Installing Visual Studio 2008 - Error 1330
This week I had to re-install all of my software again on my laptop that runs Vista. That is never fun. However, with all the SDKs and software I use, the computer tends to slow down and this becomes a necessary evil. In installing all of my software again, I ran into a problem with installing Visual Studio 2008. I haven't run into a problem with installing Visual Studio 2008 since it was in beta (I have probably done over a dozen installations of VS 2008, various editions).
I downloaded the ISO from MSDN Subscriptions and fired up the Visual Studio 2008 installation and then, bam! "Error 1330. A file that is required cannot be installed because the cabinet file c:\download\vs2008\cab5.cab has an invalid digital signature. This may indicate that the cabinet file is corrupt." I tried different install options, re-mounting the ISO and eventually re-downloaded the ISO. I never saw this before and figured this had to be a fluke thing. After it downloaded overnight, I tried again the next day and the same thing happened: "Error 1330. A file that is required cannot be installed..."
Then I started looking around on the web for any solution and noticed that many other people were having the same error (Error 1330); however, they were getting different cabinet files as the culprit. Heath Stewart's blog article on this is referenced in a lot of forums and is the first hit on Google when searching for Error 1330. His suggestion was to not install from a DVD and copy the files to the HD. I was already doing that. A further search on forums didn't really help with having success by disabling Microsoft Live Care (which I do not use).
What ended up being the problem was that I installed SQL Server 2008 first and had SQL Browser enabled (I tried a bunch of different stuff prior to this). I turned that off and also disabled search indexing on the HD. As soon as I disabled those two services, the installation worked. Just to double check that was the solution, I tried the installation again and it worked! I don't understand why either of these essentially change the signature of the cabinet file; however, it does make sense it was a service as users were reporting different cabinet files in the 1330 Error.
I wasted probably over seven hours trying to get around the Error 1330, so I decided to do a quick post to help anyone else out there that is facing the same error (as the solutions provided online didn't seem to help).
Silverlight 3 Beta - Downloads You May Have Missed
Everyone that is interested in Silverlight 3 Beta development has probably checked out all of the core items in the release: Silverlight 3 SDK, Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008, Blend 3 Preview, Silverlight Control Toolkit (March 2009 version). There have been several other releases that are related to Silverlight 3 you may have missed and are a little less obvious if you are new to Silverlight development. This blog post deals with the items that are a little less obvious but important to know about. Not all of these downloads are targeted for Silverlight 3; however, they should work with Silverlight 3 Beta.
"There have been a ton of tools released
with Silverlight 3. Did you miss any of them?"
Data Access
Silverlight includes several different ways to consume data (most of them being via services). There have been three new updates to the data service frameworks available for Silverlight released recently:
- .NET RIA Services - This is a new n-tier design framework released during the MIX 2009 Conference. This framework allows you to factor more of the work into the service tier for business logic, validation, errors, querying, etc. This framework is new to the Silverlight 3 Beta.
- ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 CTP1 - This is a preview version of the upcoming update to ADO.NET Data Services which provides client and server enhancements for Silverlight developers who create service applications. It is very similar to .NET RIA Services (In fact, many people think these are the same; however, these are DIFFERENT frameworks)
- WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 - Yet another data access framework from Microsoft. This framework targets WCF and applies REST architectual patterns for service access. In my opinion, WCF with REST gives you the most flexibility and control when creating data aware applications with Silverlight. Using interceptors, you can control every aspect of message headers, creation, caching across the channel stack. The WCF REST Starter Kit will be included with .NET 4.0/Visual Studio 2010.
- WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2
- IdeaBlade DevForce - This is a 3rd party framework that works along the same lines as ADO.NET Data Services and .NET RIA Services. They have some additional tools that take away some of the hassle of developing data access layers with Silverlight. However, they are not FREE and they are a 3rd party framework. They do have positive reviews. The biggest difference between them and WCF REST, ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 and RIA .NET Services is that their product is out now and ready to be used. If you want a Line of Business framework that is ready for production, give them a look.
- IdeaBlade web site
Architectural Pattern Frameworks
Silverlight is a plug-in that allows you to do a mix of web/winforms development. However, its similarities lend itself to the same UI patterns that are well documented in WPF. Furthermore, Silverlight as a plug-in needs to be hosted in a web environment. Architecting the data flow from the host to the plug-in is also important. This is where the MVVM and MVC architecture patterns apply.
- ASP.NET MVC 1.0 - If you are working on the web, you have to host your Silverlight application somewhere. ASP.NET MVC 1.0 allows you to build Model-View-Controller architected applications inside ASP.NET. If you are implementing REST access or URL routing navigation inside your Silverlight application, ASP.NET MVC will wrap like a glove around your Silverlight XAP files.
- Composite Application Guidance (also known as Prism v2) - This is a composite framework for Silverlight and WPF applications. Microsoft provides guidance for enterprise development using the MVVM pattern and implement Commanding for Silverlight. This framework also includes a complete StockTrader example.
