Windows Azure...and Silverlight RIA platform, with functionality similar to Excel Pivot tables and...

Building on 28 years of Grey Matter know how

Windows AzureAre you ready to put your applications into the cloud?

Better by designChoosing the right tools for your creative needs

Storage managementBackup solutions for the modern world

WIN!See page 12 for details

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Matt NicholsonEditor, HardCopy

Grey Matter LimitedPrigg Meadow,Ashburton,Devon, TQ13 7DF, [email protected]

EditorialEditor: .....................................................................Matt NicholsonTechnical Editors: .. Sean Wilson, Paul EdwardsNews Editor: ...................................................... Paul StephensPublisher: ..................................................................Andrew KingContributors: ....................................................Tim Anderson,

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4 Latest News AVG, ComponentOne,

GFI, Paessler, Red Hat and much more.

8 Reinventing Windows Tim Anderson reports from

Microsoft BUILD.

12 Inside Data How BI can benefit

development projects.

12 Competition Win MindManager 2012

Professional!

15 Windows Azure Are your applications

ready for the cloud?

18 Better by design Choosing the right tools

for your creative output.

25 Storage management Backup solutions for the

modern world.

30 Straight talking Microsoft’s move towards

‘cloud plus device’.

32 And Another Thing Jon Honeyball ponders

the implications of the Mac App Store.

34 Short Cuts Time out to honour the

work of Steve Jobs.

2 Visual Studio 201010 Microsoft BI13 Mindjet 14 ComponentOne21 Adobe23 AVG24 ABBYY27 Symantec Backup Exec29 Bing Maps31 Paessler 33 QSR35 Infragistics36 Intel

Just recently I discovered a couple of things that brought home to me just how much this industry is changing, and

just how much Apple’s influence has grown. The first concerned Amazon’s Kindle. I have been using the Kindle eBook app for some time on my Windows Phone and, more recently, I’ve been using the Kindle itself. One thing that has impressed me is the ease with which I can browse the Kindle Store for books and ‘1-Click’ buy straight from both the device and the app. However, this experience is no longer available to owners of the Apple iPhone or iPad. This is because Apple has changed the rules governing the applications available through the iTunes App Store, explicitly prohibiting apps that have “external mechanisms for purchasing content... such as a ‘buy’ button that goes to a Web site to purchase a digital book.”

The second concerned Adobe’s announcement, made on the morning that I was writing this column, that it is abandoning further development of the Flash Player plug-in for mobile devices. Again the blame can be largely laid at Apple’s door - specifically at the open letter that Steve Jobs posted on the Apple Web site in April last year, explaining why Apple was not going to allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad, and suggesting that the future lay with HTML5.

These two things are interesting for different reasons, both revealing much about the nature of Apple as a company. In the case of the Kindle app, there are two reasons we have arrived at this situation. The first is down to a clash of business models. Apple makes money by taking a 30 per cent levy on purchases made through its App Store, and in February this year made it clear this applies not only to code but also to content, such as eBooks. Amazon, on the other hand, is a distributor. It gives away the app for free, making money by taking a proportion of the sales of the content.

The second reason is more telling. Apple has its own iBooks app, allowing you to download books from the iBookstore, and it does not want competition. What is interesting here is the contrast between the two companies. Amazon is a bookseller, and a very successful one. Yes, it does make the Kindle, but this is simply to provide another form-factor for the reader. It has not crippled the user experience of the app in order to promote sales of the hardware, instead making the app available on as wide a range of devices as possible.

Apple, on the other hand, is monolithic, keeping a tight control over the whole user experience, from the hardware through the operating system and on to the apps and the content. This has resulted in some amazing products: the Macintosh, the iPhone and the iPad. However it is very different from the approach of, for example, Microsoft, which has never ventured into PC production. Microsoft supports HTML5, but is quite happy for Adobe to deliver Flash on its platforms, leaving the market to decide which survives. Apple is not, because it wants more control.

Contents

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Welcome

Register Now!HardCopy magazine is published four times a year. Make sure you don’t miss out by registering or updating your details at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/register

Read HardCopy onlineHardCopy is hosted on Grey Matter’s software information portal. To view buyer’s guides, news, blogs and forums go to www.softwareknowhow.info

Grey Matter • 01364 654 100 • HardCopy 3

ComponentOne super-bundle is simply the Ultimate ComponentOne • www.greymatter.com/componentone

Controls vendor ComponentOne has shortened the name of its all-products

mega-suite from ‘ComponentOne Studio Ultimate’ to ‘ComponentOne Ultimate’, at the same time adding five of its recent releases to the bundle. Heading the list is Studio for Windows Phone (see HardCopy issue 53),

followed by Studio suites for ASP.NET Wijmo and Entity Framework, plus OLAP controls for LightSwitch and Silverlight.

Launched this summer, ComponentOne’s Mango-compatible Windows Phone suite has already been upgraded, with new controls for reading and writing Excel (.xlsx) documents, a

‘simple yet powerful’ data bound FlexGrid control, a collection of five gauge controls and an imaging bundle that includes JPEG/PNG editing and animated GIF playback. Also included in the suite’s 18 controls are Chart, Maps, PDF, Rich Text editing and iPhone-style Coverflow components.

Studio for ASP.NET Wijmo offers 30 client-side controls based on ComponentOne’s Wijmo jQuery UI library. New in the 2011 v2 release are interactive HTML5 charts, a customisable jQuery grid and collections of CSS3 and jQuery themes, plus a new ‘Themeroller’ theme builder. The new Studio for Entity Framework provides simplified development and improved performance

for Microsoft’s ADO.NET entity object-relational data mapping framework, as well as for the RIA Services ASP/Silverlight application model, including design-time data sources, asynchronous data loading and smart client-side caching.

ComponentOne’s new OLAP suites add Business Intelligence controls to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Lightswitch application builder and Silverlight RIA platform, with functionality similar to Excel Pivot tables and charts. The Lightswitch bundle includes a drag-and-drop Panel interface for designing data views, while the Silverlight version adds a tabbed page view for presenting Panel, Chart and Grid controls together.

ComponentOne Ultimate continues to include all the company’s other control suites, including collections for Winforms, SharePoint, iPhone, WPF and Silverlight, as well as Doc-To-help Enterprise, DemoWorks screen movie recorder, IntelliSpell for Visual Studio and the XapOptimiser Silverlight optimiser/code obfuscator.

New to ComponentOne’s Ultimate bundle is a set of controls for the company’s Wijmo jQuery UI library.

Latest News

Security vendor AVG has launched Internet Security 2012 Business Edition,

with improved performance, a smaller footprint and new tools aimed at speeding up downloads and controlling browser memory hogging. Other improvements include enhanced Web security and a reorganised user interface.

Aimed at SMBs, the package includes antivirus, anti-rootkit, a firewall, Online Shield (Instant messaging protection), anti-spyware, email protection and anti-spam. Identity (password) protection, anti-phishing protection and social network protection (pre-scanning

links on Facebook pages, for example) are also included, plus a server protection module and remote admin tool.

Detection of evasive Web threats has been improved, as has rootkit detection with added support for anti-rootkit exceptions, while a simplified user interface has components grouped together to reduce clutter. AVG claims a 50 per cent faster download and install time, 45 per cent reduction in disk space and 20 per cent less processes and memory usage.

New in the 2012 edition is AVG Accelerator which reduces waiting times for large files such as Flash videos by splitting them into four simultaneous downloads. Also new is AVG Advisor, which monitors Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox and IE) for excessive memory usage, popping up a warning when consumption is likely to slow the system down.

“AVG is the most compelling product on the market for businesses that want protection without impeding performance. Customers can essentially set and forget” said Robert Gorby, global head of SMB strategies at AVG. Internet Security 2012 is also available in a standard version which omits the server and remote admin modules.

• AVG’s 2011 SMB Market Landscape report, produced by research company GfK, has some uncomfortable conclusions about smaller businesses’ attitude to security. It found that SMBs recognised social networking as a sales and customer engagement opportunity, but tended not to take precautions against social-media threats such as information theft and ‘social engineering’, instead remaining focused on traditional vulnerabilities like e-mail and Web viruses.

AVG goes ‘faster, lighter and easier’ AVG • www.greymatter.com/avg

4 Winter 2011 • Issue 54 • HardCopy

Grey Matter

Paessler supports IPv6 in upgraded network monitor release Paessler • www.greymatter.com/paessler

German network monitoring specialists Paessler AG has released PRTG v9, a

major upgrade of its flagship monitoring package. New features include support for the IPv6 protocol, a redesigned Web interface plus cross-installation Enterprise Console, vendor-specific hardware sensors, Active Directory support, automatic software update and a long list of new monitoring features. The company has retained its all-in licensing policy, with a standard price buying all the product’s features.

