I've been reading a new survey of mobile developers from VisionMobile. Around 400 developers were surveyed, and the platforms covered were iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash, and the mobile Web.

The topic is significant. Companies everywhere are crying out for mobile apps, especially for Apple iPhone but increasingly for Google Android as well. The device+cloud computing model is today's big trend, and support for mobile devices in some form or other is becoming necessary for a wide range of applications and web sites.

The first notable fact is the extent to which iPhone and Android dominate. This chart on page 10 tells the story: there is little relationship between the device installed base and the number of available apps. Windows Phone, for example, has 75 million devices out there but only 13,500 apps; iPhone has 60 million devices and 225,000 apps.

 

The reason is that Apple has created a viable ecosystem for development, as well as a superb mobile platform. Much as I dislike the locked-down nature of that platform, and its Apple tax, I acknowledge and admire what has been achieved.

Android has just 20 million devices but 72,000 apps. I'd guess that the quality of those apps is not as high on average, but it's still clear that iPhone now has competition.

If this paper is to be believed, Android will even pass iPhone. Android is identified as the most popular among developers, with around 60% using it versus 50% on iPhone. Why?

We believe that Android's lead in developer mindshare ahead of Apple's iOS is down to two factors: first the $99 fee developers have to pay in order to deploy their applications, an entry barrier which reduces the innovation from developing countries. Secondly, the very effective use of open source licensing as a marketing technique to attract developers to Google's Android.

Another factor is that Android apparently offers the best developer experience. In an appendix, the survey tests iOS, Android, Symbian and Java ME for coding, debugging, device emulation and support resources. Novices could create a simple app more quickly on Android. The coding effort was less; building 9 simple apps took nearly 3000 lines of code on Symbian, versus just under 1500 lines on iPhone and a little over 1000 lines on Android. Debugging is faster on Android. The survey comes up with the following claim:

Using the above data, we can say that when developing common applications, each hour of work for a given Android developer, irrespective of level of experience, equals 1 hour and 10 minutes for a Symbian developer, 1 hour and 20 minutes for a Java ME developer and approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes for an iPhone developer.

Contentious, no doubt, and a lot will depend on what sort of app is being developed. Still, a good result for Android.

Both iPhone and Android seem safe bets, but what about other platforms? Adobe Flash is an interesting one:

Our research further indicates that Flash developer mindshare seems to be in decline, despite Flash's installed handset base of more than 1.3B devices. Adobe's string of execution failures has meant that the installed base for Flash Lite is extremely fragmented, breaking the write-once-show-anywhere story for media brands who are Adobe's key customers. At the same time, Flash, the much-touted replacement for Flash Lite, was more than 18 months late, while Flash Lite shipments have stagnated, dropping from 43 percent to 15 percent of handsets sold from 1H09 to 2H09. This leaves Adobe with a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity, primarily on Android handsets, while having been banned from Apple's growing empire, and slowly seeing the adoption of HTML5, yet another replacement threat for Flash.

That's overly negative in my view. In favour of Flash is that it runs on the Web and desktop as well as on mobile, and will run across a number of mobile platforms. Even so, the research shows the pressure on Adobe to deliver mobile Flash, which will not be in the hands of the public until Android 1.2 "froyo" is availble on devices; and the Apple problem will not go away.

Symbian is in trouble too; in fact, since Nokia is now moving to MeeGo for smartphones, it now has little interest for developers. Some observers think Nokia should go to Android instead.

Java ME? Windows?

The vast majority of Java ME respondents have lost faith in the write-once-runanywhere vision. Moreover, anecdotal developer testimonials suggest that half of Windows Phone MVP developers (valued for their commitment to the platform) carry an iPhone, and would think twice before re-investing in Windows Phone.

That strikes me as accurate. Predicting the future is hard though. Google Android came from nowhere; it is possible that a couple of years from now different patterns will have emerged.

For now though, it's iPhone and Android all the way.

I'm at Microsoft's MIX conference in Las Vegas, where the big news has been the unveiling of the Windows Phone 7 development platform, and the platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 with extensive HTML 5 support.

There is more to say about both topics; but one thing I want to highlight is that IE9 will not work on Windows XP, the venerable release that will not die.

It is not only that XP remains in use on existing PCs; there are also new machines on sale with this old version of Windows. I've just purchased a netbook, and when making my selection I noticed that many of them still come with XP, usually the Home edition. Some companies still specify XP when buying new PCs, to avoid the compatibility hassles that come with a move to Vista or Windows 7. There's also doubt over the benefits of upgrading. A friend said to me recently, "I really like XP, it does everything I need. What is the point of moving?"