- Microsoft Azure (March 2009 CTP) - Visual Studio 2008 Tools have been updated if you want to write applications in the "Microsoft Cloud". Mesh Enabled Web Applications allow you to use Silverlight as the front-end for Microsoft data services.
- Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
Media Streaming with IIS 7.0
Silverlight 3 enhances the multimedia experience by providing true 720p HD streaming in full screen, hardware accelerated video processing and smooth streaming. Many of these features were pioneered during the 2008 Olympics broadcast in NBC. Microsoft has made this technology available to anyone who wants to host a Silverlight experience using IIS 7.0
- IIS Media Services - Allows IIS 7.0 to be turned into a web server that can stream HD quality Silverlight media streams with smooth streaming technology that powered the NBC Olympics 2008 Site.
- UX Media Simulator - This is a media player that allows you to graphically tune and visualize what happens when your Internet bandwith drops and Silverlight smooth streaming kicks in. Pretty good tool to use to debug your content if smooth streaming is important to you.
- UX Media Simulator
- Watch a video with UX Media Simulator and tune the bandwith
Additional Tools
Silverlight's unique ability to run on the client while hosted on the web has provided it with many interesting capabilities that were previously hard to achieve. Here are some tools that make our lives easier for developing in Silverlight:
- Virtual Earth Silverlight CTP - This set of assemblies allow you to expose and control Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps via Silverlight. It is a very cool add-on for Silverlight if your applications require maps.
- Silverlight Spy 3 - This is an absolute MUST HAVE for any Silverlight developer. Think of it as Fiddler/.NET Reflector for Silverlight applications. It has been recently updated for Silverlight 3 Beta.
- Silverlight Spy (update includes support for Silverlight 3 Beta)
Add-Ons and Code Examples
Microsoft has made a lot of the features really extensible in Silverlight 3. Microsoft showed off many features in Silverlight 3 that can extend the features provided.
- Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer - This tool allows you to test/debug your applications in IE 6, 7 and 8. It is very cool and a must for any online compatibility testing with IE. Most Silverlight applications remain web hosted so this applies to Silverlight as well.
- Expression Blend 3 Sample Behaviors - Expression Blend 3 includes something called behaviors. This gives designers the ability to drag and drop and add "triggers/events" to the design objects and have them "behave" in certain ways. During MIX 2009, Microsoft showed off some real cool behaviors like adding physics to object by simply dragging and dropping it on top of a control.
- Expression Blend 3 Behaviors
- Silverlight 3 Pixel Shaders - Silverlight 3 now supports Pixel Shader 2.0. This allows you to write very interesting and powerful screen manipulation using HLSL. For example, some of the nice Windows Aero Effects in Vista are done using pixel shaders. There will no doubt be a CodePlex project created for Silverlight Pixel Shaders. For now, many of the existing WPF pixel shaders can be made to work in Silverlight 3.
- Slidentity Silverlight 3 Application - Slidentity is a cool Silverlight 3 Beta application that shows off many of the new features. It is an end to end example with source code.
As you can see, there has been a lot of stuff released around Silverlight 3 that is well beyond the "core release". It can be very easy to get lost with the amount of tools/frameworks/apps out there. If I have missed any obvious ones, please e-mail me and I will add it to the list.
Windows 7 - Should a developer invest in the upcoming OS?
- Introduction
- IIS 7.0
- 64-bit Computin
- Virtualization
- DirectX
- Windows Azure
- Conclusion
Introduction
Windows 7 is the next Windows version being released by Microsoft this year. It is already getting a ton of positive buzz from the community about how much better it is than Windows Vista in terms of performance and new features. However, looking at the features currently being announced for Windows 7, many of these appear to be visual tweaks and there aren't many new revolutionary features being added. This is why many people (including myself) feel that that Windows 7 feels more like a service pack to Vista rather than a new OS.
Microsoft not only adds features to the OS, but additional OS add-ons sometimes are only provided to the "current" operating systems. This is especially important for developers who rely on their development environments working properly on the operating system in which they decide to invest. Developers (especially web developers) also need to concern themselves with developing on workstation environments that have server equivalents. For example, Vista has IIS 7.0 and it is the server equivalent of the IIS in Windows 2008 Server.
Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista and its feature set. Therefore, when evaluating Windows 7, it is also important to consider the features Vista has added. Below is a list of items I came up with that I feel are important to developers working on the Microsoft platform. Obviously, depending on what you do, some of these things might be more important than others.
IIS 7.0 (Vista & Windows 7)
IIS is Microsoft's web server platform (If you don't know what IIS is, you probably got here by mistake). IIS in its early days was decoupled from the Operating System. However, since Windows 2000, Microsoft has essentially coupled the version of IIS with the OS offering. The current offering of IIS is version 7.0 and it offers a huge number of benefits over IIS 6.0. Version 7.0 is currently available for Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7 users. IIS 7.0 has its own team in Microsoft, and the team is actively rolling out new features in updates/service packs to the operating systems. These enhacements are geared towards the server operating systems; however, they need to roll the features into the workstation OSes (Vista, Windows 7) as well since not every developer can afford a "legal" license of Windows 2008 Server. A good example of this is Vista SP1 bringing IIS 7.0 features to match the server equivalent of Windows 2008 Server IIS 7.0. This is pretty important if you are targeting hosting your application in IIS 7.0.