PRTG’s redesigned Web control interface now allows users to build their own drag-and drop device tree views. Other UI improvements include a rewritten Welcome Assistant, better AJAX performance and support for Google Chrome Desktop Notifications. The new Enterprise Console can aggregate views from multiple PRTG installations, effectively removing

the limits of the number of sensors that can be monitored.

New dedicated hardware sensors are provided for devices from Cisco, Dell, HP and other vendors, along with specialist sensors for EXS Disks, Hyper-V virtual network adapters, WSUS Statistics and others. Paessler says that 70 per cent of its sensor types now support IPv6, including Packet Sniffer and most TCP-based sensors.

PRTG user login accounts can now be managed by Active Directory, while software updates are now automatic. Device auto-discovery is improved with vendor detection by MAC address, while improved cluster functions include cluster node maps and a ‘Master Heartbeat’ script that makes sure users always connect to the current Master node.

Other new features include a two-way QoS sensor, the WinPcap packet sniffer engine and

support for Amazon SNS notifications. “We’re confident you won’t find this level of enterprise-grade functionality at this price point from any other monitoring solution provider,” said Paessler CEO Dirk Paessler.

Paessler’s updated console for its PRTG network monitor lets you build your own device trees using drag and drop.

Adobe’s annual MAX developer’s conference, held this October in Los

Angeles, attracted over 5,000 attendees and delivered the expected stream of product announcements. The theme was clear – Adobe sees the future in the cloud and on the mobile/tablet platform, and has taken steps to get there with the launch of a new Adobe Creative Cloud tools/services/community platform and the acquisition of PhoneGap, the front runner in the ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ mobile application development market.

Adobe describes Creative Cloud as “a major new initiative that radically redefines the content creation process.” Aimed at design professionals, it will offer the Creative Suite

applications (due early 2012) alongside six new Adobe Touch tablet apps, plus 20GB storage and a community/marketplace. The Touch Apps – Photoshop, Collage, Debut (presentations), Ideas (vector drawing), Kuler (colour themes) and Proto (wireframes) - will also be available as stand-alone Android tablet and iPad products, priced at just $10 each in the USA. Adobe has also bought the Typekit online Web font library, and will offer it via stand-alone subscription and as part of Creative cloud.

Apple may have relented over its banning of CS5’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler, but Adobe has nevertheless hedged its bets with the purchase of Nitobi, creator of the open source PhoneGap HTML5-to-mobiles toolset and PhoneGap Build online packaging service. These products will become Adobe’s commercial offerings, while the PhoneGap codebase goes to the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Callback.

Adobe also announced tie-ups with Samsung, LG and TiVo to put Flash applications (via Adobe AIR) on TV and digital home devices,

while in another partnership deal, tablet publications authoring specialists Woodwing Software are abandoning their own Content Delivery Service and Reader application, instead becoming VARs for Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite. Meanwhile content developers targeting just the iPad now have the option of Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, which allows them to produce a single content-rich iPad App (for example a brochure or portfolio) for $395.

• Despite the emphasis on cloud and mobility, the item which drew the biggest gasps at MAX came from the desktop – a new image de-blurring tool for Photoshop with seemingly magical abilities. Insiders say it’ll appear in CS6, but it’ll no doubt be on a tablet near you too.

Adobe heads for the Cloud with MAX announcements Adobe • www.greymatter.com/adobe

Adobe Ideas: one of six Touch applications that are available for iPad and Android tablets via its Creative Cloud service or stand-alone for just $10 each.

The real show stealer is Adobe’s new Deblur tool for PhotoShop.


Grey Matter

Red Hat adds intelligence to its jBoss middleware Red Hat • www.greymatter.com/red hat

Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat has overhauled its jBoss middleware

platform, adding ‘situationally aware” decision making, an improved Business User interface, cloud-oriented BPEL language support and the company’s high performance MRG-Messaging, as well as additional data sources, REST architecture compatibility and WSDL/XML Schema support.

The upgrades roll out across three jBoss products, all now at version 5.2. jBoss Enterprise Business Rule Management System (BRMS) now supports Complex Event Processing, in which business rules can be aware of, and influenced by, relevant business events. Also new is a Web-based Decision Table interface aimed at business analysts building rules-driven applications. The release includes a technical

preview of goal-seeking Enhanced Rules Logic, which allows users to specify a desired end result and have the system find conditions which deliver it.

jBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.2 supports Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), used for orchestrating workflows across Web and cloud services. It also gains support for Red Hat’s Enterprise MRG-Messaging, based on the open Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and providing interoperability with mobile and non-Java devices.

JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.2 can now work with Teradata, Ingres, Mondrian and JSON data sources, and publish services based on Representational State Transfer (REST). Metadata repositories can now be managed using Web Services Description

Language and XML Schema formats.“Organizations are updating their IT

infrastructure to become more agile, and leverage active decision making,” said Craig Muzilla, Red Hat’s Middleware Business Vice President and General Manager. “With the next versions of these platforms, we’re offering tools for businesses to automate rules-based decisions, business process execution and complex event processing, helping to improve the speed and quality of their business operations.”

Embarcadero offers Delphi professional certification Embarcadero • www.greymatter.com/embarcadero

If you work with products from Apple, Microsoft, Oracle or Red Hat, then you

can sit a professional certification exam which proves to the world (and most importantly employers/clients) that you know your stuff. Now Delphi developers have the same opportunity as vendors Embarcadero introduce a two-stage Delphi Certification Program.

The entry-level qualification is Delphi Developer Certification, which tests general knowledge of Delphi fundamentals such as data types, classes, memory management and database concepts. The online exam consists of 60 randomly-chosen multiple choice questions, with 60 minutes to complete them and a

demanding 80 per cent correct answers required for a pass. A typical question is “What is the underlying type of the TDateTime type?” (answer: Double) so you do need a fair amount of quick-fire knowledge.

Delphi Master Developer Certification uses the same 60-question format but tests you on advanced knowledge of Delphi programming concepts, software architecture choices, and the depth and breadth of Delphi XE’s software development capabilities. A typical question asks how you’d navigate through multiple result sets returned by a

TSQLStoredProc call (answer: Execute NextRecordSet method), and a pass will, according to Embarcadero, identify you as an elite member of the global Delphi community.

The Delphi Developer Certification exam costs just $49 (free with purchases of Delphi XE2 or RAD Studio XE2), while Master Developer Certification is a still reasonable $149. Certification lasts for two years. For more details visit www.embarcadero.com/certification.

GFI goes it alone in EventsManager 2012 GFI • www.greymatter.com/gfi

Security specialist GFI has released EventsManager 2012, an upgrade to its

Windows-based event log monitoring, management and archiving suite. To gain capacity for storing and analysing ever larger amounts of log data across networks, it’s ended the product’s dependence on Microsoft’s SQL Server database, replacing it with its own file-based storage engine. Other developments include a new reporting engine, a new browser with drill-down and global search, and log

scanning and parsing via regular expressions.GFI says that the move to a proprietary

storage engine was prompted by performance issues with SQL Server databases containing more than 15 million event records, adding that the new system offers good performance even on databases with hundreds of millions of records. The new system also provides data encryption and simplified maintenance, and can import data from the previous version.

The previous version’s fixed-layout

ReportPack is replaced with a new Reporting Engine, integrated into the main control panel and able to produce custom reports in HTML and PDF formats. Multiple type-specific log browsers have been replaced by a single browser able to show all log types, with customisable columns, drill-down and integrated search. Both the Syslog and W3C log collectors now support customisable parsing schemas, including multiple regular expressions.


Grey Matter

News in Brief Software Know How • www.softwareknowhow.info/news.aspx

• Grey Matter and Symantec are co-hosting a Tech Day at Exeter Racecourse on Tuesday 13 December. The event runs from 9am to 6pm and includes hands-on sessions with Symantec’s Endpoint Protection and Backup Exec products plus Cloud presentations and more. Lunch and refreshments are provided. The event is free and places are limited. Register now by emailing [email protected].

• The Silicon Cup is an annual IT industry charity sailing event held at Cowes, Isle of Wight, and this year Grey Matter proudly entered its own (chartered) yacht. Crewing the ‘Ballistic’ were staff from Grey Matter plus partners including Microsoft, AlfaPeople, Cognite and Yokogawa, under the experienced eyes of Skipper John and Mate George. The team took part in 2 Spinnaker races and came 11th overall, while the Charity Gala dinner raised over £50,000 for good causes. A fantastic effort by all with bruises to show for it!

