Microsoft dumping .Net for HTML5/Javascript

Mike James wrote a blog entry about this. My immediate thought: what did you expect? Microsoft sets their roadmap based on their business needs and what'll benefit them, not what'll benefit their developers. And Microsoft is focused on one thing: insuring that Microsoft controls everything. When they think "cross-platform", they mean "across all Microsoft platforms". They want it to be easy to have apps run on all their platforms, from desktops to phones, and to be as hard as possible to make those things run on any other platform. If things do run on other platforms, they want to insure that Microsoft is a required part of the infrastructure anyway.

C# and .Net and Silverlight are problematic for Microsoft because they can run on other platforms, and when they do other Microsoft products and platforms aren't required. It's not easy but the Mono project has demonstrated that you can create a C# compiler and .Net runtime for Linux, and once it exists for Linux it's a lot easier to port it to any other Unix variant. Silverlight will likely fall into the same category. But HTML5/JS has one big advantage: it's limited enough that you can't create an entire complex application in it. You can do the UI part, but you're going to need a back-end to handle things that just can't be done in Javascript. Microsoft's hope is to use the standardized nature of HTML5/JS to sell management by making sure the "standards-compliant" checkbox is checked, while doing some things under the hood and in the client/server communication with the back-end to insure that you'll need a Windows system in the mix to successfully run one of their new apps. Think back to ASP and how it got tied into IE-specific bits of Javascript and HTML to the point where it was hard to make ASP webapps work right anywhere but in IE. How successful Microsoft will be with this is up in the air, but I think their goal is what it's always been: to make sure it's Microsoft and Windows everywhere, for everything, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

As a developer, make no mistake: Microsoft does not care about you. You are important only insofar as you buying into their roadmap is needed for it to succeed. Once that's no longer needed you're at best unnecessary and at worst competition to be eliminated (every sale of software you write is the loss of a sale of something Microsoft wrote or could write, and you selling your software at the expense of Microsoft doesn't benefit Microsoft).

ASP.Net ViewState

Really really dumb idea: using a complex, high-overhead ViewState mechanism to set field values in the Web page returned from posting a form instead of simply setting the field values in the returned page. I mean, the posted page has the values populated, that's it's whole purpose. So when generating the response page, simply set the value attributes to what the fields' values were in the post request. Simple, no? Apparently not for Microsoft.

Another reason to avoid the Windows Phone 7

Apparently the OS on Windows Phone 7 permanently modifies SD cards. Now, bear in mind that the card slot involved isn't an externally-accessible one, it's under the battery like the socket for the SIM card and you can't readily swap SD cards in and out of it. I suspect it's meant to offer carriers expanded storage for stuff that the user can't mess with or replace/upgrade themselves (if the carrier does things right). But it does bring up one point: Windows Phone 7 devices won't have an SD card slot users can swap cards in. No more dumping your files onto a card and reading them into another phone. No taking the card with phone files over to the computer and reading them in. No external backup of data. No external swappable storage period. To me that's a good reason to avoid those phones. I'd stick with an Android or other smartphone, where I've got the option of external storage.

Sidekick data lossage

You know that big T-Mobile Sidekick data loss incident last week? Well, it seems a source is pointing at the potential cause. Long and short: the service did in fact have a backup, and did in fact start to do a backup before the migration. But they only have space on the SAN for 1 backup copy, and the backup process takes 6 days to run. So part-way through the backup the Microsoft manager in charge ordered them to abort the backup and start the migration, since the storage vendor had assured them a backup wouldn't be needed. Naturally Murphy stuck his nose in mid-way through the migration.

With Microsoft's track record for bad management decisions, this sounds plausible. And in a case like this you can't blame the technology. No tech will save you from this sort of deliberate stupidity.

I'd also note that the whole incident should be a warning to everyone: you need your own backups of your data. It doesn't matter what the contract says, failures can still happen and you need to be able to recover from them.

Zune lock-up bug

Owners of Microsoft's Zune MP3 player saw their devices lock up hard at the end of 2008. It turns out there's a leap-year bug in Microsoft's code. The clock in the Zune records time as the number of days and seconds since 1/1/1980. To convert that into a normal calendar time, the Zune starts with this code to convert the number of days to years and days:

year = ORIGINYEAR;
while (days > 365)
{
  if (IsLeapYear(year))
  {
    if (days > 366)
    {
      days -= 366;
      year += 1;
    }
  }
  else
  {
    days -= 365;
    year += 1;
  }
}

It's basically looping through incrementing the year and decrementing days by the number of days in that year until it's got less than a full year's worth of days left. The problem comes on the last day of a leap year. In that case, days will be 366 and isLeapYear() will return true. The loop won't terminate because days is still greater than 365. But the leap-year path inside the loop won't decrement the days because days isn't greater than 366. End result: infinite loop on 12/31 of any leap year. This bug should've been caught during standard testing. Leap years are a well-known edge case when dealing with dates, likewise the first and last days of the year and the transition from one year to the next are standard problem points where any errors tend to show up.