Picture from Tim Sneath's article on comparing IIS 7.0 before SP1 (left) and after SP1 (right)
Why should you care about IIS 7.0? IIS 7.0 has huge performance improvements over previous IIS verions, security improvements, new features, etc. This article is not about how great IIS 7.0 is. Needless to say, it is a platform developers need to start considering more when designing their architecture/hosting strategies. Microsoft also recently announced a service release to IIS 7.0 which will be included in Windows Server 2008 R2. One of the key enhancements to this version is the ability to support multiple CLR versions at once (.NET 4.0). This will obviously be a big change that developers need to worry about. Furthermore, Microsoft announced during the PDC 2008 that some of the features of WCF 4.0/WF 4.0 will require WAS (Windows Process Activation Service). Therefore, having an OS that will support some of these features will be critical for developers to be able to develop, publish and test their work locally.
The question does remain: Will Vista get all of these new changes and get all future IIS enhacements or will they eventually be rolled into Windows 7 only? There is a service pack 2 slated for Vista later this year. So my guess would be that it's safe to assume that the recently announced service released to IIS 7.0 (7.5 ?) will probably be rolled into that service pack for Vista.
Important Note: You do have to be very careful which version you purchase of Vista/Windows 7 in order to enjoy all the benefits of IIS 7.0 on a workstation OS. This is a good link to the features in IIS 7.0 available on Windows 2008/Vista. As you can see, the Ultimate/Business versions of the OS pretty much have all the features that Windows 2008 IIS 7.0 offers.
64-bit computing (Vista & Windows 7)
64-bit versions of Microsoft's products have been around for a while now. However, older 64-bit OSes (i.e., Windows XP) gained little traction because of limited driver support and the hardware back in 2001 was limited in 64-bit offerings. This has all changed recently because almost every recent server/workstation hardware is 64-bit compatible. Furthermore, 64-bit OSes are much more stable and have a greater range of support. Vista and Windows 7 do a great job of supporting 64-bit on a workstation.
The biggest benefit of running a 64-bit OS is that you gain more addressable memory and can actually utilize more than 4 gig on your laptop/workstation. This can be a huge performance boost if you're running memory hogs like IIS, virtual machines, SQL Server, etc. Furthermore, certain enterprise applications love what 64-bit offers. For example, some of the tests I ran on SQL Server 2005/2008 show that 64-bit vs 32-bit gains an extra 10-15% in performance. For people who run really large systems (i.e., data warehouses with large amounts of data), this can add up to minutes/hours of processing time saved.
64-bit is the current platform for enterprise applications. There is no extra cost for the 64-bit premium and as I mentioned before, almost all current hardware is already 64-bit compatible. Application architecture seems to be the only road block preventing 64-bit adoption and it is a no-brainer for new projects. This is also important as some of Microsoft's enterprise applications are 64-bit only (i.e., Microsoft Exchange) and in the near future, this trend will continue. I could see some version of SQL Server/WCF/WF/Biztalk in the near future to be only available for 64-bit processes, and you do not want to have a development environment that can't handle it.
Virtualization (Vista (basic) & Windows 7 (full))
Virtualization used to be a buzzword a couple of years ago. Now its benefits are coming into fruition big time via enterprise support and implmentations. I remember a few years ago being at the SQL Server 2005 launch event and noting how Microsoft stressed that all their presenters were presenting for the first time with the same exact Virtual PC image. The beauty of this was one single image set up properly with all the necessary demos was distributed to all the presenters and all they had to do was fire it up and they knew exactly where everything was (no self-installing or maintaining their own software). This is a trivial example of how virtualization can help a company succeed in delivering a conference; but virtualization's key benefit: isolating environments and making them deployable to multiple workstations.
Windows 2008 Server x64 allows you to host Microsoft's software virtualization implementation called Hyper-V. What makes Microsoft's virtualization offering unique is that it is essentially a free add-on ($27.00 extra per OS license) to Windows 2008 Server rather than a hardware/software investment from vendors like VMWare. Vista SP1 does allow you to manage Hyper-V with an add-on and this obviously allows you to connect/manage different virtual image settings.
However, Windows 7 will take virtualization to the next level. Anyone who has played with Microsoft virtualization offerings can note that local images are stored as VHD files. Essentially, what users have done before is they have been able to copy this VHD file and load it almost like an application from their current OS. The downside of course is that your main OS has to allocate its share of resources and the image takes up a lot as well. In Windows 7, users will be able to directly boot to a VHD bypassing loading their main OS. It will be essentially like having another OS partition available (only this one will be virtual).
If Microsoft can streamline the configuration and booting process, this will be a huge win for them in the virtualization space. Microsoft already releases a lot of their beta products with virtual machines. A great example of this is the Visual Studio 2010 (.NET 4.0, VS Studio, C# 4.0, WCF 4.0, etc.) image. The entire environment is already pre-installed for you and ready to go for you to test out. This example can be taken much further. In your specific companies, you can deploy full-blown developer environments to their local workstations with all the software pre-configured. I always have these conversations with developers; "works here fine" or "blows up on this machine, don't know why". Having the ability to create and isolate a development environment correctly once and deploy it to all your developers is a big win for productivity. Vendors like VMWare already allow you to do this; however, with Windows 7/Windows 2008, the ROI of virtualization will be far greater.