Here's what IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch told me:

Building a modern browser requires a modern operating system. There are facilities in Windows Vista and Windows 7 around security, for example the integrity level work that gave us protected mode, there are performance improvements that enable a variety of things in the browser, there is graphics infrastructure to take advantage of the GPU, that doesn’t exist in previous operating systems.

A measure of scepticism about such comments is reasonable. Microsoft wants users to buy its latest stuff; there's no surprise there.

Nevertheless, Hachamovitch is right. Windows 7 is more secure and more powerful. Personally I find it easier to use as well, partly thanks to Microsoft's design work on the user interface, and partly because desktop composition in Windows Aero enables richer preview of minimised applications and other good things.

Microsoft is also making a statement with IE9, to the effect that XP users can no longer expect to be included in major product releases. Office 2010 does support Windows XP; but you can bet that the next one will not.

The long life of XP is a side-effect of one specific thing, which is the failure (relatively speaking) of Windows Vista. I used Vista from its first release and regard it as better than its reputation suggests; but nevertheless, it was greedy for hardware resources, prone to annoying slow-downs, and less polished overall that it should have been.

There is also a real issue with application compatibility, introduced with Windows Vista, mainly thanks to User Account Control. This feature protects access to system locations such as the Windows and Progam Files folders, and parts of the Windows Registry, causing problems for some applications that expect full access.

These factors extended the life of Windows XP, resulting in the situation we have today: an operating system coming up to nine years old still in widespread use.

Very often the continuing use of XP is not something we can control. Rather, it is something we have to live with. Nevertheless, it is becoming a liability. Windows 7 improves on XP in every way that I can think of; and we even have XP Mode and Med-V to assist with migration, by running obstinate apps in virtual instances of XP.

Windows XP is something we have to live with, but no longer something to recommend.

Postscript: arriving at the gate for my flight from Las Vegas, I could not resist snapping what seemed the perfect illustration: Windows XP with a sad little error message.

 

So you need a new Windows application. You fire up Visual Studio, but which project type do you select? Windows Forms application, or WPF application?

Windows Presentation Foundation was introduced at the same time as Windows Vista, with final code released in November 2006 as part of .NET Framework 3.0. It was designed to replace existing Windows graphics APIs such as GDI and GDI+ with a more powerful, flexible and scaleable framework for buiding a graphical user interface, taking advantage of DirectX hardware acceleration and rich graphical effects. If Vista had proceeeded as originally planned, it would probably have been deeply baked into Windows itself, but in the end took a lesser role, presumably for performance reasons. Microsoft also added Windows XP support to make WPF more attractive to developers.

Another goal was to improve designer/developer workflow. WPF uses XAML, a declarative XML language, and is amenable to manipulation through a visual design tool. Microsoft released Expression Blend and Expression Design, which export XAML, as well as supporting WPF in Visual Studio.

Developing a Windows GUI can be frustrating. If you have ever wrestled with dialog units or the impact of "small" vs "large" fonts, you will know how badly scaling is handled. WPF is a huge improvement, with sensible layout management as well as great support for multimedia and effects.

Nevertheless, WPF was slow to take off. Issues included the large memory footprint of a WPF application, deployment of the latest .NET runtime, and lack of pre-built components; in fact, for a long time Microsoft itself advised against using WPF for line of business applications.

There was another factor too. Long-term Microsoft platform users have learned to be cautious about any technology that is not much used within Microsoft itself. WPF was a great example, with little obvious use beyond the Expression tools themselves. In this context, it was fascinating the hear the talk from Principal Software Engineer Paul Harrington at PDC in November, about how Visual Studio 2010 has been rebuilt with WPF. Harrington's team has an advantage over most of us, in that they can press the WPF team to fix bugs and make changes, and that is exactly what happened. Visual Studio needed to use invisible windows for some operations; WPF did not support that, but now now in version 4.0 it does. The text rendering in the new editor was making some developers feel physically ill, apparently, because of its blurry appearance on some systems, so a new text stack was built, enabled by turning off ClearType. The Visual Studio team ran into problems with focus and activation, and new modes have now been added to WPF to fix them.

My guess is that the stress-testing of the Visual Studio team combined with other improvements in WPF, such as new business-oriented components, will make it the sensible choice for a Windows GUI application, other things being equal (which they never are), once Visual Studio 2010 is released.

