Microsoft
Thoughts on Vista
Oct 27 2008 10:33 PM
As I mentioned in an earlier post I installed
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook a
couple weeks back. Now that I’ve had a chance to use
it a little, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
|
What?!? I installed Vista? On a MacBook!
Oct 19 2008 05:28 PM
Yes, you read that title correctly. I installed the
latest version of the Microsoft OS, Windows Vista, on
my MacBook. I didn’t install it in a virtual machine
using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I actually used
BootCamp and installed it directly on my MacBook in a
separate partition. I did this for two reasons.
Number one: I didn’t use VMWare Fusion or Parallels
because my MacBook is one of the old ones that can
only support up to 2 GB or RAM, so I would only be
able to give my virtual machine around 1 GB and still
have a responsive Mac. Windows Vista wouldn’t be a
happy camper under 1 GB of RAM, especially since the
reason I installed it is for reason number two.
Number two: I realize at the end of the day, even
though I love Apple and my Mac, the thing that brings
home the paycheck is Microsoft development. We are
getting into serious development at work now using
.NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0. I need to have a
machine at home that I can use to work on, and I’d
rather not have to lug around a laptop back-and-forth
to work every day.
Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.
I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.
Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.
I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.
New Microsoft Ad is good...but, it misses the point
Sep 19 2008 05:59 PM
Microsoft released a new commercial last night. It’s
part of their $300 Million dollar ad campaign to try
and revamp their image after the Vista fiasco. The
first two advertisements in their new ad campaign
were pretty awful. It had Bill Gates and Jerry
Seinfeld, and the ads really made no sense. Some
people joked that the ads were like the Seinfeld
show, they were commercials about nothing. Now, they
did get people’s attention, but not exactly in a good
way.
The new advertisement is better than the first two. You can watch it on the Microsoft site if you haven’t seen it yet. The new commercial has a Microsoft employee that happens to look like the PC guy, from the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple commercials. He starts off by saying, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been stereotyped”, then it goes on to show a lot of people saying that they are a PC and that they do important things. The thing that the marketing company, and a lot of other people in the forums talking about the commercial seem to miss, is in the Apple commercial, the two guys are supposed to represent computers. That’s why they say “I’m a PC”, not, “I’m a PC user”. Apple is saying that PCs are boring, beige boxes that people hide under their desk, because they look bad, while Apple computers are great looking machines that people are proud to display. It seems that a lot of people, including the marketing firm that did these commercials, seems to think that Apple was saying Mac users are young and hip while PC users are guys in suits; which isn’t what the ads say.
I did see a funny quote. The tag line of the new Windows campaign is, “Life without walls”. If you have no walls, you don’t need Windows : )
Another funny thing, apparently the ad talking about how great it is to be a PC, was created on a Mac.
The new advertisement is better than the first two. You can watch it on the Microsoft site if you haven’t seen it yet. The new commercial has a Microsoft employee that happens to look like the PC guy, from the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple commercials. He starts off by saying, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been stereotyped”, then it goes on to show a lot of people saying that they are a PC and that they do important things. The thing that the marketing company, and a lot of other people in the forums talking about the commercial seem to miss, is in the Apple commercial, the two guys are supposed to represent computers. That’s why they say “I’m a PC”, not, “I’m a PC user”. Apple is saying that PCs are boring, beige boxes that people hide under their desk, because they look bad, while Apple computers are great looking machines that people are proud to display. It seems that a lot of people, including the marketing firm that did these commercials, seems to think that Apple was saying Mac users are young and hip while PC users are guys in suits; which isn’t what the ads say.
I did see a funny quote. The tag line of the new Windows campaign is, “Life without walls”. If you have no walls, you don’t need Windows : )
Another funny thing, apparently the ad talking about how great it is to be a PC, was created on a Mac.
Microsoft Validation Application Block
Jun 27 2008 04:40 PM
I first used one of the Microsoft Application Blocks
a few years ago, and needless to say, I wasn’t all
that impressed. We tried to use the caching
application block. It was more a pain than it was
worth. Because of this I was a little reluctant to
use any of the application blocks again, but after
seeing a quick presentation on the Validation
Application Block from a co-worker, I decided to give
it a shot. The application blocks have come a long
way. The code is a lot cleaner now, and it feels like
the overall design is better. I guess it’s like a lot
of Microsoft applications; version 1 sucks, but it
slowly gets better with each subsequent version.
WPF - Thoughts on first week of use
Apr 09 2008 09:54 PM
I've been doing development on our prototype
application since the beginning of this week and
thought I would give my thoughts I what I think of
WPF.
Pros:
It's pretty easy to do things using WPF compared to doing the similar thing in traditional .NET WinForms development. Now, I don't know if this is a case of WPF being a great framework, or WinForms being a bad one; but I'll still consider this a Pro.