Windows 7 and Windows 2008 have kernel enhacement changes made to their OSes, so they understand running hyper-v/virtual images without loading the whole OS. Windows 7 developers won't have to load an entire OS and then load a large image and carve out large amounts of resources to run that VM (i.e. 2 gig of RAM). This should make running virtual images very performant and a very attractive way to distribute external/internal development environments.
DirectX (Vista and Windows 7)
For Gaming & Multmedia Development
DirectX is a set of APIs offered by Microsoft for multimedia and game programming. DirectX is a good example of how Microsoft gets into the game and simply crushes the competition. Since the last few versions, there is no other framework that includes all the multimedia features that DirectX does.
Well before Vista's release, Microsoft was touting how they were adding a new fresh DirectX 10.x that was fully re-written and I heard interviews with product managers claiming 50% performance improvements. Seemingly, just like everything in Vista, this fell well short of the enhaced expectations. Since then, Microsoft announced DirectX 11 which will be available for both Vista and Windows 7 OSes. DirectX 11 is really exciting because it includes true multi-threading support (I was really suprised that DrectX 10.x doesn't do this really well). This is probably going to be the biggest performance boost to gamers: All higher-end gaming rigs are now quad core (or better in the future) processors.
If you are not a game/multimedia developer, you probably don't care about this too much. However, if you are in the gaming industry, this is obviously a cornerstone of picking the proper development OS. However, having said that, what true hardcore developer isn't a gamer at heart? I know that right next to all my SDKs and APIs, I have just as many cutting-edge games installed. Crysis on my 2560x1600 30" monitor looks really nice :)
For WPF
WPF for example leverages DirectX as its rendering engine for some of its tasks. I am not sure how this will progress as new versions of WPF materialize (.NET 4.0). But it is probably safe to assume that some of the effects/shaders you will be able to use in WPF will probably rely on DirectX specific versions. A good example of this is the WPF Effect Library which uses the DirectX engine's pixel shaders for some neat effects. Currently, you do not need Vista/Windows 7 to execute these effects. However, DirectX 10.x includes Pixel Shader 4.0 and DirectX 11 includes Pixel Shader 5.0. Obviously, as the pixel shaders include more capabilities, it is safe to assume some of these effects will be consumed by WPF. Therefore, you will eventually need a higher level shader in order to do some of the more advanced effects.
Clear example of Pixel Shader advances (2.0 vs 3.0)
This is also something to note for Silverlight developers as in Silverlight 3 we are supposed to get "hardware" acceleration and 3D support. The easy way to achieve this is by using DirectX engine under the covers. However, for compatibility, this would probably kill a lot of Silverlight's features on a Mac. I don't know if there is more information on this, but it is something to look out for if you are a WPF/Silverlight developer.
Windows Azure (Windows Vista & Windows 7)
Windows Azure is Microsoft's Web/Cloud OS that was announced at the PDC 2008 in October. Windows Azure combines cloud storage in Microsoft DataCenters with several enterprise services. Applications created for Windows Azure can be consumed via the web or on the desktop/mobile devices via an Azure client. This is not meant to be an intro to Azure; however, if you want to quickly get a high level understanding of what Azure is all about, I recommend checking this article out: Windows Azure - Breaking It Down.
To get started with Windows Azure, you need to install the Azure SDK (The full version is currently under private beta). The catch is that you need Windows Vista SP1 in order for this to work. There is a great thread here that explains the details, which essentially boils down to having certain IIS 7.0 processes "simulate" the cloud environment. Included there is also a link from someone who was able to get it to work on XP. Obviously, the supported version is only for Windows Vista SP1 currently (and eventually Windows 7).
Note: Windows Azure is a brand and what it will exactly include is still up in the air. Not everything is based in Azure. For example, certain parts of Azure and features like Live Services DO NOT/will not have a requirement of Vista/Windows 7. However, trying to guess what those items are months before Azure is released is anybody's guess (maybe except at Microsoft). Microsoft is moving more and more things into the "service offerings". For example, last week (January 23rd) Microsoft announced that the ProClarity BI product (which allows end users to build Dashboards/Analytics/Scorecards) will essentially be moved as a service under SharePoint. Maybe Microsoft offers a similar service for Azure developers (?)...kind of how Google allows users to use analytics/BI for Google Analytics.
Other
There are obviously numerous other examples and productivity enhancements included with Vista and Windows 7 for developers. Windows 7 performs much faster than Vista in most benchmarks. It will include a new TaskBar which is programmable for minimizing clicks, etc. If you are a driver/SDK developer for a particular OS, having the OS installed is obviously a no brainer in these kind of situations. Windows Vista also includes additional cryptography enhacement. All these things are important; however, they seem to be geared towards a smaller developer audience.