The big caveat is that developing new applications using a Windows-only API does not look like a smart choice in many scenarios, though it could still make sense within some organisations, or if your application is strongly hooked into Windows anyway. WPF has good support for new Windows 7 features, for example. But Microsoft is also releasing Silverlight 4.0, which has considerable compatibility with WPF but runs on the Mac as well as on Windows, is easier to deploy, and which fits with the web model for data handling. Silverlight 4.0 now has COM support on Windows, when run out of the browser, which means you can add native code if you really need to, and integrate with other applications such as Microsoft Office.

In some curious way then, WPF is maturing to become an excellent development framework at just the wrong moment. Nevertheless, I'd now think twice before hitting the Windows Forms option on a new application.

At Microsoft Tech-Ed 2009 in Berlin long-time Windows server expert Mark Minasi gave a session on the .vhd format used by Microsoft for virtual hard drives in Hyper-V, the virtualisation feature built into Windows server 2008.

Minasi's talk was not about Hyper-V, but rather about other things you can do with a .VHD. He even noted that in a Windows environment you can use a .VHD as a superior form of ZIP (though without the compression), if you want a single file that can contain windows files and folders while preserving NTFS security attributes, and that can be mounted - or "attached" in .VHD jargon - rather than having to be extracted elsewhere.

One neat trick is to use .VHDs for multi-boot. Multi-boot is less important now that virtualisation works so well, but can still be useful if want to test an operating system with full performance and access to hardware such as accelerated graphics. The old way to do this is with multiple partitions, but this is somewhat inconvenient. Windows 7 is able to boot from a .VHD, and you can set up mutiple VHDs so that you can choose which one to use at start-up. There are a couple of limitations. The operating system has to be Windows 7 or presumably 2008 R2 (which uses the same kernel); and sleep/hibernate does not work in this configuration.

A VHD is still just a file, so you can back it up by copying it elsewhere, provided it is not the one currently running. Note that in this configuration only the hard drive is virtual, not the computer hardware, so while you could go on to mount the VHD in Hyper-V it would be like moving Windows to a new motherboard and very likely would not boot.

Another clever tip is that Windows 7 setup support a keystroke combination, Shift F10, which gives access to the command line for MinWin, the cut-down version of Windows that runs during setup. Here you can get access to Diskpart, the command-line disk management tool, which among other things lets you create a VHD. So you can take a machine with an untouched hard drive, boot into the Windows 7 setup, shell to the command line and create a VHD, then attach and install Windows onto that new virtual drive. Setup actually states that this does not work; but it does work, and we saw it demonstrated.

There are three kinds of VHDs. A fixed VHD has the same on-disk size as its capacity. An expanding (or dynamic) VHD reports the size that you specify when it is greated, but only occupies the space on its host that is needed by the data written there. This is convenient for backup, and lets you over-commit the host drive if you choose to. The third kind is a differencing VHD - a VHD that is based on a parent and only occupies the space needed by its difference as you write to it. The GUI Windows disk management tool does not support creation of differencing VHDs: one of Minasi's points is that you should learn the command line approach using Diskpart in order to get access to all the available features. That said, differencing VHDs are supported in the Hyper-V GUI management tool.

The bottom line is that VHDs have uses that go beyond virtual machines and if you work on the Windows platform it is well worth becoming familiar with them.

At the Future of Web Applications conference earlier this month I spoke to Microsoft's corporate VP of the .NET Developer Platform, Scott Guthrie about ASP.NET MVC. Guthrie is a co-inventor of ASP.NET along with Mark Anders, now at Adobe. A few months back I wrote a piece entitled ASP.NET MVC rescues Microsoft's web platform, but I wanted to hear from Guthrie how he sees the framework evolving, and to explore whether it is time to abandon the older Web Forms approach. How does he see the future of the platform?

"The amount of buzz and religious fanaticism about [ASP.NET MVC] is amongst the highest I've been involved in, certainly since .NET 1.0 and Silverlight. Some people prefer the Web Forms model  and I emphasise that Web Forms is not going away, there's all the new stuff that's coming for Web Forms 4.0.

"MVC is an alternative way to do UI and still leverage ASP.NET. For crowds like the one here at FOWA that wants total control over the markup, and who like test-driven development, it's a dream framework. Those folk tend to be more online, so they communicate better which is part of the reason you hear the buzz. I think we'll have more than a million developers using ASP.NET MVC within the first twelve months."