• Visitors to Grey Matter’s stand at the Business South West 2011 show in Exeter in October were treated to a first look at our Web site’s new Office 365 section, dedicated to Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite. With product details, advice and clearly laid-out tables showing all the available options, it will help you to decide which of the Office 365 subscription plans best suits your business, then try or buy the product. Visit the new site at www.greymatter.com/office365.

• A new Web site worth noting is www.parallel-universe-online.com where Grey Matter and Intel will be providing information on Intel’s software tools. Contents will include issues of Parallel Universe magazine, the latest product guides, white papers, benchmarks, case studies

and Getting Started guides. The site is due to go live just as this issue of HardCopy hits your desk, so bookmark it now!

The Grey Matter team with the good ship ‘Ballistic’ at Cowes for the Silicon Cup.


Grey Matter

Reinventing WindowsTim Anderson reports from BUILD where Microsoft lifted the

veil on Windows 8, WinRT and more.

Microsoft’s September BUILD conference in Anaheim, California took

place at a critical time in the company’s history. Competitors from Google to VMware are talking gleefully about the post-PC era; Windows Phone has so far failed to win the market share Microsoft was hoping for; and Apple’s iPad, together with sundry Android devices, have quickly made Windows an also-ran in tablets.

BUILD was also flagged in advance as the moment when Microsoft would reveal its future development strategy for the Windows platform, with rumours that .NET would be downplayed in favour of HTML 5.

All this led to considerable anticipation when Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky took the stage to present the developer preview of Windows 8. That first day keynote was a spectacular success, and not only because attendees were promised a rather smart Samsung tablet on which to try out the new operating system. Microsoft showed a new user interface called Metro, inspired by the design work for Windows Phone, which is smooth, responsive and, above all, touch-friendly. Microsoft’s catch-phrase ‘Windows reimagined’ is justified: the Metro-style interface feels like a new operating system. It does not even support overlapping windows, one of the key characteristics of old-style

Windows, though unlike Apple’s iPad you can have two applications side by side.

Just to be clear: traditional desktop Windows is also present in Windows 8, and if you do not want to use Metro you can ignore most of it other than the Start screen, which replaces the Windows 7 Start menu. There are new features in desktop Windows 8, including a ribbon UI for Explorer and an improved file copy dialog, but they are minor compared to the Metro revolution.

The consensus at BUILD was that Windows 8 Metro is a delight to use. Talking to developers at mealtimes though, it was apparent that most will not be switching their development efforts to Metro-style applications any time soon. In most cases, that switch would mean a complete rewrite of the user interface. Further, Metro-style apps are sandboxed to the extent that some features which Windows developers take for granted are not available. There is no SQL Server driver, for example; all data access is meant to be done through Web services. This tension between the prettiness of Metro and its immediate usefulness was one dampener on the enthusiasm generated.

The developer storyMuch of BUILD was focused on the developer platform for Metro in Windows 8. At its heart is

a new runtime called WinRT. Although conceptually this is a layer between applications and the underlying operating system, Sinofsky was keen not to present it like that: “everything we’re showing you today is built into Windows – it is Windows. We’re not building layers on layers. We’ve built everything natively into Windows.”

One way of looking at this is that the Windows team learned from mistakes made with Windows Vista, originally codenamed Longhorn. Vista introduced Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is a .NET API, resulting in an overhead for WPF code versus

native code. Microsoft’s ambivalence toward WPF was obvious, since little in Windows Vista or Windows 7 depends on it. Earlier prototypes of Longhorn used WPF more extensively, but performance was terrible, and work on Longhorn was reset at great expense in time and money.

WinRT has no .NET dependence, and we were told that under the covers it is similar to COM, the old Windows object model which .NET was intended to replace.

That said, WinRT borrows two key features from .NET. It uses XAML for its presentation language, and it uses the same metadata format as .NET IL (intermediate language) to describe the WinRT API.

Next, Microsoft added an interop layer to both the .NET runtime and the Internet Explorer JavaScript engine so that the API looks like a .NET API if you are coding in .NET, and like a JavaScript API if you are coding in JavaScript.

This means developers have three choices for Metro development: C/C++, .NET or JavaScript with HTML/CSS. Although there is a slight performance edge to C/C++, it is small, and all the samples seen at BUILD performed well irrespective of their development language. There was high attendance for session on developing Metro apps in .NET, and any wild predictions that .NET would be deprecated in Windows 8 were proven false.

WinRT is intended to be a safe application platform, to an extent that desktop Windows will never be able to match. WinRT applications do not have access to the file system other than to isolated storage, and to user-controlled open and save actions though file dialogs. Only a safe subset of the Win32 API is available, whether through C/C++ or via Platform Invoke in .NET. Reading and writing data is normally done through Web services, as in a Silverlight or Adobe AIR app, rather than through a traditional database driver. That said, you could use a local database that is isolated to your app.

Another key feature is that WinRT apps cannot communicate other than through pre-defined ‘contracts’ of which there are five: Search, Share, PlayTo, Settings and Picking


Development

Conference attendees try to make sense of the literature in the

sunshine outside the Anaheim Convention Center.

TIMANDERSON

A freelance journalist since 1992, Tim

Anderson covers a wide range of

technical topics. His recent work has appeared in

publications including Guardian Technology,

The Register, Computer Weekly,

Hardcopy, vnunet, IT Expert and ITJOBLOG,

as well as his popular ITWriting blog.

[email protected]

www.itwriting.com


Development

(which lets your app access files belonging to another app, subject to opt-in).

Async in Windows 8One of Microsoft’s smartest moves in WinRT was to make all API calls that might take more than 50ms into async-only functions. Microsoft considered having synchronous alternatives but rejected the idea in order to force developers to do the “right” thing.Async functions return immediately, delivering results later via a callback function. The goal is to have a user interface that is always responsive.

This means that Metro developers will be writing a lot of async code, often a challenge than makes it hard to structure your code sensibly. Fortunately there is a new feature in C# 5.0 which makes this easier. The ‘await’ keyword instructs the compiler to exit the current function while making any code you wrote after that line into a continuation that runs when the awaited function returns. The details of the callback are hidden from the developer.

The beauty of ‘await’ is that you can use it

more than once in the same function: the compiler will manage all the nested continuations that result.

What about Silverlight?Microsoft developed Silverlight, its cross-platform .NET runtime and browser plug-in, with great energy between the first version in 2007 and version 4 in 2010. There was speculation that it could eventually merge with WPF as a primary way to deliver applications on Windows. Then, at PDC in October 2010, Microsoft talked up Internet Explorer 9 and HTML as its Web strategy, barely mentioning Silverlight: “Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted,” confessed Bob Muglia (then VP). With hindsight, it is obvious that this followed the decision to focus on WinRT rather than .NET as the foundation of Windows client programming. There is no Silverlight runtime in WinRT, not even in the Metro-style Web browser.

On one level then, the fears for Silverlight’s future were justified by what was announced at BUILD. That said, another way of looking at this

is that key features of Silverlight, including XAML and the .NET runtime, are alive and well in WinRT. Silverlight developers will have the easiest of transitions to WinRT, since the sandboxed model is close to what they are used to.

Silverlight continues in desktop Windows and its browser, with version 5.0 to be released in late 2011. It also remains as the development platform for Windows Phone 7.

Will Microsoft eventually replace Silverlight with WinRT in a future Windows Phone release? That would

make sense, but the company will not confirm the idea yet, no doubt to avoid giving the impression that Windows Phone 7 is based on an old platform.

A tale of two keynotesBUILD was not just about Windows 8. The Day Two keynote focused on the server and cloud side of Microsoft, both the public Windows Azure cloud, and private clouds based on Server 8 and a greatly enhanced Hyper-V virtualisation platform. Server 8 will share code with Windows 8 and presumably be released at around the same time. (Both Windows 8 and Server 8 are codenames, and the final releases may be called something different.)

Microsoft had run a strong press preview of Server 8 the week before BUILD; yet the Day Two keynote lacked the energy of the previous day and failed to show off the new server features effectively, though VP Scott Guthrie received a warm welcome in his new role managing the Windows Azure development platform. CEO Steve Ballmer appeared at the end, emphasising the importance of this event to the company.

There was a preview of Team Foundation Server (TFS) running on Azure, which may well make sense for many teams given the difficulty of configuring and maintaining TFS.

The most over-subscribed session at BUILD was from C# inventor Anders Hejlsberg on the future of C# and Visual Basic. The main focus was the asynchronous capability (see above), and a forthcoming project codenamed Roslyn which he described as “compiler as a service”.