Jump Lists in Windows 7 (imagine Visual Studio 2010 or other dev products with nice lists)
Conclusion
Windows 7 is going to build on a lot of features that Vista already includes for developers. Many of these features already exist in Vista and Windows 7 will merely enhance them. If you are working with Vista, you can take advantage of many of these features. Development shops on Windows XP need to seriously evaluate their upgrade paths for their next OS. Vista is a good choice if you want to get started on any of these new upcoming technologies (i.e., Azure). However, waiting for Windows 7 might be a better choice as it will extend the next time an upgrade is required in the OS lifecycle. Windows XP is clearly showing signs of a "semi-supported OS". Microsoft likes to suppport the latest two versions of any product. Once Windows 7 comes out, developers have to be very cognizant of this that the new upcoming beta/SDK might simply not work in their Windows XP environment.
Windows 7 - Should a developer invest in the upcoming OS?
Windows XP or earlier: You need to plan for this accordingly as XP will be missing some big features geared toward .NET developers in the short term. Upgrading to Vista/Windows 7 is largely a personal choice (if a consultant) or a corporate choice (if on a work computer). Not upgrading to a "current" OS also presents the developer with the danger of any new upcoming SDKs or even the .NET framework future versions not being supported.
Windows Vista: Windows 7 simply enhances some of the features previously introduced in Vista. If you are on Vista, you won't gain much as a developer in terms of pure features. However some of the virtualization, performance and possible IIS 7.5 extensions might warrant an upgrade at least on your second development environment.
Note: Uses who purchase a computer with Vista after July of 2009 will get a free upgrade coupon for Windows 7. Furthermore, I recommend any developer to attend Microsoft's launch events. I have gotten a couple licenses of Vista Ultimate this way, they are given away to attendees for FREE amongst other software. Microsoft recently started giving away software (full versions) about 3-4 years ago at their events.
Silverlight 3 - What we Know So Far & What We Can Predict (Part 3 of 4)
Silverlight 3 Platform Stack - Part 3
Part 1 - Silverlight 3 Announced Enhacements Part 2 - Silverlight 3 Development Stack Part 3 - Silverlight 3 Integration with the Microsoft OS and Platform Stack Part 4 - Silverlight 3 vs Flash and the iPhone In Part 1 of this short series, I looked at what we know so far about Silverlight 3 from what has been announced by Microsoft. In Part 2 of this series, I take some educated guesses as to what and how Silverlight 3 will be released in relation to the development environment. In Part 3 of this series, I am going to take a look at the upcoming Silverlight 3 platform stack and how it will evolve to push Silverlight as THE leading RIA for business applications.
A little history/background about .NET in relation to Silverlight
For those not familiar with .NET or those who have not been programming in .NET until recently, this will be some good background information that will set the precedent for a lot of my platform predictions. .NET was formally released by Microsoft as a developer platform back in 2002. In those days, a lot of top gurus argued that .NET 1.x was not really adding any value to the development experience. The arguments were that it wasn't really revolutionary and a lot these concepts had been done before (and were being done better by other languages like Java). Some predicted that .NET wouldn't even be able to compete with Java and Microsoft was yet again copying rather than innovating.
A few years changes A LOT :) Java is way behind in language features compared with .NET and .NET now is everywhere in the Microsoft stack. How did this happen? What many naysayers failed to see was Microsoft is more than just a software company with a couple of products. They offer products that range from mobile phone apps to platforms that run the biggest companies in the world. This is the exact way that .NET CLR went from a simple developer language/framework to being the core runtime across the board at Microsoft (Yes, I know MS still uses C/C++ for OS/SQL, etc). Seemingly all new applications are written in .NET and many of the older C applications all have .NET level based APIs. What does this mean? This essentially means that if you want to extend/enhance/be more productive with the Microsoft platform, you will most likely be utilizing the .NET CLR. A lot more can be written about this, however this core concept of how Microsoft made .NET a huge success plays into on how I think Microsoft can make Silverlight technology the premier RIA technology.
Silverlight 2 Current Platform vs Silverlight 3 Possible Platform
As you can see, Silverlight 2 (released in October 2008) has a limited platform stack. As of today, SharePoint 2007 content can be extended with Silverlight 2. Furthermore, the Windows Azure SDK (in private beta) supports the Silverlight 2 environment. I added it in a slightly different color because it has not been formally disclosed whether Silverlight 2 or Silverlight 3 will be the fromal version for Azure. Note: For those that do not know, Windows Azure is the Microsoft Cloud OS announced at the PDC 2008. On the right-hand side, you see my predictions as to where Silverlight 3 will expand. I am going to go through each item and list my predictions as to how Silverlight can be used.
SharePoint & Web Parts
SharePoint
SharePoint is Microsoft's collaborative platform. The current version of the platform is SharePoint 2007 (which extends the free WSS 3.0 that comes with Windows Server OSes). It was announced SharePoint was the fastest Microsoft product to grow into $1 billion in revenue. Many businesses are installing SharePoint to place their internal documents, HR, financial/accounting, business intelligence, etc., systems into one consolidated portal. SharePoint allows for a rich programming model with WorkFlows, SharePoint Designer, web parts and other APIs. This allows developers to provide custom content that might not be available OOTB or via 3rd party solutions. One of the ways you can extend SharePoint is with web parts using the web part framework.