Cons:
The tools. Even though WPF has been out a while, the tools used for development still aren't up to snuff. I perform a majority of my XAML development using Expression Blend March 2008 CTP, and all of the C# coding using Visual Studio .NET 2008. In a way this sucks, because, even though Expression Blend is made for doing WPF development, there's no intellisense to be found. Also, it doesn't integrate with a source control system, like Team System, which we use. So I will modify a XAML file and go to save it, then find it's read-only and needs to be checked out. VSTS doesn't have a stand-alone client, I have to fire up Visual Studio to check out the file.
The prototype we are developing is modeled on Infragistics Tangerine example application. This sucks because we're shoe-horning our code into all this existing code. I actually scrapped all the code on the window I am modifying, and also scrapped using their overly complicated XamDataGrid for the built in and easily customizable WPF ListView. Hopefully once we get through with this prototype next week and they show it to the steering committee, and the buy off on it, we can scrap the whole Tangerine application and begin fresh. It's hard to learn a new technology when all you're doing is adding code to an existing application.
Overall I like WPF. I'm not exactly enjoying doing the current development we're doing with it, but it is a nice change of pace.
Pros:
It's pretty easy to do things using WPF compared to doing the similar thing in traditional .NET WinForms development. Now, I don't know if this is a case of WPF being a great framework, or WinForms being a bad one; but I'll still consider this a Pro.
Cons:
The tools. Even though WPF has been out a while, the tools used for development still aren't up to snuff. I perform a majority of my XAML development using Expression Blend March 2008 CTP, and all of the C# coding using Visual Studio .NET 2008. In a way this sucks, because, even though Expression Blend is made for doing WPF development, there's no intellisense to be found. Also, it doesn't integrate with a source control system, like Team System, which we use. So I will modify a XAML file and go to save it, then find it's read-only and needs to be checked out. VSTS doesn't have a stand-alone client, I have to fire up Visual Studio to check out the file.
The prototype we are developing is modeled on Infragistics Tangerine example application. This sucks because we're shoe-horning our code into all this existing code. I actually scrapped all the code on the window I am modifying, and also scrapped using their overly complicated XamDataGrid for the built in and easily customizable WPF ListView. Hopefully once we get through with this prototype next week and they show it to the steering committee, and the buy off on it, we can scrap the whole Tangerine application and begin fresh. It's hard to learn a new technology when all you're doing is adding code to an existing application.
Overall I like WPF. I'm not exactly enjoying doing the current development we're doing with it, but it is a nice change of pace.
WPF
Mar 21 2008 06:23 PM
One of the upcoming features of the application we
are working on is called the online experience. We
want to provide the higher ups, the directors and
managers, with an easy, intuitive look into what's
going on at the moment and in the future, in our
company. One thing my managers are fans of, which I'm
happy about, is eye candy. I don't mean having lots
of bling for no reason. But, from working on a Mac,
you come to like the eye candy that makes the
operating system and it's applications a pleasure to
use. I suggested we look into using WPF (Windows
Presentation Foundation). I've been pretty impressed
with some of the demo applications I've seen, and
hopefully we have waited long enough since it's
introduction that a lot of the bugs have been ironed
out. One thing I really like is this gives us a
chance to have a business application that doesn't
necessarily have to follow the usual boring business
application look-and-feel. It does get boring
sometimes working on an application that's just
filled with grids displaying information, will be a
welcome change to introduce something new.
Microsoft and Yahoo!
Feb 01 2008 06:22 PM
I see that Microsoft has put in a bid of 44 Billion
to purchase Yahoo! I have a couple issues with this,
and it's not all about my dislike for Microsoft. It's
more to do with the fact that I like how Yahoo!
supports developing sites that work across platforms
and browsers. Yahoo! Mail works nicely, although I
did just ditch my pro account with Yahoo! because I
have been in the process of switching over to GMail.
Yahoo has some great engineers and developers that
have developed their YUI (Yahoo User Interface)
tools. These tools allow web developers to create
sites that have a rich interface, without having to
come up with all the javascript. I also like Flickr,
which is where I store my photographs. It has a great
interface, and uses Flash and Flex a lot where they
really need the slick interface. They are also big on
using Free BSD and PHP. If Microsoft purchases them I
have the feeling that a lot of this will change,
which would suck. When Microsoft bought Hotmail a lot
of the users at the time left, because like most
products they buy, it gets worse afterward. I can
already see all the Flash being replaced with
Silverlight, and sites suddenly working better on
Windows with Internet Explorer for all the extra
goodies. I hope I am wrong that all this would occur,
but this is Microsoft we're talking about, so it's
not very far fetched.