In your talk you mentioned the stackoverflow site which performs very well but runs on not very much in terms of hardware? Is ASP.NET MVC more efficient than Web Forms?

"ASP.NET itself has always been really fast, we've had a lot of success with large sites. One of the things people like about ASP.NET MVC is that the model fits to what they are expecting, for the large LAMP contingent which is heavily represented at this conference.  And when they do the performance testing they say 'Holy cow, this thing is fast.'  Stackoverflow is a great example, written I think within three weeks and scaling to that level with two machines. Performance is a feature, and one of the reasons StackOverflow works as well as it does is that it's instantaneous response time.

"Conchango just did a site, implemented in 20 weeks, a giant ecommerce project, it's 100% ASP.NET MVC. The SEO is phenomenal, the YSlow rating is phenomenal, they're just blown away. It was fun talking to them last night - the guy was jokingly saying, 'I can't believe it works so well'. It's like the best marketing literature in the world times ten. More and more when I give talks I'd say half the people are new to ASP.NET MVC, and the other half come upand say, 'by the way we've done five sites on it.' That's great to hear."

On equivalent hardware and leaving aside different coding styles, is ASP.NET MVC going to scale that bit better than Web Forms?

"No. The reality is you can build hugely scalable sites with each. Where it does help a little bit is that there is smaller page size and there's a bit more control. There's less abstractions."

And the page lifecycle is shorter?

"It is shorter. I don't think that's making any measurable perf difference. It's more that it naturally flows to what they're doing. I do think it's fast, in the same way that web forms can be fast too. But it promotes a certain way of working that, if you know what you're doing, you tend to build really fast apps."

What about the open source aspect? Are people contributing code?

"People are not contributing code directly to ASP.NET MVC, but we're shippling JQuery and we're shipping JQuery validation which are open source projects, and we are integrating them into our code. With JQuery in ASP.NET MVC version 1.0 we just shippped it, whereas in version 2.0 we have helper libraries that are making big usage of it.

"I'd say that's a first for Microsoft, we're actually taking open source software that has multiple contributors, and using it in a deep way within our own product.

"We ship the ASP.NET MVC source code under an OSI Licence. You can take the code, you can modify it, you can do builds. I know a few people that have done customer tweaks, but for the most part it's that people like being able to learn the product through the code. There's also the reassurance of knowing that if they ran into something, they could fix it."

Would you consider accepting community contributions to the code?

"We've thought about it. I think a lot of people interpret open source as 'hey, anyone can just submit stuff'. The reality is that pretty much every open source project has a closed set of contributors. They come from multiple organisations or backgrounds, but you don't check anything into the Linux kernel without Linus or Andrew signing off on the fix. That would be true of ASP.NET MVC, in that there would be a core set of contributors. At some point I think we will probably open it up to let people to contribute code, or at least patches."

What's new in the latest ASP.NET MVC 2.0 preview?

"The ability to easily do forms validation for input, server-side and especially client-side in a very declarative, easy way, is a huge productivity win.

"'Areas' provide a way to take a large project and easily structure it into multiple small projects.

"New form helpers and what we call editor and display templates for customising them  is an innovative way to get strong typing, intellisense and debugging support, and a lot of flexibility in terms of UI generation.

"Asynchronous controllers allow you to call call services on the web, the Twitter, the Facebooks of the world, and  much more efficiently  scale your web server. The classic problem if you're calling Twitter is what's the response time of Twitter? What's the response time of Facebook? Most web servers are multi-threaded so they're processing multiple requests, but say they have 10 threads running and 15 requests come in, and each of those requests need to go and access Twitter, you're going to block 5 people while nothing is going on on the server. With the Async support we provide a way that you within your app can say, I'm going to wait for a while, yield back the thread, and when the data comes back reschedule me. It can dramatically improve the scalability of the site.

"We're doing a bunch of work around helpers for caching, paging, and a other things. In general it's a compatible release, we're trying to listen to the community, keep it a very transparent, Agile-based development process and knock off the top asks.

"We ship the source to every preview, take lots of feedback. That's the other thing people have really liked about the project, this open feedback. They don't feel like we're telling them, here's the way it is, take it or leave it. They like the fact that we've been iterating with them."

