Windows Embedded (Think Kiosk)

Today Microsoft released some more details on their road map for releasing the VNext of Windows Embedded.  Normally I don’t get interested in these things because grocery stores, airlines, GPS and others have shown how terrible of a user experience they can provide.  Embedded stuff always used to be kind of a world of its own but I think with Windows 8 we are seeing things come back together.

You can read the full press release here but here are a few key points I found interesting…

-  According to analyst firm IDC, the market for intelligent systems will swell substantially in the next few years, from 800 million units today to more than 2.3 billion by 2015.

-Windows Embedded Enterprise v.Next, providing full Windows application compatibility and the power of Microsoft’s premium operating systems on embedded devices, will be available for use in a number of different devices, such as ATMs and kiosks, a quarter after Windows 8 is generally available for PCs

- Windows Embedded Standard v.Next will support the ARM architecture, in addition to continuing support for the Intel x86 and x64 architectures

Like I said I normally don’t pay much attention to Windows Embedded but I think with some of the changes happening, the similar application models/compatibility – the potential is there to make this interesting.  Maturing of the touch interface and Kinect also have impact here.  I wouldn’t expect a better checkout experience at your local grocery store real soon, but there might be hope.

Kicking the tires on Windows 8

Last week the new Windows 8 Consumer preview was released and I thought I would share some of my experiences so far. I think I’ve installed it about 6 times so far on different devices. Some are touch and some do not have touch. Windows 8 touch is addicting, after a couple days last week of using it most of the time on my machine without touch I was still touching the monitor.

I have the Samsung Slate they gave out at build and it was the first device I updated. I was planning on doing a couple days of development work last week so I took it with me. The device is smooth and probably one of the best test devices I’ve used for Windows 8. In case you’re curious the Samsung Series 7 slate is very similar but not exact and I have seen many people get those if they didn’t have the Build conference device and wanted a slate. For developing though I found it a little clunky primarily because Visual Studio is not very touch friendly. So that means you need a keyboard and a mouse to really be productive. For me, once I have to drag those around I might as well just use a laptop. The slate though is perfect for showing off what you build and once more apps are there it or a similar device will easily do all the things I keep an IPad around for. One upgrading the Build slate – if you don’t boot from USB you don’t boot from USB you will need to have at least 20gb free. If you want to make a bootable USB – I used the Microsoft store tool - http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool In my case I had 20gb free so I ran it from within the prior Windows install. It created a Windows.Old folder containing my developer preview version of Windows 8. That will consume 10-20gb of space so you will want to remove it. You can’t simply remove the Windows.Old folder using delete but you can using Disk Cleanup.

On my Windows 7 laptop, I use VMWare to run my virtual machines because they are all 64bit (hoping to break that habit with Windows 8 support for 64bit guests) I setup a virtual machine on that with Windows 8 and that ran pretty smooth. You do need the more recent version of VMWare if you are going down that path. I have also known me to use Virtualbox. The reason to do a virtual install is so you can run it at the same time you are doing stuff on Windows 7 – otherwise you should check out Scott Hanselman’s post on booting from VHD - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToGuideToInstallingAndBootingWindows8ConsumerPreviewOffAVHDVirtualHardDisk.aspx

Just after build we got a HP Touchsmart all in one computer we have it sitting on the counter and sometimes it just acts as a picture frame and other times it’s a full Windows 8 device. Upgrading it seemed to work. Of the different devices jury is still out if it picked up a few quirks on the latest consumer preview. For example, it seems like sometimes touch is not as responsive as it used to be.

I mentioned earlier that developing on the slate wasn’t all that I thought it would be. Not that you can’t but for me I don’t like to carry around a keyboard and mouse for a slate – seems like it should standalone. So after some research I found that the Lenovo X220 tablets seem to be a good option. Turns out they are also on Microsoft’s short list of recommended systems as well - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/29/running-the-consumer-preview-system-recommendations.aspx The thing with these is it has keyboard, mouse and touch all in one device. It’s also a really small form factor so you don’t feel like you are carrying around the kitchen sink. We were lucky and found a couple slightly used/open box that we picked up for a really good price. I did the setup on one of these this morning and it went smooth. The touch was very responsive and I’m getting addicted to the fast switching between applications.

Our e-mail/ Lync etc is hosted via Office 365, so after installing Windows 8 – download and setup of Office did from the portal and that went smoothly just like with Windows 7. Visual Studio 11 can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us During the beta you can use any of the editions so there really is no good reason to just use express right now. Visual Studio 11 now has backward compatibility on the solution files so I’m hopefully to use it more than 2010 at this point. The one holdout here is the Windows Azure tools but they are likely to follow soon behind. This post is helpful in the meantime if you need to use Windows Azure tools - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/vs11/

One other nice thing is that the new preview has an actual app store connected up and live. It is still pretty empty because all of us need to build applications. It does give you an idea where things are headed. There are a few apps in there like USA Today and Photobucket etc. These are clearly preview versions but its great they are there to get you started. From my perspective filling this with the key apps is a done deal since Microsoft has done that with the major ones for Windows Phone. Sure there will always be a few hold outs that aren’t there but I suspect by later this year we will be surprised how many applications are in the store.