Another way of describing it is an API for the compiler and its semantic analyser. Using Roslyn, it is easy to execute C# or VB expressions generated at runtime. It also makes writing smart IDE features easier, so developers can look forward to more powerful refactoring. Hejlsberg demonstrated how you can take a block of C# code and “paste as VB”, or vice versa. Roslyn will not be in Visual Studio 11, but is now available for Visual Studio 2010 as a technical preview.

Another BUILD highlight was Herb Sutter’s two sessions on C++, especially the second on writing modern C++ code. It was a myth-busting talk on how, contrary to its reputation, writing C++ code is now safe and fast thanks to features like automatic lifetime management and auto type deduction.

Find out more...

All the sessions from the BUILD conference are available to watch at www.buildwindows.com.

iWindows Division president Steven Sinofsky at BUILD

The road to Windows 8? The new Metro-style control panel.

Graham Keitch explains how business intelligence

can benefit development projects.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the process of managing an

application or project over time. The lifecycle phases typically include requirements definition, development, testing, deployment and maintenance. There are a number of tools that assist with general project management and some that handle the more specialist demands of IT workers who need to collaborate and deal with issues specific to a development project. Dedicated ALM technologies such as Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 are tightly integrated with the tools that developers use. They are equipped with specific features to assist with things like version control and

change management. The data they capture can also provide intelligence on how a project is going. Let’s take a closer look at how Microsoft uses business intelligence (BI) to tackle this.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) provides access to specific functionality for controlling work items and managing collaboration between project members. It has an API that exposes the functionality as Web Services that can be consumed by applications like Visual Studio 2010.

TFS employs a SQL Server data warehouse to store information about key project components such as tasks, bugs and test results. The repository is used by BI technologies to reveal trends and provide traceability, while dashboards and reports display real-time

metrics that can give early warning of potential problems and allows informed decisions to be taken to keep things on track. OLAP technology is deployed within the data warehouse for rich reporting using Microsoft Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services. The OLAP cube is refreshed every two hours by default, and the rate is configurable. The dashboards are delivered through SharePoint Server.

TFS monitors and automatically logs information regarding the access and use of work items and source code. There is a warehouse adapter in the data tier which caches data from the underlying database in tabular form suitable for consumption by SQL Server

Analysis Services. The reports are compiled using SQL Server Reporting Services and can be exported in various formats including Excel, XML, PDF and TIFF. More than 30 reports are provided out of the box and there is provision for further report creation and customisation.

The data can also be exposed to other analytical applications via a Web Services interface which broadens the scope for tailoring reports to your needs. The analysis services are able to identify trends that span multiple work items including code error, churn and build events. Version control changesets store information about check-in events and this data can be combined with information relating to Team Build, Test Agents and other components to provide a variety of reports. These might

include the rate of code change, untested bugs and regressions involving previously passed tests. The TFS project and its data can be synchronised with Microsoft Project Server as well as other systems which might include finance or human resources applications.

In the context of ALM, you should not think of BI as a reporting and analytical tool that is only concerned with immediate project logistics. The capturing and analysis of data relating to IT systems and the business they support is important throughout the lifecycle. TFS provides full traceability that enables you to track progress and quality against business goals and customer requirements. You can specify and report on relationships between requirements, work items, test cases and builds.

Long development timelines are more likely to be affected by shifting goal posts and BI can feed valuable information about the current state of the business into the project team. In an Agile environment, this will enable the project to be realigned and respond to changes in business requirements or conditions. TFS supports Agile and other development methodologies such as SCRUM through the use of different project templates.

Inside Data

Team Explorer Everywhere also provides support for Eclipse, and extends the collaboration and reporting benefits to heterogeneous environments. Post-deployment, BI can take on a capacity planning role, highlighting trends that signal a need for system changes involving code or infrastructure. It is often helpful to put things in place that ensure the application continues to deliver end user satisfaction and efficiencies while still meeting the current and projected needs of the business. The data can come from numerous disparate and perhaps less obvious sources including help desk systems and other feedback mechanisms such as forums, user groups and online facilities like Microsoft Connect. For the IT department, this is useful intelligence which can inform the whole application lifecycle.

Graham is the database pre-sales specialist at Grey Matter and has worked in IT for over 20 years. He also helped co-ordinate the European ground-based efforts that supported the space missions to Comet Halley. In his spare time, Graham uses computer sampling technology for music composition.

grahamk@

hardcopymag.com

GRAHAMKEITCH

Find out more...

i For more on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server see www.greymatter.com/p661901. Details of Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere can be found at www.greymatter.com/p661649.

Using Microsoft Team Foundation Server technologies to monitor how quickly bugs get fixed.


Database

Competition question: What is the newest feature for

Brainstorming in MindManager 2012 Professional for Windows?

q Guided Brainstorming

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All you have to do to enter is correctly answer the competition question below, fill out the rest of the form and send it to:

Mindjet CompetitionGrey Matter LtdPrigg MeadowAshburtonDevon TQ13 7DF

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issue 54MindManager 2012 Professionalentry form

WIN a full licence ofMindManager 2012 Professional!

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF ENTRY1. No purchase necessary for entry to this competition.2. The prize is a full licence of MindManager 2012 Professional. There is no cash alternative.3. Completed entries must be received by 20 Jan 2012.4. Entries submitted online at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition or completed on a

photocopy of this page will be accepted.5. Only one entry will be accepted per person.6. The winner will be decided by a random draw from the correct entries received by the closing date.7. The winner will be announced on 23 Jan 2012 and will be notified by email or telephone.

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9. Employees of organisations connected with this competition are not eligible for entry.10. Mindjet and Grey Matter reserve the right to use the winner’s name in promotional

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The competition promoter is Grey Matter Ltd, Prigg Meadow, Ashburton, Devon TQ13 7DF.

Mindjet has long been known for its

brainstorming software MindManager, and

now you can win a licence to the 2012 Professional

version! This is packed with new features, including

Analysis View which helps you make decisions

by mapping topics onto predefined sectors, and

Guided Brainstorming, a three-stage process

that starts with defining the challenge before

moving on to tools to help you generate new

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Competition

£ $

£ $Are you ready to put your applications into the cloud?

Matt Nicholson finds out what Microsoft has to offer.

Cloud computing is entering a new phase, moving beyond the simple

‘servers in the sky’ to something rather more sophisticated and even more useful. Microsoft has thrown huge resources into this new arena and come up with Windows Azure.

Of course cloud computing itself is not new. It has long been common for small and even medium-sized businesses to host their Web sites externally, paying a monthly fee to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for access to a Web server and perhaps a database on which they can run their Web applications. This could be an ASP.NET application talking to SQL Server, or something written in PHP or Perl that interacts with MySQL. The ISP looks after the operating system and the hardware, keeping it updated and properly backed up, leaving the customer to look after the application.

What is new, and quite genuinely changing

the landscape, is the application of virtual machine technology to such services. Microsoft Hyper-V, for example, allows a customer’s installation to run in a virtual machine that can be scaled in terms of memory and virtual processor cores according to demand, or seamlessly moved between servers or even data centres for the purposes of load-balancing and maintenance. This is cloud computing in a more literal sense in that the physical location of the server is less well defined and can change moment-to-moment. This is what Microsoft is using to deliver Windows Azure.

Size mattersThe first thing that strikes you about Windows Azure is its sheer size – and the magnitude of the investment it represents for Microsoft. The service is currently delivered from six data centres: two in North America (Chicago and San

Antonio), two in Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore) and two in Europe (Amsterdam and Dublin). The Chicago centre alone cost $500 million and occupies 700,000 square feet. The servers themselves are housed in shipping containers, each containing around 2,000 Dell machines. The Chicago centre currently houses 56 such containers, and is scheduled for a second phase which will add another 56, amounting to some 224,000 servers in all. The Dublin centre represents a similar investment, although it is smaller at 300,000 square feet. It is expected to contain 100,000 servers by the end of 2011.

In addition to this are the 24 nodes used by the Content Delivery Network (CDN), with eight in the US, nine in Europe (including one in London), and seven serving Asia, Australia and South America. CDN is an additional service, incurring a small charge per gigabyte transferred, that allows you to enhance performance by caching suitable application components nearer to your users.

That said, Windows Azure is not specifically aimed at large-scale applications serving millions of users across the globe; it is also cost-effective at a small scale. A solution involving one virtual machine (single virtual core, 768MB memory and 20GB storage) working with a 1GB relational database hosted on SQL Azure would cost around £30 a month under a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ scheme, with the added bonus that you can scale up as the need arises, and pay for the additional capacity on an hourly basis.