Microsoft's proposed solution: wait until sufficiently far into 1/1 of the next year, then force a hard reset of your Zune. Yeah, that'll get your Zune working but it doesn't fix the bug. Bets that Microsoft's fix for this code causes a different kind of failure on 1/1/2013?

MS claims in Vista lawsuit

Microsoft is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over Windows Vista. The plaintiffs there are claiming that Microsoft falsely advertised machines as Vista Capable when they weren't capable of running the Vista shown in advertisements. One of Microsoft's responses to this is that Vista Basic, which the machines are capable of running, is a real version of Vista and therefore there wasn't any false advertising. This isn't going to fly. The question isn't whether Vista Basic is a real version of Vista, it's whether it's the Vista advertised to everyone. And it isn't. It's missing almost all the elements shown in the advertisements, and nowhere in the ads does it say that what's shown may not be present. In fact all the ads emphasize all those elements shown as the things that make Vista Vista. That's going to kill Microsoft.

This isn't a software trademark or copyright case. This is straight-up consumer law that's been around almost as long as car salesmen have been. If you advertise a car on TV and show the supercharged V8, 6-speed manual transmission, sports suspension, full leather interior, full power everything with sunroof version, and that's all you show, and you end the add with "Starting from $9000.", then courts have held that you need to deliver the car as advertised starting at $9000. If the only model you offer at $9000 is the 4-cylinder, 4-speed automatic, cheap cloth interior, manual everything stripped-down model, the courts will nail you for false advertising. You did the advertisement knowing you couldn't and wouldn't deliver what was shown for the price you quoted, and you don't get to do that. Which is why every car advertisement, when they show the price, always says in readable text underneath the "Starting at" stuff something like "Base price. As shown, $LARGER_NUMBER.". And Microsoft didn't do the equivalent. They showed Vista with the Aero interface, emphasized the Aero interface as a defining characteristic of Vista, and never gave a hint in the ads that Vista might not actually contain the Aero interface. A reasonable person, looking at the ads and the "Vista Capable" sticker, would conclude that that sticker meant the machine was capable of running what Microsoft was advertising as Vista. And it can't. And all those e-mails from Microsoft execs show that Microsoft knew it. Bam. Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. They can wriggle all they want, but when it comes down to it they're going to lose on that point for the same reason car dealers lost and had to start adding that explanatory text.

Browser process models

Everyone's praising IE8 for it's new one-process-per-tab model. It's got many advantages over the threaded model used by most browsers, including the fact that a crash of one tab can't take other tabs or the browser down. What most people don't seem to get is that the multiple-process model isn't new with IE8, and in fact the threaded model was one adopted only over the strenuous objections of everybody else. You see, threads exist for one reason and one reason only: on VMS and Windows (which was designed in part by the guy responsible for designing VMS), creating a process is expensive. You need threads in those OSes because you can't create a lot of processes quickly. But Unix had cheap process creation from day one. You needed another thread in Unix, you forked off another process. Threads weren't needed. But everybody in the Windows community kept braying about needing threads and why didn't Unix have them, oblivious to the fact that they already had what threads did in the fork() call. So Unix finally, reluctantly, adopted threads with all their pitfalls. And programmers used them heavily when processes would've been more appropriate. Until the pitfalls finally became too much to live with, when they went from just driving programmers nuts to causing problems for the very users who demanded them in the first place. So now we're back to where Unix was 25 years ago, forking a new process when you need a new thread of execution.

aseigo on new MS/Novell deal

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/08/microsoft-and-novell-reaffirm-pact.html

aseigo has some comments on MS's new deal with Novell to buy more Linux support coupons. I have to agree with him. One thing that has bothered me with MS's activites is their nebulous claims about their IP that's supposedly infringed upon by Linux. My first reaction is "I'm from Missouri. Show me.". Exactly what intellectual property does Microsoft claim to own that's being infringed upon, and exactly what in a Linux distribution infringes upon it and how? Lay it out and let's get it resolved. And yet Microsoft won't do that. They play coy, dodging around saying exactly what it is they're accusing Linux of. And my immediate reaction to that is to think that they really don't have any claim that'll stand up to public scrutiny, that if they had to actually lay it out all they'd end up with is "We got nuthin'.". And that makes me immediately suspicious of any deal that supports them in this. When someone's running a scam (which is what a false claim to get others to pay you is, a scam), there's only two kinds of people doing business with them: marks, and accomplices. I probably want to avoid both.