The bottom line is find a machine that you can put Windows 8 on. Clearly this is where Microsoft is focusing its mass energy and like it or not it will be here soon. I’ve gone through this with all the past Windows versions and this is about the time that if I can I simply just start using it as my daily OS. I’m in the first stage of that now which is trying it to see if I find any blockers that would prevent it from working. I’m guessing by a week or two I will be ready to make the leap.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting Windows 8 is perfect, or done just that its ready for you to get to know it if you are a developer.

WCF errors after Installing Azure SDK 1.5

I’ve run into this problem twice now and figured maybe someone else might hit it as well.  The error occurred right after installing the new Azure 1.5 SDK and the first time I went to run a regular application that did a WCF call I got the following error.  The error simply says NetTCPRelayBinding could not be found.

What was interesting was the fact I wasn’t even using service bus at all.  After looking all over I finally found a blog talking about removing entries left behind in the machine.config here  I was a little skeptical at first but as I got more desperate I figured worst I could do is kill one of my machines.  That didn’t completely fix the problem but removing all old entries having servicebus in the name did turn out to be part of the solution.  Do remember to backup this file before you edit it just in case you make a typo and need to recover it later.

The other part for me both times has been running the command   RelayConfigurationInstaller /I from the  %Program Files%\Windows Azure AppFabric SDK\V1.5\Assemblies\NET4.0 folder.  This was done after the machine.config was cleaned up from all old servicebus entries and saved.

Once that was done I was able to use WCF related things like before and all was good.  Please use care with using this approach as it’s not clear why this is even required but I figured I would share what I found in case it helps someone else not spend a few hours tracking down one possible solution.  I will pass this along to Microsoft and if they offer any additional guidance I will update the post later.

Update 10/10/2011:

This issue is related to AppFabric 1.0 SDK not uninstalling properly and clearing out entries in machine.config. We have captured the symptoms and workaround in the known-issues sections here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh148155.aspx#KnownIssues

For a brief period between April and June the AppFabric 1.0 installer on the download site had a bug where is did not remove all machine.config entries, this has since been fixed. In addition SDK 1.5 does not add any entries to machine.config.

Build Day 1 Keynote Thoughts

This morning kicked off day one of the Microsoft Build Windows conference where developers got the first preview of building apps on Windows 8. It's been an interesting few months leading up to the conference as many people were speculating everything that they could get someone to believe. A few weeks back though facts started to come out via the Windows 8 Blog - you can find it here. The keynote and the session videos will be up on the conference site for free so even if you didn't make it you can find them here. I have no intent to repeat everything you can read in the press release here, so I will only highlight a few key thoughts.

A few random thoughts to get started…

• Every thing that runs on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8

• Even memory usage will be less. Windows 8, is even more optimized than Windows 7 for example a netbook running windows 7 used 404 mb of memory. That same netbook runs with just 281 mb in Windows 8.

• Look for small things that are new for example Picture password - allows picking points on picture or sliding across in gesture to login. Simple Pin support also appears to be in.
  
• Choose how you want to interact, mouse, keyboard touch, all work, touch clearly being thought of as a first class way of interacting. In fact I heard in one session - "If the monitor doesn't support touch it's broken". I personally think this will happen faster on the slate/tablets and slower on the desktop as there is a lot of existing desktops with non touch devices. That said, touch clearly adds some interesting interactions that are possible and that should push the pace desktops move to touch capable displays faster.
  
• Metro style, you know that style from the Windows Phone, is now going to be a consistent experience across the phone, slate and desktop, but with obvious tweaks to fit the form factor.
  
• Best Steve Sinofsky quote of the day "I don't think anything is better than a Chrome free browsing experience" - and I don't think he really was talking about the chrome around the browser (think Google Chrome if you don't get it...).
  
• Choose how you want to build applications, XAML with C++,C#,VB, or HTML5 and Javascript all sitting on top of WinRT (more on that in the future) which provides a clean optimized native runtime for them. For those that were proclaiming XAML as dead - can we move on now please?

• If you used to use your PC startup time to get coffee, you will have to find another excuse because boot time is going to just keep getting faster

Connecting Applications

Probably one of the most interesting thing I saw during the keynote was how applications could connect to another application. This isn't a new concept, after all copy/paste has been used for years to move data from one application to another. For example, you copy an address from an e-mail and paste it to the map application to get directions. In Windows Phone if you take a picture you might share it on Facebook, e-mail it away all via a Share type link. Windows 8 Metro style applications will now formalize this in what they are referring to as "Charms" (I'm guessing Charms as it's name won't make it past marketing by release) But the idea is an application can publish itself as a source and/or a target. Sources provide data that applications use, and targets indicate they can accept that same type of data. Contracts are used to perform the match making. For example, an Image application might publish as a source a picture and if I wrote a Smug Mug application it could be the Target and would show up on the list Charms because it accepts pictures. Search is another great example of where this might apply but you can think of a number of business scenarios where this is useful as well. By connecting applications it makes for a more consistent user experience and in a lot of ways can reduce the amount code you have to do for common application features. It is also important because it lets the user interact directly with other applications without leaving the existing application. For people building Charms (targets) it's an easy way to extend windows and other applications, ones that might not even be known at the time the Charm was created.