Guthrie is diplomatic about the question of Web Forms versus ASP.NET MVC, and even though I pressed him, would not quite agree that it performs much better. Clearly Web Forms is not going away. Take a look though at some of the comments from practitioners like Howard van Rooijen of EMC (formerly Conchango):

One of the great aspects of ASP.NET MVC is how lean and clean the architecture is - there is so little background noise compared to WebForms; possibly the best illustration of this is the difference between the MVC Request Pipeline vs. WebForm Page Lifecycle. The number of hoops you are forced to jump through in WebForms, compared to MVC is quite staggering.

Overall I heard nothing to change my general opinion, that if you can use ASP.NET MVC rather than Web Forms, you probably should.

The Apple Mac's OS X is a gorgeous operating system, beloved by its users, but outside the niche world of designers and musicians it is generally not the one used in business. It's an odd situation that puts pressure on system administrators to accommodate Macs into their systems, either from the aforementioned designers, or from eager home Mac users who want to enjoy it at work as well.

Last week Apple released OS X Snow Leopard, also known as OS 10.6. I was at Apple's flagship store in Regent St, London following a press briefing, and watching throngs of people line up to purchase their upgrades left me in no doubt about the Mac's continuing success. Nevertheless, because of its high price and lack of business penetration the Mac remains a minority choice. The figures are slippery, but it may be around 10% of the US market by units, 20% by value (the difference showing how expensive they are), while worldwide it is much smaller.

Now Apple has introduced native support for Exchange as a key feature of Snow Leopard, apparently giving admins one less reason to deny would-be corporate Mac users. Is it enough?

Unfortunately the Exchange support still falls short. I've spent several days working almost exclusively in the new OS, and explored the new Exchange support in Snow Leopard. Although there is a lot to like, such as deep integration with Mail, iCal and tasks, there are snags. For a start, you need Exchange 2007 SP1, and earlier versions remain common. Even if that is in place, Snow Leopard's Exchange support still falls short of Outlook on Windows. The new feature is based on Exchange Web Services (EWS), which do not expose all the features of Exchange.

I found myself missing features like the ability to send on behalf of another user, and access to public folders. Another practical problem is that unless Exchange is configured with EWS in mind, it might not work at all, especially when trying to connect over the public internet. Outlook has its problems, but its ability to use RPC over HTTP, avoiding the need for a VPN connection, is a brilliant feature. It is also strong at seamless online/offline support, stronger than Apple Mail. I'm also not convinced that Mail's new Exchange support is quite done, as evidenced by several crashes like this one:

The real issues are broader than this. Macs still fit awkwardly into Windows-based networks. System administrators like standardisation: standard application deployments, standard operating system builds that can be zapped and re-imaged; standard configurations that can be enforced using Windows group policy. The presence of Macs adds unwelcome complication.

There's also the matter of application compatibility. If your business depends on some little application written in Visual Basic 6 or Microsoft Access, for example, you have to figure out a way for Mac users to run it, by emulation, or terminal services, or some other route.

In the short term then, Snow Leopard will not transform Enterprise Mac adoption. Nevertheless, the Mac is a huge influence, beyond what its market share implies. Further, if a significant number of users are using Windows grudgingly, wishing they were not, that is not good for productivity.

Here's three suggestions. The first is to think cross-platform. The past is the past; but for new applications it is short-sighted to target only Windows. I suspect this lesson has largely been learned, but it still bears repeating. Have a cross-platform client - Silverlight may help for .NET developers, or there is Adobe Flash/Flex, or Java, or pure Web applications, to mention a few solutions.

Second, learn from Apple. Microsoft is doing so, and Windows 7 is the evidence. An interview I did with Bill Buxton last year gives further background.

Third, is it really so hard to accommodate Macs? Yes, there are still issues, and different factors apply in every organization, but few problems are insurmountable.

Incidentally, I am no Mac Zealot. I actually like Windows, and although I'm currently immersed in OS 10.6, I intend to go back to using a PC most of the time. Some things are better on the Mac, some things are not, and most things are more expensive. It does pay though to have users working in the environment they prefer; and where that is possible, it makes sense to allow it.

Microsoft's Eric Nelson conducted a poll on how many businesses still use Visual Basic 6. It is hard to make sense of the statistics, since there was a built-in bias:

This survey was sent out to individuals we "suspected" had Visual Basic 6.0 heritage but it was also widely advertised through the MSDN Flash to UK developers.

