services for .Net, what do you think of Microsoft’s latest RIA programming concept and approach?

March 18th, 2009

IE 8 final bits ready for download on March 19

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:51 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, Mix '09

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is proclaiming Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) finished and will be releasing the final bits for download on March 19.

Microsoft plans to make the bits available as of 9 a.m. PT on Thursday. Interested parties will be able to grab them from the Internet Explorer 8 Web site, officials said.

Update: The final IE 8 bits are downloadable now from here for Windows XP and Vista. The final version isn’t meant for installation on Windows 7.

Microsoft officials will launch officially IE 8 during the Mix ‘09 morning keynote on March 19.

There are very few changes between the Release Candidate (RC) IE 8 code that Microsoft delivered in January and the final bits, officials said.

Starting with the RC, Microsoft began offering users a downloadable Compatibility List of sites which automatically default to the older, non-standards-compliant version of Internet Explorer 7 in order to lessen compatibility problems with IE 8. Since January, Microsoft has tweaked that list a bit, removing sites which have since updated so as to work properly with the more standards-centric IE 8, and adding new ones that aren’t standards-mode compliant. Otherwise, the tweaks to the product have been few.

Microsoft is planning to push IE 8 to users via its automatic updating mechanisms, but has yet to set a date as to when it will do so. In the interim, downloading the IE 8 code from Microsoft’s Web site will be the way interested users can obtain the latest release of the Microsoft browser.

Microsoft also plans to bundle IE 8 with Windows 7 when that operating system is launched, most likely later this year. Recently, officials said they plan to offer users the option of “removing” IE 8 from Windows 7 in order to try to head off antitrust punishments likely to be doled out by the European Commission overseeing the Opera browser-bundling complaint against Microsoft.

March 18th, 2009

Silverlight 3: Having an out-of-the-browser experience

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:02 pm

Categories: App Compatibility, Apple, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Mix '09, Office 2010/Office 14, Silverlight (wpf/e), Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Microsoft Windows, Web Browsers, Cloud Computing, Operating Systems, Software, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

One of the main - and somewhat unsung — features of Microsoft’s next version of Silverlight is its support for running applications outside the browser.

Microsoft officials slipped in a mention of Silverlight 3’s planned out-of-the-browser support during keynotes and sessions at the Mix ‘09 conference on March 18. On March 18, Microsoft made the one and only planned beta of Silverlight 3 available for download today and said the final release is slated for later in 2009.

Officials said the out-of-browser support will allow Silverlight apps to run on Windows or Mac clients and provide users with online, offline or intermittently connected access to their Silverlight apps and content.

Many Mix attendees understndablly equated the planned Silverlight 3 out-of-browser support to Adobe’s AIR — the runtime that allows Flash and other rich Internet apps to run outside the browser. But Microsoft officials claimed there will be advantages that Silverlight 3 offers over AIR — starting with the fact that developers and users won’t need to download an additional runtime in order to get Silverlight out-of-the-browser support like they need to do with AIR.

“AIR is a separate download from Flash,” said Brad Becker, a Microsoft Group Product Manager for User Experience and Tools. “And already Silverlight (for which Microsoft claims there have been 350 million installations worldwide to date) has many times more users than AIR.”

AIR also is a lot bigger, byte-size-wise, than Silverlight, Becker said.

Some Mix attendees also wondered aloud (on Twitter) whether Silverlight’s new out-of-browser support will end up killing off Windows Presentation Foundation — the Windows interface technology from which Silverlight was spawned.

Becker said that won’t be the case. Instead, Microsoft is hoping to provide developers and users a continuum, allowing them to run their Web apps how and where they want. Unlike WPF apps, which are fully integrated with the desktop and hardware, Silverlight apps run in a protected sandbox environment that isolates them from the base OS, he said.

I asked Becker about Microsoft’s plans to support Silverlight 3 on Linux clients. He said if and when that support happens, it will most likely come from Novell, which created the Silverlight port to Linux, known as Moonlight.

I also asked him how and when Microsoft would support Silverlight out-of-browser on mobile devices. Becker said Microsoft had nothing to announce about that kind of support at this time.

What do you think: Is Silverlight 3’s out-of-browser support going to be a killer feature for the next version of Microsoft’s browser plug-in? I’m wondering when and if Microsoft might make its Office 14 Web applications Silverlight-based, myself. Any apps you can envision being well suited to take advantage of Silverlight’s out-of-browser support?

March 18th, 2009

Microsoft refreshes Azure cloud, development kit

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:32 pm

Categories: Azure, Channel, Corporate strategy, Mix '09, PDC 2008, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Official, Microsoft Corp., Azure, Data Centers, Business Structures, Databases, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Finance

Microsoft has made its first big refresh to its Azure cloud platform since the company first rolled out “Red Dog” operating system and the Azure layer of accompany cloud services officially last October.

On March 18 during opening day of its Mix ‘09 conference, company officials detailed new changes it is making in the development kit and the back-end infrastructure. Among these changes: Support for FastCGI (for both .Net and PHP) and support for full trust, which allows developer to invoke native (and not just managed code in medium trust). Microsoft is expecting the full-trust support to appeal to developers who want to move existing libraries and graphics-based programs to Azure, officials said. A refreshed Azure software development kit (SDK) also is available to testers.

Microsoft also will allow Azure testers on or before April 21 to select the geographic location of the datacenters where their Azure-hosted products and services are hosted.

Microsoft still has held back on talking about Azure pricing, partnership deals and service-level-agreement plans. It will disclose all of those “this summer,” officials said.

Microsoft announced last week that it is reworking the SQL Data Services (SDS) component of Azure to make it more like a hosted relational database.

Microsoft officials reiterated at Mix that the company is still on track to roll out the final version of Azure later this fall.

March 18th, 2009

Microsoft's SuperPreview: A Web site developer's new best friend?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:01 am

Categories: Apple, Development tools, Expression Studio, Google, Internet Explorer, Mix '09

Tags: Developer, Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Site, Site, Tool, Web SuperPreview, Web Browsers, Productivity

Microsoft showed off at Mix ‘09 a new tool — Expression Web SuperPreview — that could prove very useful as new browsers from a variety of vendors proliferate.

The tool allows developers and designers to see how their sites look and work with different browsers so they can debug them more easily.

SuperPreview is part of Microsoft’s forthcoming Expression Web 3 release. Microsoft made available for download a subset of the full SuperPreview tool — the part that developers and designers  can use to compare how their sites look in Internet Explorer (IE) 6, 7 and 8. The full release of SuperPreview will allow developers to also compare how their sites look in Firefox, Sarari, Chrome and more.

(Update: My mistake: Microsoft isn’t planning on supporting Chrome or Opera with the first release of SuperPreview. The final first release will support IE 6, 7 and 8; Safari (for Mac, not Windows); and Firefox, officials told me.)

With Microsoft expected to release to the Web the final version of IE 8 this week. Given how many existing sites don’t look and work right in the more standards-compatible IE 8, SuperPreview could be handy for folks trying to tweak their sites to work in IE 8.

Long Zheng of istartedsomething has more details and screen shots of the new SuperPreview tool.