.NET From India

Silverlight, HTML 5 and the whole RIA puzzle

Microsoft SilverLight (Photo credit: denetsnuff)

A year or so ago if you are a developer on the MS platform and you wanted to develop an RIA application, you automatically picked Silverlight as option 1. If Silverlight was not viable, then you started looking at other options like ASP.NET AJAX etc. But picking Silverlight was a no brainer.

Then along came HTML 5 and talk around the interactivity, graphics and Offline usage features of HTML 5. At around the same time, Microsoft started to put out kind of confusing messaging around Silverlight. SL 5 was making its way out, but HTML 5 support was also being added. Then Microsoft went silent on the future of Silverlight. That led to talk around SL getting the cut and everything moving to HTML 5.

If you are going to create an application that needs some kind of RIA features or offline, out of browser support, you are now at a decision point. Do you go with Silverlight or jump into HTML 5?

Well this post is my thought process around answering that question…

If you need offline access and do not want to write a desktop app (WinForm or WPF), then HTML 4 kind of gets ruled out. HTML 5 adds support for Offline Scenarios, but this is not fully supported yet. So there is a needs for offline support, as of now, you have only 2 options, a desktop app or Silverlight. (I am going to keep my scope constrained to Microsoft technologies as that is what I work with)

Another usual need is rich interactions (which led to RIA). Obviously currently with technologies like AJAX, JSON and web services, it is possible for HTML applications to be a lot more interactive than before. HTML 5 does take this forward a lot and promises a scenario where you can get really interactive applications running in the browser.

The problem I see with HTML 5 is that if you are planning to build an enterprise application (keeping it simple as you have control on browsers you will support inside the enterprise) then in the short term, if there is a need for offline support or high interactivity, then the only option is Silverlight. Ok, what about support then, since MS is strangely silent on Silverlight's future. Well, Silverlight is supported till 2021, and most enterprise applications have a life time of 5-10 years. So even if SL is going to go out of support in 2021, there is a high chance that you application has already go through a rewrite cycle by this time and you could have chosen an alternative, maybe HTML 5, for the rewrite.

So in the short term, if you are building a new application, then do not ignore Silverlight. It is a very viable option till HTML 5 stabilizes and is widely supported (at the same level by multiple browsers) or by that time, there may be a Silverlight 6, who knows!!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,HTML 5,Application Development Options

Windows Virtual PC–Launching Virtual Machine Wizard Manually

I use Windows Virtual PC for running some of the test VPCs and also for learning new features etc. Since I also play around with multiple versions of virtualization software (VirtBox, VMWare etc), I suddenly found that my Virtual PC directory settings were kind of screwed up (after many installs/uninstall of multiple virtualization software). So now I do not get the options to create a new virtual machine.

The good thing is that Windows Virtual PC is made up of multiple EXEs and you can manually launch then as required.

The easiest way is to directly type the command into the run bar as all of these EXEs reside in the system32 directory.

The command to launch the new virtual machine wizard is vpcwizard.exe.

You can find more about the different EXEs that ship with Windows Virtual PC on this post: Windows Virtual PC Executable

SmartArt animation in PowerPoint

Since smartart is a collection of shapes that is grouped, it can be quite challenging to animate a smartart in a way that you want. PowerPoint out of box allows you limited flexibility in the way you can animate sub parts of a smart art.

Let us assume the following smart art

Say if I want to animate this so that the first Level 1 appears, then the equivalent Level 2 appears and so on.

But the default animation options will give you the following:

Default Animation available with Smart Art

This obviously does not fit into our flow. So instead of using the Level based animation, we can do the one-by-one animation and then customize the animation further to fit our need. The below video shows the customization that will allow us to animate the smartart as per our requirement.

Customized Animation

IE9 Released!!!

Download it from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie/home

 

 

There are also some nice updated demos of the capabilities at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ including a nice interactive video mixer app called Firework Interactive Video.

A Few IE9 RC Features

As I use the new RC the more changes/feature I come across. Below are a few I came across over the weekend.

One of the new popup messages I came across was a new “cross-site scripting” dialog shown below

I don’t know what this does, but it was at a well know site. I assume this is to do with XSS Filter setting and I could not find anything more on this on the web.

The other is when you download a exe or other executable files. I am quite sure this feature was not there in the Beta as today is the first time I came across this. This is a prompt I got when I tried to download an exe file.