SharePoint is all about sharing data easily with a simple drag & drop (no programming) interface. Right now a lot of the data exposure objects are essentially derivatives of ASP.NET grids presented nicely with Ajax magic. For the most part, they work really well and are highly performant. However, they could definitely benefit from some Silverlight integration. For example, filtering/sorting/uploading documents can be brought down to the Silverlight client and improve the interactivity and performance.
Web Part Framework
The web part framework was introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. This allowed ASP.NET developers to introduce portal/modular functionality that started becoming more popular with Web 2.0. The web part framework was also introduced into SharePoint 2007 as well and the same API can be used to create web parts. The Web Part Framework allows you to create web parts for both SharePoint and/or native ASP.NET. You have an option to use the web part class from either the SharePoint framework or the ASP.NET framework. The nice thing about using the ASP.NET framework web part class is that it will work in both SharePoint and ASP.NET, while using the SharePoint class limits your web parts to only work in SharePoint. I prefer to use ASP.NET web part base classes as it gives you much more flexibility and the SharePoint web part classes only give minimal additional features.
Silverlight & SharePoint/Web Part Framework
The nice thing about web parts is that they can use a number of different technologies. They can use plain vanilla HTML code. They can use ASP.NET controls with postbacks. They can use a combination of Ajax capabilities. Obviously, they can be extended to us Silverlight as well. This is a real powerful extensibility, as you can write a Silverlight application/module with minimal design considerations for SharePoint. A web part wrapper can be written for the Silverlight web part that essentially consumes the XAP file and integrates with the web part framework. This can add capabilities such as personalization properties, consume SharePoint lists/libraries, web part connections, feature deployment, etc.
Silverlight & web part design
Essentially, we can write a Silverlight application, create a new project that references the Silverlight XAP file and use the Silverlight HTML bridge (C#/JavaScript) to link the Silverlight application and the web part framework features. In Silverlight 2, a lot of this code right now is manual and unless you know Silverlight/web part framework rather well, this could be a daunting task. There are a couple of projects out there that do some of the backend work for you. One is the Microsoft sponsered SharePoint BluePrints on CodePlex. Another good framework is the SilverPart also hosted on CodePlex.
Now you can provide a very rich UI for your SharePoint data
This is very powerful extensibility of SharePoint to essentially add RIA. Of course, you could have done this Flash/Flex; however, you can write everything in one single .NET language, single environment and a consolidated development environment. The next version of SharePoint or Silverlight 3 will probably get formal support for SharePoint. It would be pretty cool if you could simply just point to a Silverlight XAP file that implements an interface for basic communication and everything just worked. Hopefully, in the near future we get this functionality. Furthermore, Silverlight web parts provide additional features like "low postback design" and can offload some of the processing on the client thereby improving performance.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is an OS from Microsoft announced recently at the PDC 2008. The unique thing about Azure is that it is a "cloud OS". This means all the services, data and all the backend "stuff" lives in Microsoft data centers. Windows Azure is compromised of several services that work together and make up the total platform. Currently, the Windows Azure platform is in beta and you can request an SDK to write Azure enabled applications.
Services that make up the Azure platform
Silverlight and Azure
Cloud computing is the new buzzword in the industry. This has been done by other vendors, even very well like Amazon's S3 service. Microsoft (like always it seems) is late to the game. However, Microsoft as a latecomer has to do things a little different. A few things that make Microsoft's venture into cloud computing unique is that several of these services that make up Azure are first class services from enterprise products (SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM). Powering all of this is the .NET framework. However, one uniqe aspect is that Microsoft also owns UI technologies like ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and Surface that can be used to display these cloud services. Silverlight's small footprint and being a web plug-in play a big part in it being a great choice as a UI.
Upcoming Live Mesh Applications can use vanilla Ajax or Silverlight Web Applications
Jonas Follesoe has a great article on creating a Silverlight application in the "cloud". Furthermore, this also moves the "fit client" (i.e., Adobe AIR) rumor from a probably to highly likely for Silverlight 3. I can't stress how much different this is from other cloud computing initiatives by the other big players. Microsoft has an entire UI technology that differentiates itself from simple data storage like Amazon and it has the power of mature platforms like SQL Server, SharePoint and Office running some of the service offerings.
"No current player in cloud computing has this combination of a mature development framework (.NET), desktop-like UI (Silverlight), mature services (SQL Server, SharePoint, Office) and data storage"
What is really nice about Microsoft's initiative is that going from an idea or business concept to going live on a fully scalable framework that can reach millions is really simple now. During web 1.0, a lot of money had to be invested in the web infrastructure and this is why startups that were global had to raise tens of millions of dollars to just start up. With web 2.0, hardware became cheaper and a lot of companies actually could afford to completely outsource all of their server maintenance to a host provider. A very good example of this was YouTube, who at the time of being bought by Google had approximately 300 servers on RackSpace. With Web 3.0/cloud computing, this is further abstracted as you are not hosting on "servers" from a development perspective. As a cloud developer, you are writing these services and they are materialized somewhere on the server but you don't really care about it. Not having to worry about OS/hardware intricacies directly obviously makes creating applications much faster.