In other words, only Windows developers were consulted, and those more likely to be using VB 6 were specially targetted. Some results:

• 86.53% of respondents still program with VB 6
• 87.62% actively maintain VB 6 applications
• 46.81% have more than 100,000 lines of VB 6 code running
• 42.58% plan to keep their applications in VB 6 for the forseeable future, even though most respondents believe that neither runtime nor the development environment is now supported by Microsoft
• 51.76% plan to migrate their VB 6 applications to .NET (mostly to VB.NET, but a fair amount to C#), but are in no hurry to do so: most said "over the next three years"

See the original post for more detail. I'd like to know more about the wider picture - how many companies overall still use VB 6 - but although these figures are skewed I can well believe that there is a lot of VB 6 out there.

Incidentally, the respondents are correct in believing that the VB 6 IDE is no longer supported. Extended support ended in March 2008. However, note that Visual Basic for Applications, which partly shares the same runtime, remains part of Office and therefore is supported. The VB 6.0 runtime is supported at least until 10 years after the release of Windows Server 2008; see this paper for exactly what is and is not included.

I noticed that msvbvm60.dll, along with other VB 6.0 runtime files, is also in my beta copy of Windows 7. I guess that will nudge the support life for the runtime even further into the future.

The bottom line is that Microsoft would be crazy to release a mainstream version of Windows that could not run VB 6 applications. For the most part, laggard VB 6 developers are safe, though there could be third-party components that stop working. Another point is that VB 6 will always be 32-bit.

All this prompts a few observations.

First, if you have skills in VB 6.0, it looks like you will be in demand for a while.

Second, my own views on VB 6.0 are mixed. I recognize that it was a revolutionary and very capable tool; but if anyone is inclined to wax lyrical about its merits, I point them towards Verity Stob's Thirteen Ways to Loathe VB and Bring your Hatchet by Bruce McKinney. At best, it is a flawed platform.

Third, I do see the sense in leaving well alone in many cases. VB 6.0 is lightweight compared to .NET, and runs on a wider range of hardware. Migrating code is perilous unless you have rigorous unit tests; some quirk in VB may catch you out, so that ported code does not work in quite the same way.

It strikes me that there is little value in migrating from, say, a VB 6.0 client application to a .NET Windows Forms application. My instinct would be either to leave it be, or redesign it as a web application. Otherwise the risk is that your new ported application will be just like the old version, but slower.

Microsoft has a summary of the options here, which seems to promote the idea of hybrid applications, perhaps using the Interop Forms Toolkit to embed .NET controls in VB 6 forms. Maybe, but there is a danger of getting the worst of both worlds. That said, every case is different so there is little value in generalizing. The important thing is to have a technical and business rationale for the path you choose.

Microsoft has published development guidelines for Windows 7 applications. They make interesting reading even if you don't plan to develop specifically for Windows 7 - after all, it has only just gone into beta - because they presumably represent Microsoft's latest thinking about how Windows applications should behave. In fact, I don't see much in the document that is specific to Windows 7. Arguably many of the problems with Windows are a result of badly-behaved applications, so I'd suggest that it pays to follow the guidelines unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. Most are applicable to internal apps as well as publicly available software. You can read them in detail by following the link, but here is a quick summary.

First, there are three "policies":

1. Don't be malware or spyware. Goes without saying; yet even supposedly reputable applications stray over the line sometimes, for example by phoning home with user data without proper explanation or consent.

2. Do not modify Windows Resource Protection files. This is about not installing system files except with official Microsoft redistributables.

3. Sign up to receive crash data from Windows Error Reporting. Probably not relevant to internal applications, where users soon let you know about crashes, but a great idea for anyone distributing software more widely.

Next, 10 guidelines. Note that there can be good reasons for breaking the guidelines; Microsoft's logo rules allow for waivers in these cases.

1. Install and uninstall cleanly, and never force a reboot at the end of an installation. The guideline doesn't address the question of how much user data to leave behind on uninstall. Most applications leave user data in place; but occasionally users reinstall to try and fix a configuration problem that is in the user data.

2. Install to the correct folders. Apps in Program Files, for example, and user data in AppData. An interesting twist here is that if your app is available for all users on the machine, then it cannot write user data during the install, but only on first run:

Since the install potentially elevates to a different user account during a "per machine" install, there is no correct user location to store data at the time of installation.

3. Support x64. That doesn't mean a 64-bit version, just that it works OK on 64-bit Windows.

4. Follow User Account Control (UAC) guidelines. This is the security feature in Vista and Windows 7 that means even local administrators run with limited permissions. I have seen app vendors advise customers to turn UAC off for the sake of their application. UAC is a security feature, and Windows insecurities afflict all of us in the form of viruses, spam and other malware, so I reckon we should support Microsoft's efforts and work with UAC rather than against it.