Such a business model can also be attractive to larger organisations. Dan Scarfe of Dot Net Solutions, which has helped a

Windows Azure

Matt is editor of HardCopy magazine and has run the DNJ Online Web site since 1998. Prior to that he published Developer Network Journal, ran the Visual Basic User Group (VBUG) and has edited more computer and hi-fi magazine than he cares to remember.

http://blog.mattmags.com

[email protected]

MATTNICHOLSON

>>An aerial view of the Windows Azure data centre under construction in Dublin.


Cloud Computing

£ $

£ $

lot of companies move to Windows Azure, cites the online fashion retailer ASOS.com which was attracted to Azure because it allowed them to scale up their infrastructure to handle the high volume of transactions in the run-up to Christmas, without having to pay for idle resources through the summer months.

A major benefit of any cloud-based system is its negation of the need for capital expenditure on in-house systems, and the associated running cost. Azure specialist two10 degrees has been working with Temenos, which provides software for use by customer-facing bank tellers, to move its solution to Azure. As Jeremy Barnes explains, this is a codebase that goes back to the 1980s with some components written in BASIC, others in C and the more recent in Java. It is served up by Apache Tomcat, so it’s about as far from a Microsoft .NET application as you can get. By moving the application to Azure, Temenos has been able to sell into smaller organisations across the world that would not normally be able to afford the in-house installation required: “Customers can be anywhere in the world, and the software can be deployed within hours rather than months.” The system has now been rolled out to some 12 banks in Mexico.

Degrees of abstractionWindows Azure is sometimes described as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to distinguish it from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

offered by most providers. The distinction is not obvious but comes down to the degree of involvement that the user needs to have with the underlying platform.

Imagine that you are looking to deploy a high-volume Web application to eight virtual machines, four in a UK-based data centre and four overseas. If you are using a conventional IaaS provider you would need to log on to each virtual machine in turn, installing and configuring your application on each one. Now imagine you need to patch the application once or twice a month. You would need to schedule downtime so that you can log in and update each installation. You can be confident that your providers will keep the underlying platform up to date, and the virtual machines backed up, but the actual mechanics of deploying and patching your application are left to you.

Windows Azure works at a higher level of abstraction. Under Azure, you only need to upload one instance of the update. Behind the scenes, Azure will take down each virtual machine in turn, install the update, start the server up again and check that everything is OK before moving on to the next instance. Furthermore, Azure has considerably more understanding of the application that you are running. In the case of a Web application it knows that it is meant to respond to requests, and periodically tests that each installation is working properly. If it detects a problem Azure will automatically provision a new installation for you, take down the problematic installation and seamlessly insert the new one into the mix.

And if you decide to add more virtual machines, in order to handle increased traffic, Azure will automatically provision the new installations and ensure they are properly load-balanced within the data centre. As Dan Scarfe puts it, “It’s all completely seamless. You don’t have to worry about servers any more: you just think about services and the number of users who are going to be accessing them. You don’t need IT operations staff anymore – you don’t even need people who know what IIS is.”

Under the coverThe Windows Azure Platform comprises three main components. The first is the underlying operating system which is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 and a customised version of Hyper-V. Your application runs in an abstraction called Windows Azure Compute, and you rent Compute Instances by the hour. A Compute Instance comes in five sizes ranging from Extra Small (described earlier) to Extra Large which gets you a machine with eight virtual cores, 14GB of memory and 2,040GB of storage. Your

application is installed as one or more components that each run either in a Web Role, for front-end Web applications that require IIS7, or in a Worker Role for background processing or non-Web applications.

Accompanying Compute is Windows Azure Storage which gives you persistent storage in the form of BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), Tables or Queues. Storage elements are replicated between two data centres on the same continent, and can take advantage of the CDN for faster delivery. Storage can also be accessed through REST APIs, or directly from any application that can send an HTTP or HTTPS request.

Barnes has been working with a company that develops software for manufacturing and design processing. This is a thick client that is capable of some quite intensive graphics so, as Barnes explains, “It’s not about wrapping it all up and loading it into a virtual machine.” Instead they are saving to Windows Azure Storage which takes away any backup concerns and opens up possibilities for collaboration. Barnes adds, “Storage is a trivial fee – it’s pennies per month per gigabyte.”

The second component is SQL Azure. Unlike most such offerings, SQL Azure is effectively one enormous SQL Server 2008 R2 cluster distributed across the world; and you pay by size of database, rather than edition. This makes it very cost efficient: most Web sites probably operate with a database of less than 1GB, which costs just £6 a month, but because it is running on a cluster it is highly available, fault tolerant and automatically backed up. Currently available as Community Technology Previews are SQL Azure Reporting and SQL Azure Data Sync (for synchronising an in-house installation with SQL Azure).

The final component is Windows Azure AppFabric and, as Scarfe explains, “There is no equivalent to AppFabric from any of the other vendors.” AppFabric itself breaks down into three main services. First is AppFabric Service Bus which is effectively a distributed messaging system, allowing you to connect Azure applications to in-house applications and so create hybrid solutions, or to any kind of external device.

AppFabric Service Bus gets around the need to configure firewalls and routers to accept incoming connections by using a technique known as NAT traversal. Effectively, both ends of the connection make calls out to AppFabric Service Bus which acts as a broker to facilitate communication. Services are discovered using standard Internet protocols, and support SOAP, Web Services and REST. Applications can publish multiple endpoints

The alternativesThere are a number of companies that compete with Windows Azure, however the most significant (if only by size) are Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

Amazon Web Services is a collection of hosted services of which the most relevant in this context is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 is more of an IaaS provider, requiring you to become involved in some of the mechanics of load balancing and scaling. Initially based on Linux, EC2 now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.

Google App Engine operates at quite a high level of abstraction – you don’t need to worry about the number of servers you are using, for example. It comes with runtimes for both Python and Java, and there is a Java implementation of PHP available. It is free for small scale applications that use up to 1GB of storage and up to 5 million page views a month. There are no facilities for relational databases, although there is a data store that responds to a syntax similar to SQL.

An interesting project that is currently in Beta is Cloud Foundry, operated and managed by VMware and billed as the “world’s first open PaaS offering” for Java-based applications.

Do bear in mind that all these services, including Windows Azure, are operated by American companies and so are subject to American law when it comes to data protection. You may need to make your users aware of this.

<<


Cloud Computing

£ $

£ $

that can each serve multiple subscribers, and it all comes together to make for an extremely flexible solution.

Hitachi Consulting made good use of the Service Bus for the departure control application it built for easyJet, which runs from Windows Azure. This application needs to service the handheld devices used by easyJet staff, but airports are naturally reluctant to open ports on their firewalls. AppFabric Service Bus allows the application to communicate with these devices through the firewall without compromising security.

Then there is AppFabric Access Control which handles log-in credentials. Access Control integrates with a wide range of identity services from Active Directory Federation Services to Windows Live, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. With Access Control you can let people log in to your application from Facebook with just one line of code, and from Active Directory with another line of code.

Dot Net Solutions worked with The Body Shop to build a global customer loyalty Web site using Windows Azure. The Body Shop was particularly keen on Access Control as it would give them access to the Facebook accounts of their customers.

The other important component is AppFabric Caching which facilitates the caching of state information across a multi-server solution. This is a distributed in-memory cache that works with both Windows Azure and SQL

Azure, and transparently with .NET applications. AppFabric Caching is priced on a daily basis depending on the size of cache you use, starting at just over £27 a month for 128MB.

Working with AzureAs you would expect, Microsoft provides comprehensive support for those using its development tools. The Windows Azure SDK is a free download and includes Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio which allows you to build and debug Azure applications offline; the free Visual Web Developer 2010, if you do not have Visual Studio; and SDKs for Windows Azure itself and for Windows Azure AppFabric. You can also download SDKs for working with Azure from Java, PHP and Ruby, and Microsoft has announced the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS, Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games.

Then there is AzureRunMe which was created by Barne’s colleague, Rob Blackwell. This is a free bootstrap program that you upload to Windows Azure Compute for the purpose of running programs written in the likes of Java, Ruby or Python. It could, for example, be used to run a Tomcat-hosted Web application, a JBOSS application or a legacy C or C++ application.

And Microsoft is adding features to Windows Azure. Up and running now is Windows Azure Marketplace where you can buy

ConsumersBusinesses

Internet

Service BusBlob Access Control CachingTableQueue

Storage

Compute

Worker Role Web Role VM Role

AppFabric

SQL Azure

Windows Azure data centres

and sell both Azure-hosted applications and specialist datasets. This already includes over 500 applications covering a wide range of industries, and over 100 datasets ranging from average house prices by borough as supplied by the Greater London Authority, to historical daily observations from all WeatherBug tracking stations going back to 1993.