If you see, there is no run option in the popup bar. I clicked on Action and I got another dialog

Again here the “Run anyway” option becomes available only if you click a expander button (those small arrow’y things). The default action available is only “Don’t run” and “Delete”.

This is quite a good thing as it basically adds a layer of protection and requires user action to actually run an executable from a unknown site. Also if the download is from a source that is marked as reputable, then this dialog does not popup.

More details on this feature at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/10/13/stranger-danger-introducing-smartscreen-application-reputation.aspx

Global Internet Speed and Cost

I came across this picture and a related article on the average broadband speed and cost per mbps around the world.

Compared to Japan an Korea, rest of the world seems far behind. This does not mention India and China, two of the most populous nations. AFAIK, 20 Mbps is the max speed currently available for a home connection in India and the average speed would be around 256 Kbps?

And cost wise I am not sure where India fits in though….

(Soure: Compare Your Internet Cost and Speed to Global Averages [Infographic])

IE9 Tracking Protection and Tracking Lists

Obviously one of the most talked about option of the new IE9 RC is about the new feature called Tracking Protection. This allows you to control what kind of tracking options you will accept and also as a by product can help you stop all those distracting Ads from showing up. Do note, this is turned off by default and you need to turn it on and also subscribe to lists that contains sites to be blocked.

As soon as I installed the RC, I set this up and then went ahead and subscribed to all the recommended lists. I figured more the lists, better my chance of catching an Ad site.

But according to this article (Privacy protection and IE9: who can you trust?), the lists can contain both allow and disallow rules and allow rules win when there is a contention. So basically, it now becomes important that you choose the right lists or you are going to pretty much be without any tracking protection. Based on the article, the current list rate as follows (as of Feb 12th list):

Publisher	Block	Allow
EasyList	2,189	47
PrivacyChoice	463	1
Abine	94	0
TRUSTe	0	3,958

 

So going anywhere near TRUSTe, basically negates tracking protection as of now.

And PrivacyChoice does not actually allow any site, it just has a sample whitelist entry and that seems to have been counted as a false positive.

Moving Applications to Azure

I was reading this post about how they are moving TFS to Azure to provide a cloud based version of TFS.

I find this very interesting as it provides you with a view of what kinds of problems you may face if you are moving an existing application on to the cloud (esp. Azure)

Some issues like security can have a major impact on your application design, while others like SELECT INTO support may also drain a lot of effort to fix.

And the final big thing that may weigh on your overall effort is testing. Because, now all your previous test results are out of the window and you will have to do a complete regression to make sure that everything works find.

Microsoft BI – ‘hard to beat pricewise’ – Forrester

A recent Forrester Report on the BI space puts Microsoft BI on the leaders quadrant and also says the value of Microsoft BI is ‘hard to beat pricewise’.

I have been seeing an increasing trend among customers in adopting Microsoft BI over the past year or so and this seems to be led strongly from two fronts:

1. Price – Since the price of most of the elements required for BI is encapsulated in things that most enterprises already have (SQL Server, SharePoint (for PPS) and Office (Excel+PowerPivot).

2. New UI power in PowerPivot and SharePoint PPS services seem to also add to the overall trend.

(Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ragnarh/archive/2010/10/26/forrester-research-calls-microsoft-s-business-intelligence-value-proposition-hard-to-beat-pricewise.aspx)

Tracking Cookie Opt Out

Recently there has been a number of articles and focus on tracking cookies used by online advertisers and concerns around privacy. Most of these companies use tracking cookies and track your online usage and then serve up advertisements based on this data.

Obviously, you don’t want companies tracking all of your  online activities and till now the only option is to delete cookies periodically (I prefer to use CCleaner once a week) or use private browsing options in your browser.

I came across a site (via an post on ZDNet) called the Network Advertisement Initiative, which seems to be an association of these advertisement companies. They have a page for Consumer Opt-out, where you can go an opt out of having tracking cookies placed on your machine by member companies. Basically you get to opt out of around 60 companies in 2 clicks. (As of today, there seems to be some companies for which opt-out cookies do not seem to work, but most of them did)

Note: Opt-out works by placing an opt-out cookie, so that you don’t get the tracking cookie. So if you clean out your cookies, then you will need to come and opt-out again. Also opting out does not stop Ads from showing up, just that you don’t get a tracking cookie.