5. Do not load services and drivers in safe mode. For obvious reasons - safe mode is meant to be safe.

6. Digitally sign all executable files - both DLLs and EXEs. Worth doing, if only to avoid the user seeing ugly warnings about unknown applications.

7. Do not prevent an installation or application from launching because of version checking. This is an interesting one. If you write and test your application for, say, Windows Vista, it seems reasonable to block it from running on Windows 7, which you haven't yet been able to test. Unfortunately this kind of thinking causes major problems for users, who upgrade Windows and find that it "breaks" their applications. However, you are allowed to check for a minimum version - after all, if you know your app won't work on, say, Windows NT 4.0, there is little point in permitting the user to try.

8. Listen for system shutdown messages, prompt to save data if necessary, and avoid unnecessary reboots.

9. Support multi-user sessions. This means that multiple instances run by different users have to be isolated from each other.

10. Don't crash. Pass Application Verifier checks (Microsoft's utility for finding heap corruption and other common problems).

In the past I've read Microsoft logo guidelines that have struck me as placing unreasonable burdens on developers; but these seems concise and sensible. I'd be interested in opinions - has Microsoft set attainable goals, and is there anything here you violently disagree with?

The recent Linux plumbers conference included a session on getting Linux to boot in 5 seconds (see also the write-up here). It was great to see the report, because performance gets far too little attention. Most of the business world runs Windows rather than Linux, at least on the desktop, and in most respects Windows seems slower than Linux on the same hardware. I would give anything to have Vista boot in 5 seconds on my laptop. In fact, the main problem with Windows Vista is not driver compatibility, or annoying security prompts; it's that little spinning bagel that appears only too often. When I start Microsoft Outlook 2007, I brace myself for an extended pause while it starts up, during which the whole system becomes unresponsive. By contrast, I still enjoy using an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro for working with images, even though I have Adobe PhotoShop installed, because it starts in a blink and does exactly what I need.

The old joke is that what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away; but it is not a joke any more. Time spent waiting while a computer boots, or reboots to apply an update, or sits there doing who-knows-what in one of those sulky pauses, is time when we could be getting on with our work. Those delays cost real money, every day. They are also aggravating, sometimes not only for the immediate user. If I am on the telephone, for example, Outlook's slowness is not only a problem for me, but also for someone else trying to arrange a meeting.

I suspect that Microsoft made two wrong assumptions. First, that hardware improvements would remove performance issues. Fast hardware does mitigates problems, but really only disguises rather than fixes slow code. Further, the popularity of mini-laptops and other low-power devices means that fast hardware cannot be assumed. Second, Microsoft intended Vista to be always on, relying on sleep and resume instead of fast start-up. Unfortunately sleep and resume tends to be unreliable, and many Windows updates still require a system restart.

The same factors apply to web sites and web applications. One of the things that keeps people going back to Google is the consistently excellent performance of its site, especially in search. I am convinced that this has a subliminal impact, and that we instinctively prefer the sites that are more responsive. PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf speaks frequently about performance - last August at Drupalcon, for example - and is intolerant of slow applications; it would be great if more industry leaders shared his attitude.

There is little we can do about Windows boot times - well, apart from happy hours spent messing with msconfig, the System Configuration Utility - but that does not apply to our own development work. A project is not really done until the performance is satisfactory, even if all the other features work as specified. Performance is easy to measure, and there are plenty of profiling tools that show up bottlenecks in the code; tools like Rational PurifyPlus, Intel's VTune, or for .NET Redgate ANTS; there are also free tools available. The trick is to focus attention on what is too slow, rather than wasting time on what is already fast enough. It is rewarding work, since applications that perform well are a delight to use. Performance goes hand-in-hand with design, about which I posted a couple of weeks ago; they are both essential parts of the user experience, and a good user experience means a high level of satisfaction. There's nothing better for keeping customers coming back for more.

Over the weekend Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Coporate VP of the .NET developer division, announced that the open source jQuery Javascript library will be integrated into Visual Studio, the main Windows development tool. Further, Microsoft will treat jQuery as a supported product within technical support contracts, and will use jQuery to build new controls for ASP.NET, its web platform.