Coming soon is the Windows Azure Platform Appliance which gives you all you need to deploy Windows Azure in your own data centre. This is currently in Limited Production Release, but so far Dell, eBay, Fujitsu and Hewlett Packard have stated their intention to offer cloud services based on Azure.

However the immediate benefit for many companies, and particularly Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), is the ability to take an existing application and deploy it to Azure. This can be a relatively painless exercise and bring immediate benefits in terms of extending the reach of their software to clients who have not been prepared to make the capital investment required for more traditional deployments.

With this in mind, Barnes’ company has been running three-day Acceleration Labs, bringing together three or four non-competing ISVs with the aim of getting their application up and running in Azure by the time they finish. So far they have put 25 to 30 ISVs through this process, and Barnes is claiming a 100 per cent success rate. He admits, “That’s perhaps not something that on Day Four you’d want to put out to a customer, but you can go into the boardroom on Monday morning and state that, after three days, you now have your application running on the Windows Azure platform.”

Barnes adds, “We are seeing a bit of the old 1980s IBM effect here. If you’re betting your business on a cloud model then you want to put the responsibility for delivering it on someone you trust, and people can see the level of investment that’s going into Windows Azure.”

The various components that make up the Windows Azure platform.

Find out more...

Dot Net Solutions is at www.dotnetsolutions.co.uktwo10 degrees is at www.two10degrees.comAzureRunMe is at http://github.com/ RobBlackwell/AzureRunMeFind out what Grey Matter can offer at www.greymatter.com/mcm/azure-product-pageFor more on Azure see www.microsoft.com/windowsazure and www.globalfoundationservices.com

Microsoft is currently offering 90 days free trial of a Small Windows Azure instance with 1GB SQL Azure database.

i


Cloud Computing

Better by design

Design software used to imply paper-based documents pretty

exclusively. Whether it was desktop publishing or the photos and illustrations used to brighten the pages, the finished document was likely to end up in print. While this is a still an important medium, design for eBooks, video or the Web is now just as important and many applications can handle more than one type of output.

Here we look at the most impressive applications for print, video, photos, illustration and the Web. Although this market is dominated by Adobe, which made its name with products like Photoshop, Premiere and InDesign, there are other well-known players such as Quark, Corel, Pinnacle and even Microsoft.

Print publishingDespite many predictions of a screen-based society, a vast amount of information is still published on paper. Desktop publishing (DTP) applications are ideal for putting together anything more complicated than the internal report which can be knocked up in Microsoft Word. These are essentially assembly tools, taking words, graphics and photos and laying them out on a page.

Having said that they’re largely about designing for paper, most DTP programs can also be used to repurpose material, allowing you to use the same content and design for electronic distribution on DVD or on the Web.

Adobe’s InDesign desktop publishing tool superseded PageMaker and was created as a

direct competitor to QuarkXPress. In many publishing houses, Adobe has usurped its rival by pushing the tight and increasing integration between Adobe InDesign CS5.5 and the other Adobe tools found in the CS5.5 suite.

InDesign 5.5 adds extra features for eBook publishing and can create for Flash or HTML5 (important if you’re designing for iPhone or iPad). Different sizes of page can be created in the same document and there’s extensive support for long documents (cross-referencing, conditional text, bullets and numbering). It also includes strong typographical control, thanks to

Adobe’s historical strength in font design and formatting.

Often dismissed as too basic, Microsoft Publisher 2010 has many of the features needed to produce day-to-day documents in small

and home offices. This version is the first to incorporate the Ribbon interface, bringing it into line with the other members of the Office suite.

The Ribbon doesn’t exactly suit a desktop publisher, where a toolbox is often more convenient, and some odd changes have been made, like removing the possibility of scanning an image directly into a Publisher page. Even so, the program is generally easy to use and includes direct PDF, HTML and XPS creation, as well as integrating well with contact lists from Excel, Outlook and Word for mail merging.

Object alignment is much easier, with guide lines popping up to show when horizontal or vertical edges align. Typographical support has also been improved, with OpenType fonts now supporting alternate character shapes, true small caps and ligatures.

The longest lasting professional page design software is QuarkXpress, now on version 9. It started as a Mac-only product but has been cross-platform for many years. As well as providing output to print up to broadsheet and

What we useHere on HardCopy our art editor Jason Stanley is usually to be found buried in Adobe CS5.5 Design Premium, using InDesign to design the magazine itself, and both Dreamweaver and Fireworks on our Web sites. Jason also uses Photoshop and Illustrator extensively, and Adobe Flash to create online promotions. In the past we did use QuarkXpress together with Photoshop extensively, but the integration offered by the Adobe CS suite prompted us to switch.

Microsoft Publisher is a surprisingly sophisticated desktop publishing tool for use at home

and in a small office, and remains easy to use.

Whether designing for page or screen, using the right application saves

time and effort. Simon Williams looks at the leading contenders.


Design & Media

SIMONWILLIAMS

Simons Williams has been

a technology journalist for

over 25 years, writing for

many leading magazines

and Web sites. He also

writes and tutors poetry

and runs monthly open

mic sessions in pubs.

(Photo: Amy Boswood)

[email protected]

>>


Design & Media

beyond, it now supports the ePub ebook format, Blio rich media eReader and iPad through the free App Studio add-on.

Particular strengths of QuarkXPress include typographical controls, comprehensive shaped text-wrap tools, image grids, easy cloning and linking of page elements and a separate story editor to help modify text in complex layouts. Conditional styles make it easy to repeat formatting rules, such as changing the font or size of the first word in stories throughout a publication.

Others to consider include Adobe FrameMaker, PageStream, and Serif PagePlus.

Video productionEditing film or video electronically is a key part of film, TV and corporate presentation production alike. Video editors import unedited video clips of all lengths and present them on a time line or storyboard, showing separate lines for video clips, titles, sound tracks and stills. Combining all these elements creates the finished video which can typically be output in a variety of formats and to DVD, CD or directly online to services like YouTube.

Probably the best-known of all video editors, Adobe Premiere CS5.5 is available in two distinct versions: Professional and Elements. The Elements product is designed primarily for home use, while the Professional version extends through semi-professional and into the professional market.

The big improvement in version 5.5 is the introduction

of the native 64-bit Mercury playback engine. Using this tool gives much smoother playback while editing, without the need for so much separate rendering.

It’s now much easier to switch between Premiere Pro and other systems, such as Final Cut Pro or Avid software, which may be in use on a collaborative project. As well as being able to use the keyboard shortcuts of either of these video editors, you can also move video to and from Premiere Pro using an XML format as a go-between.

Aimed at the enthusiast and semi-pro video market, Pinnacle Studio HD 15 is a video editor with many of the same core features as Premiere Elements, for which it is a direct competitor. Pinnacle is a subsidiary of Avid, one of the main providers of professional video editing software for TV and film.

The program is aimed at video enthusiasts

to help in the editing and distributing video on DVD and CD, and for uploading to the YouTube Web site. It has a wider range of supported formats than some higher-end products, reflecting the range of different platforms in the consumer video market.

The new features in version 15 include archival, so you can save all the files used in a particular video project together in one place. This could be to an internal or external hard drive, DVD or memory stick, or an online storage service.

Aimed at the same general market as Pinnacle Studio, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 Ultimate is a video editor for the enthusiast. It is designed to cope with a wider array of uses than some of the mainstream professional applications out there, though not at such exacting levels.

VideoStudio Pro X4 Ultimate adds a couple of interesting features to its set in the latest version. It now handles stop-motion animation, so you can shoot videos frame by frame, and handle time lapse easily, either by removing frames from a video or by combining a number of stills to make a movie. The package includes proDAD Mercalli SE image stabilisation and Boris Grafitti 5.3, which helps create all kinds of sophisticated titles.

Others to consider are Avid itself, and Apple’s Final Cut Pro. There is also Camtasia Studio from TechSmith which lets you record and edit what appears on the screen of your PC for training or presentation purposes. It can export to a wide range of formats including H.264/MPEG-4, MP4, SWF, WMV and MOV, and comes with presets for YouTube and devices like the iPhone or iPad.

Pinnacle Studio HD offers a cleanly designed screen, ideal for video editing, with a timeline

at the bottom, preview above and to the right, and a tools panel to the left.

By combining different photos of the same subject, you can use Adobe Photoshop

to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image which looks very vital.