SQL Server 2008 R2/2010
SQL Server 2008 was released last year and not many additions were made to the tools which are largely based on the tools rewritten for SQL Server 2005. For those that work with the full SQL Server stack, it is a lot more than just a place to store your data. SQL Server comes with rich Busines Intelligence, Reporting, Data Transformation capabilities, etc. A lot of competitors and non-database vendors have moved ahead of Microsoft in the end user tools area. Microsoft tools are largely geared towards the developer and this needs to change. Some of the examples we see that Microsoft is seeing the pressure in this regard is the new user friendly Report Builder in SQL Server 2008 or the new self-service Business Intelligence application that Microsoft is planning for the next version of SQL Server, codename Kiliminjaro/Gemini. I think Microsoft can add Silverlight in key areas of SQL Server and catch up or pass competitors in these areas.
Charts & Graphs (make them interactive with Silverlight 3)
You can make pretty charts in SQL Server 2008, but wouldn't it be cool if they were Silverlight based and highly interactive?
SQL Server 2008 currently allows you to create rich reports using Dundas Visualizations. These visualizations are nice but they are highly static (no animations or interactivity). Competing vendors like Panorama have added Flash charting capabilites to their end user reports which are animated, interactive, spacial, etc. This is an area where I see Silverlight being added to enhance products like Reporting Services, Report Builder or PerformancePoint Server. That would be a real powerful addition to the SQL Server stack.
RIA charts for your data
Interactive Dashboards
If you have done any kind of business intelligence development, dashboards are a great way to present a huge mountain of data in an easy-to-understand way. There are different types of dashboards with distinctions on their intended audience (i.e., executives) or their functionality (i.e., what-if scenarios). There are products by other vendors that can tie to SQL Server data and do this already. One great product is offered by Business Objects called XCelcius . This product allows executives or senior management to answer questions like, what happens to my margins if the cost of fuel goes up 20%? The person can get the answer immediately and not have to drill down or reference other reports or data sets. It is real powerful information. Evolving a product like this into Silverlight makes perfect sense.
What-If profitability analysis in Business Objects XCelcius (Click the picture to try the demo out)
You can write applications like this right now in Silverlight and tie it via services to SQL Server. However, this requires a significant development effort. It would be much easier if this were a simple drag and drop feature inside SQL Server Report Builder. Adding Silverlight 3 in key places to SQL Server can bring the data to life and make it a lot easier for end-users to consume, analyze and deliver insight.
XBOX 360 & Zune
The XBOX project is finally starting to pay off for Microsoft. While it is being outsold by the Wii, it is beating the Sony PS3 handily. The XBOX 360 has probably one of the best online experiences and the online arcade is great. It is the only major console that allows hobbyist developers to add their own games via the XNA Framework. The concept of Microsoft spreading .NET everywhere rears its head here. Recently the 3.0 version of the XNA framework allows developers to publish their games to the Zune as well. While it is nice that hobbyists can post their games on the XBOX arcade (after it is verified by the community) and make some money off of the game, they are still geared towards the young male audience.
Apple has perfected the micro/casual game devliery and micro payments on the iPhone
The iPhone market has really opened up the ability to deliver a new genre of games to the mobile market. These games are simple and they cost usually very little compared to large console alternatives. Apple has a huge opportunity here and is gearing up to take on Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft in the gaming market from a different angle, and there are some articles already creeping up about new GPUs and multi-core firmware which could add significant processing power to the iPhone. On the web you can see sites like http://www.miniclip.com or http://flashgames247.com/ that get millions of hits per year that target the casual games. If you have an iPhone or have visted these sites, these games are not really complex, offer any revolutionry AI or have breathtaking graphics. However, these games do provide one key feature and that is delivering quick entertainment on the spot. Furthermore, casual gaming has a much larger audience than your 12-28 year old male that can include families, older generations and - dare I say - women :)
In Part 1 of the series, I wrote about Silverlight 3 heading for mobile devices. Couple this with the Azure framework and you have a technology that can be used to compete with Apple and in the casual gaming market. Look at how popular games like Rock Band or other party games bring families and/or friends together. These types of casual games that can be delivered to the user via the XBOX brand have a huge potential. Silverlight 3 is gearing up to be faster via rendering, hardware acceleration and adding 3D support. Microsoft is one of the leaders in the gaming arena and with the Xbox brand name, it can expand its market into micro/casual games with Silverlight 3.
"Silverlight 3 as a potential gaming framework is a perfect alternative to the current Apple iPhone model that can reach audiences on the web, Xbox 360, Zune and mobile devices."
Note: In Part 4 of my series, I will look at how Microsoft shapes up competively against Adobe and Apple in this space.