This is a breakthrough both for Microsoft and for open source. In the past, Microsoft has preferred to reinvent the wheel rather than adopting existing open source code. For example, when the company delivered Visual Studio Team System, it did not use existing open source products like NUnit for unit testing, or Subversion for source code management, or Nant and CruiseControl for build management, but shipped all-new equivalents. That strategy may have backfired. At the recent Remix08 conference in Brighton, I noticed that when a developer asked about Team System during a panel discussion, he was immediately advised by several other delegates to stick with the open source products.

I don't mean to suggest that Microsoft has only just discovered open source. After all, the company has its own open source community focused on interoperability, and publishes source code to some of this products under various shared source licenses. On the developer side, Microsoft sponsors significant open-source products like IronPython and IronRuby. But the jQuery case is particularly interesting, because Microsoft already has its own Javascript library called ASP.NET AJAX.
 
Is Microsoft now abandoning its own library? At Remix08, I asked Guthrie this very question. "We are definitely still investing in ASP.NET AJAX, there's lots of features coming out," he told me. "But there's a proportion of developers coming from other platforms where having support for other AJAX frameworks makes it more likely they'll use Visual Studio, which is good for us, and there's some proportion of developers on .NET that would prefer to use other frameworks in addition. People tend to be pragmatic. jQuery is great for CSS selectors and for the animation engine, but doesn't have a type system like Prototype or ASP.NET AJAX. We see a lot of developers wanting to use the ASP.NET AJAX class and type system, and then use CSS selectors and animation from jQuery."

In his announcement, Guthrie explains how jQuery support came about. Developers were asking for features to be added to ASP.NET AJAX, when they were already in jQuery. "As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it." That sounds like common sense to most of us, but getting to this point has been a considerable journey for Microsoft.

The move is not without risks. If jQuery is good enough, then what about PHP, an open source alternative to ASP.NET? What about using Linux instead of Windows, or OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office? The company can hardly suggest that open source stuff is never any good, when it is integrating open source code into its own products. Instead, Microsoft has to compete on real-world issues like quality, productivity, reliability and support, which can only be good for its customers.

"Developers, Developers, Developers" is the famous rant of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Maybe he picked the wrong word. I'm just back from the Remix 08 conference in Brighton, where the company's Principal Researcher Bill Buxton spoke on software design. He made a big impression, especially when he suggested in an interview that unless Microsoft changes its culture in a way that put design at the core of its software, the company would die.

Underlying this is the ascendancy of Apple, widely admired for its design, and the mixed fortunes of Windows Vista, which was meant to have great design but in practice has plenty of irritations many of which are design issues. There is a tendency to think of design as primarily about graphics and layout, but this view is too narrow. Design is about the user's experience, and encompasses all kinds of user interaction.

Few companies have the resources of Apple or Microsoft; but raised expectations of what constitutes good or even acceptable design affect the whole industry, including developers of internal applications as well as web site authors. Design failures are frustrating for users; and the consequence is that software is used less, and satisfaction is lower.

An example which comes to mind has no graphics at all. A certain telecom company with a colourful name has a telephone menu system which is unavoidable if you need to call support. Whenever I have to use it, I feel my blood pressure rising before dialling the number. I know I will have to go through numerous layers before being allowed to speak to a human. I know I will be given mandatory choices, none of which apply to me, forcing me to lie. I know each step will be ponderous, with a recorded messages I have heard before, and invitations to use the web site instead - if I thought that would do, why would I call? If you call outside working hours, you are taken through all the steps and told right at the end that the office is closed, goodbye. When I do eventually speak to someone, I am already in a bad temper.

This is the consequence of poor design. I could reel off countless further examples, such as Microsoft Outlook 2007, with its obscure dialogs - click Message Options to show email headers, very clear NOT - its habit of blaming the user for its own shortcomings, "The data file was not closed properly," and its slow performance with large mailboxes. Some of these are technical issues, but because they directly damage the user experience, they are also design problems.

Enough ranting. The interesting question is how developers and designers can work together to improve software design at every level. Buxton talks about continuous design, where designers participate in the development process throughout, rather than only at the beginning of a project, or even worse, only at the end. It is a good thought; but as the panel discussions at Remix demonstrated, there is no consensus about how the developer/designer relationship should work.

There are signs of change. Tools are appearing which have both developers and designers in mind, such as Microsoft's Expression Blend which can open Visual Studio solutions, or Adobe's product codename Thermo, which converts artwork into application code. That said, it is people rather than tools that hold the key. It is about developers ceding some of their power to designers; and about designers learning more about the constraints under which developers work; and about learning to treat poor user experience as a defect. It is not easy; but teams that get this right will gain a substantial commercial advantage.