Windows App Store

One thing the mobile developers understand is the idea that a app store is an easy way to get people to buy applications. The idea someone can find it, click buy, install it and go makes it a low friction way to get people into your application. Windows 8 will have an app store integrated in that will allow metro style applications (those built in XAML, HTML5) to be first class citizens. The app store will also allow legacy applications(you know those non metro style applications) to be in there with a link to the companies web site. For the metro style apps, you pick a price, you decide if you want a trial, you go through the marketplace process and then the application is ready to buy. It looks similar to the Windows Phone process. To me this opens up a new opportunity to build small applications that people will pay a few $ for and anyone, not just huge ISVs will have the ability to have an application take off if people find it interesting.

I'm here at build with 5000 friends, in fact I've been impressed how packed the keynote and all the days sessions have been. It's now early afternoon, and there's a lot of excitement floating around. The fact that each attendee is getting a slate running a developer preview of Windows 8 and all the tools later today I'm sure doesn't hurt. Look for more on that once we get them later today and I get a chance to kick the tires.

Silverlight + CRM Book Released

Silverlight has always been a good fit for extending the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user experience.  CRM 2011 takes that a step further by providing first class support including the ability to host Silverlight content as web resources on the server.  Silverlight can be used for a little widget on a form to a full blown rich page of content.  In fact, we start out the book by talking about where it is a good fit and where it isn’t.

The Silverlight + CRM book takes the best parts of our Silverlight Jumpstart book and adds a ton of CRM specific content.  In fact I think its safe to say right now it’s the most CRM + Silverlight content found anywhere.  We cover everything from where Silverlight can be used with CRM to how to use OData and the WCF services to perform data and service actions.  You can read the full table of contents here.

If you’ve purchased one of our other books check your e-mail we sent you a really good discount.  If you haven’t bought one of our books or are just too lazy to look in your email here’s some codes to help you along as well.

Discount Code	Product	Price
DaveBlog	ebook	$19.99
DaveBlogPrint	print	$34.99
DaveBlogBoth	print + ebook	$54.98

You can find the book site at http://www.silverlightpluscrm.com

Finally, I know a number of you have been asking me about updates to our full CRM book CRM as a Rapid Application Development Platform. We have been crazy busy working on that as well. In fact, last night was another late night!  Part of what takes so long is not just updating content but making sure we cover new CRM 2011 features.  Got ideas for either of these books of stuff we should cover?  Send it over but only if you don’t mind if we write about it!

WP7 Ad Control and OutOfMemoryException

Recently we added the Windows Phone Ad Control to one of our existing applications.  It ran fine on the emulator but as soon as you put it on a real device it crashed with a System.OutOfMemoryException.  Turns out after a little investigation and locating this forum post the issue is related to capabilities specified on the application. 

More specifically you need to have ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT in your WMAppManifest.xml list of capabilities.  Here’s the exact line you need to add:

<Capability Name="ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT"/>

That’s not the only capability that is needed when you add advertising, just happened that we already had the other ones on the list.  Walt Ritscher has a good blog post here that talks about how 3rd party DLLs and other references you add can expand your security foot print.

The Marketplace Test Kit or the Windows Phone Capability Detection tool can detect and auto generate these capabilities for you – details here,

LinkedIn–Time to Check Your Settings

I’ve always in the past thought LinkedIn was a pretty stand up company, however recently some of their actions make you go hmmm…  I came across this post talking about how LinkedIn now has options for if your picture can be used in advertising and e-mail preferences allow unsolicited e-mail from 3rd party.  I thought for sure the post had to be wrong, I’ve always thought of LinkedIn as being above those games, but sure enough the post was accurate and my profile was enabled without my permission.  So go now, and check your settings the post here has details on how to do it.

I’ve used Linked In’s premium service off and on before – in the past it used to be easy to shutoff if you decided you didn’t need it for a while.  This last round after a few months of paying for it and not using it, I decided to turn it off again.  They make it easy to charge your card for services, but there is no link to easily request it to be turned off that I could find.  Ironically, I took advantage of the service to e-mail the Linked In CEO, who by morning made sure it got turned off.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Linked In has incredible value and if you aren’t on it, as long as they don’t keep playing games you should be there.  Hey Linked In, I’m not sure who’s making these decisions, but clean up your act!

Update 8/11 – Linked In Posted the following to their blog in response to the reaction of the community of the changes - http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/08/11/social-ads-update/