£400 of freebies? Pull the other one, Microsoft

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

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Is Microsoft throwing stones in the developer glass house?

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Am I the only person who finished reading the Security Development Lifecycle Progress Report and immediately conjured up an image of Microsoft developers throwing stones in a big glass house?

The Microsoft SDL is, obviously, a good thing if it helps to reduce vulnerabilities in code. But I got the feeling that Microsoft was saying that Windows and Internet Explorer are such popular targets for attack because developers are not applying all the SDL techniques and technologies available to them.

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Behind the scenes of a cloud conversation

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Eagle-eyed surfers will already have spotted my bumbling efforts as part of the Cloud Power initiative, and those who didn’t can now go and have a bit of a giggle, come back, and say whatever comes to their mind in reaction to the footage.

I thought I’d do a bit of a behind-the-scenes account here for interested parties, and also explain why I’m happy to take the risk of being an idiot in a video that exists purely because a single vendor – Microsoft – wanted to make it.

First off: Tim and I didn’t rehearse. I believe I get worse with each rehearsal, starting from a pretty low base in the first place. We had a set of basic questions but we didn’t have any set conclusions we were expected to work towards. Given the breadth of the questions being asked, this was something of a relief.

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When a Windows 7 boot disk goes wrong

Friday, February 4th, 2011

PC Pro can be as guilty as anyone else when it comes to putting the boot into companies when they do something wrong, so just for a change let’s celebrate a company doing something good. That company: Microsoft. The something good: sorting out a tricky problem with a Windows 7 system. Well, almost.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

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Microsoft WebMatrix review: hands-on

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Microsoft is famous for developing new technologies only to abandon them later, leaving early adopters high and dry. WebMatrix is one of those rare exceptions to get a second life (or third, depending upon how you count them) after being dropped like a stone six years ago.

In a nutshell, WebMatrix provides a free web development environment for .NET and, to a lesser extent, PHP. The aim appears to be to provide a simple entry point to .NET web development for beginner coders – the hope being that once snared within the Microsoft development environment, programmers will upgrade to Visual Studio. The initial install includes the IIS Express web server, the SQL Server Compact Edition for databases and support for the new Razor mark-up syntax.

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Silverlight 5: Back from the dead?

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

At its recent Professional Developer Conference Microsoft’s Bob Muglia signalled a major change of strategy for the company’s Silverlight technology. When first introduced Silverlight was intended to become a near universal cross-platform web runtime like Flash. Now Muglia revealed that Microsoft saw HTML5 as the future for universal in-browser development while Silverlight was being repositioned as a native application development platform for Windows Phone 7 devices. Unsurprisingly, most pundits saw this as an admission of defeat, with our own Jon Honeyball asking: “Silverlight RIP?”

Yesterday, just over a month later, Scott Guthrie announced the “Firestarter” launch of the new Silverlight 5 beta under the slogan “the future of Silverlight starts now”. So what’s going on? (more…)

Yet another Microsoft storage disaster

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

So Microsoft has decided to kill off the Drive Extender technology in the next release of Windows Home Server, codenamed Vail (and the other concotions of the same basic recipe: Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, codenamed Aurora).

This was the one bit of cleverness in Windows Home Server that really appealed to the home user. Buy a four-bay server like the cute little HP Home Server, and add more discs when you needed more space.

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Microsoft Lync: sneak preview

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Yesterday’s good internet weather slickened up the demos at Microsoft TechEd here in Berlin no end. It wasn’t possible to tell whether the screens we were watching in the keynote speech were being served from PCs behind the curtains, or on another continent.

However, the Demo Gods swiftly departed for a more pressing engagement: today’s demos of Microsoft Lync suffered enormously, from capricious Wi-Fi links, low external bandwidth and the product demonstrator’s “all on a laptop” lifestyle.

If it was me having to demonstrate a heavy piece of kit built three or four stacked products deep on top of Server 2008, I’d have a quad-core laptop and a pared-down server as a virtual machine, just in case; but pretty clearly, the Lync demo team were not aware of just how good their bad demo actually was.

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Android and Apple iOS will not beat BlackBerry

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

Fanboys had better sit down before continuing, as I have some bad news for you, unless your particular tech obsession of choice is CrackBerry or Windows flavoured. Neither Apple iOS nor Android will beat BlackBerry or Microsoft as a mobile business platform any time soon, according to the latest market research.

But more of that later, first let’s start with some confusing jargon. A newly published study conducted by Plantronics reinforces what I already know, namely that more and more people are working outside of the traditional office environment these days.

Well, actually, that’s being a little disingenuous as in reality it confused me greatly by suggesting that people increasingly work in ‘transitional spaces’ and, to be honest, I had no idea what that really meant.  Delving a little deeper, it would appear that it means ‘public spaces used while in transit’ according to Plantronics. Translated into normal-speak I think what the survey was actually trying to say is that people are doing more work while on the bus, train or plane. And in hotel rooms, airport lounges or coffee shops for that matter. Anywhere outside of the office, other than the home environment in other words.

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Silverlight RIP?

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

The battle royal between HTML5 and the two major plugin runtimes of Silverlight from Microsoft and Flash from Adobe continues to rumble on.

To the intense annoyance of both firms, it appears Apple is holding sway here with its insistence that neither Silverlight nor Flash will be allowed on the iOS platform used in the iPhone and iPad. And that, in its opinion, HTML5 is the future.

Well, there is no doubt that HTML5 is the future, in that the current HTML5 implementation leaves much to be desired and it will take time and work for this to be fleshed out. But Apple says no, use native code on iOS or use HTML5. (more…)