Windows Mobile 7
Windows Mobile is one of the less successful product lines being offered by Microsoft. In terms of innovation and market share, it is far behind the leaders. Even when Microsoft is not a leader in the mass-market, it makes up for it in the corporate market but not for mobile devices. Blackberry is way further in the game. I made the jump as well. I moved from my Windows Mobile 6.x phone in favor of an iPhone recently and love it. Having said that, Windows Mobile 7 is promising to be multi-touch and feature a full browser and essentially compete with the iPhones and BlackBerries of the world.
Silverlight fits the mobile world real well. Anyone who has an iPhone has enjoyed the ease and power of the AppStore. For users, it's great. You have access to thousands of applications which are very reasonably priced (fall into the micro-payment category). However, for developers and app publishers, it's a whole different game. Apple only provides SDKs on the Mac platform. You have to program in their language/framework and they JUST recently lifted the NDA on being able to talk about iPhone programming....a big WTF :) Apple also vehemently opposes Flash to be installed on the iPhone. Many people wrongly assume it's a technology obstacle. It's more of a "owning everying on the iPhone" model. If Flash can be run on an iPhone and I come up with a stupid FlashLight app for $.99, Apple doesn't get its cut and you also bypass the "store firewall" called iTunes.
Some screens of a Windows Mobile 7 Theme (from screens that were leaked)
Silverlight on a Windows Mobile 7 platform can do a couple of big things: by providing an open development platform analogous to the AppStore and enabling many web apps to be run on a mobile phone. If Microsoft pursues this route, they can very easily gain a lot of users. That is one of the nice things currently about Windows Mobile. You can go out to a third party site and download an application and off you go. It does sacrifice in ease of use because of needing to install the application while being connected to your PC. Silverlight 3 being a web plug-in obviously changes all this. Furthermore, it was announced during the PDC 2008 that Silverlight Mobile will run off of the Silverlight desktop codebase.
"Silverlight 3 is a very attractive framework as you write the code once, and it works on mobile, desktop and fit client applications all at once."
In the near future with all of the XAML based frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, Microsoft Surface) integrated into a single XAML codebase will be a huge productivity boost. Imagine having to write one set of code for your application and you can automatically distribute it to the web, desktop, Azure cloud, mobile devices and multi-touch screens. That is a very powerful concept that Microsoft can potentially hold has as their ace card.
Office Web
I saved the least interesting concept for last (least interesting at least to me). Boxed software is actually facing a huge crossroads now. Software like Office (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) and Photo Suite (Adobe PhotoShop) have traditionally grown over the years by throwing in more and more features. Over the last few years, people have been asking themselves, what am I paying for when I only use 20 features? For me, a couple of real examples actually re-enforced this point. I was on a website a while ago where you selected the features you need from MS Word. Over 70% of these features I never heard of or knew what they did. After you were done selecting, the website told you what version of Office you could get by with. After the quiz, the site recommended Office 97/2000. As you can see, the recent versions are simply feature-gloat and don't really add anything to the normal users. Another example is from a study of people who were self-described "Office Word Gurus". These people were from publishing backgrounds, etc. The study found even self-described power users only really used about 25 core features of the entire product. This obviously goes on to show that these traditional feature-gloat software needed to become simpler and cheaper to use if they want to remain relevant with casual/infrequent users.
Google has been quick to jump on this potential and have released Google Docs, a marketed free alternative to Microsoft Office. I personally think it's neat and simple to create documents pretty fast and access them from anywhere. It's not enough to replace a Word processor for me (I use OpenOffice 3.0 by the way). Adobe has done the same has placed some of the core features on the web of the graphing suite. Microsoft is late to the game (as always). However, they are going to roll with "Office Web" soon. This is going to be a web version of the Office Suite and live in the Azure Cloud utilizing a lot of the Office Services in Microsoft data centers. What can potentially make the Office Web product a lot nicer is the UI technology behind it. Having a Silverlight based UI is simply a lot better than just a HTML/Ajax UI. This is where I think Silverlight 3 can be used to enhance the product. Furthermore, it can also spur further adoption of the Silverlight framework. Microsoft has made the right decision in not REQUIRING Silverlight for Office Web. However, Silverlight will enable some additional content and improve things like rendering. Note: Office Web is not out yet formally and neither is Silverlight 3. This is why I am guessing this will be based on Silverlight 3 rather than Silverlight 2.
Office Web (Word) shown at the PDC 2008
Summary
As you can see, Silverlight 3 has the potential to spread throughout the Microsoft platform like a virus -- just like .NET started out with a wimper back in 2002 and now it's in every single API that Microsoft releases. I am willing to bet that Microsoft is already implementing a lot of these ideas and using the power of Silverlight as a web/cloud/mobile/desktop UI to enhance the funtionality and competitiveness of their products. Microsoft stands uniquely positioned to take advantage of Silverlight because of their deep platform of products. While Silverlight 1 and 2 were simply playing catchup to Flash/Flex, Silverlight 3 will be different. The upcoming spread of Silverlight version 3 and beyond across Microsoft products will become an important piece not only to the users but to developers as well who will be able to take advantage of the numerous features the framework will provide.
Note: In Part 4 of the series, I will take a look at what this means for Silverlight vs Flash/iPhone.