>>


Design & Media

Photo enhancementThe increasing use of photographs in all forms of media has boosted the importance of photo editing software, so it is one of the key tools in a designer’s kit. From the basic ability to resize and crop images, modern tools can often take the place of camera settings to enhance or apply effects to photos. They can be stitched together to make panoramas and objects can be removed by ‘airbrushing’.

More recently, the ability to edit RAW photos, which take data directly from a camera’s sensor without applying any compression or other modifications, has made the digital darkroom a reality.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the best known of all photo editing applications, so ubiquitous that the verb ‘to Photoshop’ is now listed in some dictionaries. Version CS5 includes several new features designed to speed up treatment of photos. Tools like automatic lens correction can use an image’s EXIF information to automatically correct for distortions like chromatic aberration and vignetting. Drawing a straight line over a photo and snapping the photo to the line corrects a crooked image in one move.

Other features, like Content-Aware Fill can remove unwanted objects, like signage and utility cables from photos in a few swipes of a brush, and knockouts are now much easier to set up and adjust, even when dealing with fine detail, such as hair.

Although ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6 is a budget application in comparison, it still shares some similar tools. Both can work with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, which PhotoStudio creates by combining multiple shots of the same subject, bracketed with different exposures.

It also has a software engine which can intelligently remove noise from images taken in

low light. Photo noise can be a considerable problem with less expensive cameras and at lower ISO levels. Like Photoshop, PhotoStudio 6 supports RAW camera formats, so it can work directly with sensor images.

PaintShop Pro used to be a rival to Photoshop and although more recently it has fallen behind, Corel has continued to develop the application. With PaintShop Pro X4 you have an economical but well featured photo editing tool. Like the other two, it supports RAW images and can create HDR shots with vibrant or accentuated colours.

It can also achieve selective brightening of parts of an image and combine similar images to create blends with the best elements of each image combined into one. If you’ve seen those funky cityscape shots, where everything looks like tiny models, you can also simulate the effect of a tilt-shift lens, to achieve this.

The new version also enables you to add adjustment layers to images, allowing you to experiment with changes and effects without altering the original image.

Other applications to consider in this field are GIMP

<<

(the GNU Image Manipulation System), Serif’s PhotoPlus X5 and Photoscape.

Illustration softwareDrawing or illustration software is different from photo editing software in several respects. The main one is that photos are raster graphics, defined by the colours of the rows of pixels that make them up, while drawings are vectors, controlled by the coordinates of their nodes and the equations of the lines that connect them. Vector images can be resized to any level, without affecting their sharpness – they never pixellate.

Drawings are more often created from scratch within an illustration program and are usually used by designers who have artistic training. Illustration applications are often used with graphics tablets, which provide more natural interaction than using a mouse.

Originally a partner to Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, now in version CS5, has been rather overshadowed by its tearaway sibling. The program enables smooth curves to be drawn with mouse or stylus and can simulate various natural media, such as bristle brushes.

It can cope just as well with perspective drawing, providing grids for 1, 2 or 3 point linear perspective. The Blob Brush can be used to draw areas with a single vector outline in the same way you might paint a raster area in a photo editing program. With multi-

Designing in 3DDesigning in 3D is a good deal more complex than designing in 2D as it involves a combination of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and rendering software, but it has major applications in creating objects for games and film.

Creating compound 3D models depends on being able to manipulate standard shapes, such as spheres and cubes, and being able to create new ones from scratch. New shapes can be generated using a virtual lathe to spin 2D shapes, or a mesh to model shapes from a series of linked triangles.

Once the basic model has been created, its surface can be smoothed, painted and texture mapped to make it appear more real. Models can then be laid out to build up a scene for a fixed image, or fed into a games engine for animation. Computer Generated Images (CGI) are used in film, video and TV, for both feature and advertising content.

The main commercial 3D modelling tools come from companies like Autodesk, originally known for AutoCAD but more recently the creator of the Maya 3D design and animation suite. Autodesk has several related tools such as Softimage and 3ds Max.

In a different area, specifically to help modelling landscapes, Bryce 7 is both easy to control and capable of producing very naturalistic or extravagant fantasy landscapes. A series of plug-ins for adding people and specialist characteristics to Bryce landscapes are available. Originally from the stable of Kai Krause and available only on the Mac, it’s now supported on both Mac and PC.

If you want to try 3D modelling before making what can be a substantial investment, there are many freeware offerings that are worth having a look at. For example, Wings 3D describes itself as an advanced sub-division modeller and is used by some professional 3D designers as a handy scratchpad. A list of 25 freeware 3D modelling programs can be found at www.hongkiat.com/blog/25-free-3d-modelling-applications-you-should-not-miss/.

Borrowing a feature from Corel Painter, CorelDraw X5 offers

artistic brushes which mimic the use of natural paint media

in a vector environment.


Design & Media

platform design becoming more and more important, drawings produced in Adobe Illustrator CS5 are resolution-independent and will scale correctly to any screen size.

Perhaps better known than Illustrator, at least in the Windows world, is CorelDraw. Now CorelDraw X5, the program includes a new colour-management engine for better colour matching across different media, and new Web graphic design tools which make it easier to put clip-art together quickly.

You can fix the radii of curved corners on objects, so that resizing them doesn’t disturb the corners. The PowerTrace tool, which converts raster images to fully-scalable vectors, has been improved again and creates more accurate reproductions.

Sold as a suite, CorelDraw includes copies of Photo-Paint, PowerTrace, Capture and Connect, so providing a pretty comprehensive set of design tools in the one package. The Premium version includes VideoStudio Pro, adding video to still image production; and SWiSH Max for Flash animation.

If you need to create drawings for business, such as floor plans, flow charts or tree diagrams, you may find a purpose-made tool like SmartDraw more convenient. This vector-based application relies on a wide selection of pre-configured templates which you can quickly adapt to your needs, while retaining a professional look and feel.

SmartDraw 2012 has a completely redesigned project management tool which enables you to squeeze a complete chart down to a single page and to colour code tasks automatically, to show when they’ve run late. Other freshly designed templates include those for hubs, meetings, timelines and organisational charts.

Others to consider include Corel Painter 12, Microsoft Visio, OpenOffice.org Draw and Xara Xtreme.

Targeting the WebDesigning Web sites is very big business, but there are several different approaches, from hand-coding of HTML and CSS to big database tools which are all about displaying goods online. In between these are Web design tools which work much more like DTP programs. These applications aim to make Web design a matter of choosing and positioning elements on a page, with all the hand code kept behind the scenes. Many can handle simple e-commerce, too, in the form of shopping trolleys and access to PayPal and credit card payments.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 is well suited to targeting the growing range of devices capable of displaying Web content. Not only does it generate and support HTML5 and CSS3, but it can display the same screen in several sizes simultaneously on a PC so you can compare how they all look.

The program also incorporates the PhoneGap framework, so you can package any application you design ready for the App Store or Android Marketplace. As with InDesign, Dreamweaver is well integrated with other Adobe applications, though in this case it’s Flash (see panel), Fireworks and Photoshop.

Dreamweaver is a good tool for hand

coding, as well as for designing from the front. The program can help with coding, providing code hints for HTML, JavaScript, Ajax and PHP.

Microsoft has come a bit late to the Web design party and Expression Studio 4 Web Professional is a little light in feature terms by comparison. However it does have good standards support and can handle HTML, PHP, XML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, Ajax, Flash and (of course) Microsoft’s Flash rival, Silverlight. The Studio 4 Web package is a suite that comprises the Expression Web site designer, Expression Encoder for Silverlight, and the vector drawing editor Expression Design.

Serif WebPlus X5 is perhaps a surprising inclusion in this company but can be a very sound choice for individuals and smaller companies who want to create a presence on the Web with very little outlay. WebPlus X5 works very much as the same company’s DTP program, PagePlus X5, does for paper documents. Unless you really want to get down and dirty, you never need to see any HTML in the complete design and running of your Web site. Version X5 includes good e-commerce integration together with the ability to set up blogs, forums and online booking, and to display Google Maps and YouTube videos within pages. You can also show slideshows and live Twitter feeds.

Other applications to consider include MR SITE Takeaway, NetObjects Fusion XII and Web Studio 5.

Find out more...

i

Adobe software at www.greymatter.com/adobe.Microsoft Publisher 2010 at www.greymatter.com/p537381.QuarkXPress 9 at www.greymatter.com/p744543.Pinnacle Studio HD V15 at www.greymatter.com/p695061.Camtasia Studio at www.greymatter.com/p517596.Corel software at www.greymatter.com/corel.ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6 at www.greymatter.com/p315604.SmartDraw 2012 at www.greymatter.com/p835159.Microsoft Expression Studio 4 at www.greymatter.com/p462423.Serif WebPlus X5 at www.greymatter.com/p557030.Autodesk Maya at www.autodesk.com.

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Aobe FlashThere are a number of technologies involved in handling designs for electronic distribution, whether for phone, tablet or Web. Adobe’s Flash has arguably been the most important for the last several years.

Flash is a multimedia platform, designed to bring animation, video and interactivity to Web pages. It can be used to animate vector and raster images, and is the basis for many online advertisements and a wide selection of simple games. The Flash Player is provided free by Adobe with Adobe Reader and has well over 100 million installations.

The best-known application for building Flash materials is Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5. This is a fully fledged creation tool for Web animation and interactive applications. It can be bought separately, but is also included in all versions of Creative Suite except Design Standard.

Flash Professional uses advanced animation techniques, such as inverse kinematics, tweening and motion properties like spring and bounce, to help realise complex scenes. It also enables interaction, so customers for Flash-created projects can exercise comprehensive control over object elements.

Flash is available for PC, Mac and a wide variety of portable devices, including smartphones. Flash file formats are supported by several third-party applications, including KToon and SwiSH Max 4. TechSmith’s screen casting tool, Camtasia, used to create screen-based tutorials, producing Flash-compatible files. Its rival, Screencam, produces Shockwave Flash (SWF) files by default.

The importance of Flash may have peaked as Apple has stopped supporting its use on devices running iOS, which means iPhone, iPad and iPod. While this is only a small proportion of available devices, HTML5 is also gaining momentum and may well be the platform of choice for the next generation of mobile devices, whether or not they can run Flash.

Protecting your data is of paramount importance. Kay Ewbank

checks out your backup options in the modern world.

Data is one of the most valuable assets a company owns, so it’s important to

keep it safe and well backed up. This used to involve a few tape drives scattered around the server room, but there are now many more choices available, and the task of managing data backups is in consequence itself more complicated. The important thing is to ensure all your data is backed up in a fashion that is appropriate to the requirements, and that your backup regime is manageable and auditable. The problem lies in knowing and being able to prove that you’ve backed up all the important files, that they’re stored securely, and that the backups could actually be restored if ever you needed them.

The software covered in this guide will help you manage your storage management, but you still need to decide on the physical location of your backups. Many companies choose to use hybrid backup, where data is backed up first onto disk, and then older or less important data is moved to cheaper tape storage. This technique is called Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). The important thing about HSM is that the files are still available to the end

user: if a user needs to access a file that has been moved to slower backup storage, they should be able to do so without needing to know where it is in the archive.

An increasingly popular alternative is cloud-based storage, and this too can be part of a HSM solution. Cloud-based storage gives you the security of off-site data backup, which may be a requirement for auditing or insurance purposes. It can also be less expensive, and avoids the trap of running out of space because you bought a backup device that turns out to be too small. The potential disadvantages of cloud-based storage are that your data is stored out of your physical control, and could quite possibly come under the jurisdiction of another country where the laws regarding data protection are different.

One feature that has recently become common is support for data deduplication. This is a technique whereby multiple data blocks that are identical are only stored once, with subsequent copies pointing back to the full copy. This can greatly reduce the space required as most data sets have large amounts of duplicate data.

The most important thing about storage management and backup software is that it’s easy to use, and that you use it. One day you will need to restore your data: make sure you’re ready for when that happens.

Symantec Backup ExecSymantec’s main storage backup product is Backup Exec, with its sister product Backup Exec System Recovery as an alternative if you want to be able to restore entire systems rather than individual drives, files or folders.

Backup Exec can be used to back up data stored on both physical and virtual machines, and Exec 2010 added deduplication options so you can make efficient use of the space. The software has an easy-to-use console, and the software integrates with other Symantec products allowing you to set up rules that trigger a backup on alerts generated elsewhere.

The most recent release has a plug-in for VMware so that you can monitor VMware backups from the vSphere or vCenter side, showing information such as backup timing and the sort of backups that were carried out.

You can backup to disk or tape, with the option of a rolling backup where data is first backed up to disk and then migrated to tape as it ages. You can also choose to store a copy of your data remotely in Symantec’s Online Storage for Backup Exec. This gives you access to off-site storage from the Backup Exec user interface.

If you want to go for a completely cloud-based system then you can use Symantec Backup Exec.cloud. This service automatically streams an encrypted copy of your designated data to Symantec’s data centres, and the service can be deployed on both desktops and servers, and used to protect Microsoft application data. The service is subscription-based so you only pay for

Storage management

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KAYEWBANK

Kay is a database consultant specialising in EIS, financial analysis and GIS systems. While much of her work is based in London, being a consultant gives her the freedom to sail, travel and help out as a part-time sheep farmer.

kaye@ hardcopymag.com

Configuring your backup devices from the home page of the Symantec Backup Exec console.


Systems

the storage you use. There are no per-user licence fees.

Backup Exec has good support for Microsoft applications such as Exchange and SQL Server. You can set up rules, for example, to say which data or mailboxes should be archived, and whether they should be deleted from their original location. You can also set retention policies to say how long data should be kept in the archive. One nice new feature in the latest release is an Outlook plug-in that lets users see their archived emails directly from within Outlook, so avoiding the need for end

users having to search for archived emails outside their familiar applications.

CA ARCserve BackupCA ARCserve is part of the large ARCserve family of products that covers all aspects of system management on a variety of platforms. ARCserve Backup is available in an all-inclusive version that can be used to protect both physical and virtual file servers, email servers, database servers and application servers. Alternatively, versions are available specifically by operating system, for file servers, or for

application servers. Whatever machines you’re managing are shown in a single console, regardless of their physical location.

ARCserve Backup works with two other members of the family to provide backup of data from branch offices. ARCserve D2D can be used to back up to disk incrementally; ARCserve Replication can be used to replicate Windows, Linux and UNIX data from remote offices to a central location from where you can use ARCserve Backup or ARCserve D2D to take backups from the central Replica server.

ARCserve lets you choose the best location for your data so you can work with integrated disk, tape and cloud storage. There is also ARCserve D2D On Demand, the result of a partnership between Microsoft and CA which combines an on-premise solution with Windows Azure for added security and flexibility.

Backing up applications such as SQL databases or email servers can be tricky because of open files, but ARCserve has good support for such applications with protection agents for all the big-name SQL databases, SAP, Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics. If you’re backing up virtualised servers, ARCserve can be used with VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.

The management console in ARCserve is clear and easy to use both day-to-day and if there’s a problem. Any potential problems are highlighted and you’re offered choices as to how to put things right. If something goes wrong and you need to recover a particular server, ARCserve suggests the best ways to work to get you up and running. ARCserve’s reporting is one of its strong points, with a good range of graphs and pie charts showing you at a glance data such as storage use, deduplication information and historical data.

NovaStor NovaBackupNovaBackup is designed to be easy to use, offering a browser-based interface from which you can manage a variety of clients. Alternatively, you can control the software locally from the clients. Either way, you view your environment from a dashboard that shows you the status of all the devices you’ve defined as connected. If you want to carry out an action such as scheduling a backup, you use one of NovaBackup’s wizards.

NovaBackup comes in a number of versions depending on the type of machine you want to back up, with options ranging from PC and workstation backup to data centres with LAN, SAN, NAS and Virtual Server environments. Licensing in a virtualised environment is by physical server

Backing up virtual machines

Some of the products covered here offer backup options for virtual machines, but in general these are additions to software that existed before virtualisation became popular. Here we look at two products that were specifically created for virtual machines.

Veeam Backup & Replication was created specifically for VMware ESX virtual machines. The software runs under vSphere and can be used to take image level backups of complete ESXi virtual machines.

One of the advantages it offers is the way it uses incremental backup to reduce the time taken for creating backup images. A number of products do offer this, but the way Veeam does it is quite clever. First a full backup is taken, after which incremental backups are used. Veeam then automatically writes the incremental changes into the existing backup file to create a new ‘synthetic’ full backup. You still get the benefit of incremental backups because it also generates a reversed incremental rollback file which contains the data from the full backup that’s just been overwritten. So you get the advantage of being able to go to the most recent file and get a full backup, but earlier data is still available if you need it.

While the software does back up entire VMs, you can also use it to restore individual objects at the file system or application level. You also get the choice of backing up on-site or off-site.

One advantage of Veeam is that all backups are automatically verified, so hopefully avoiding the problem of believing your backups work right up to the moment you need to get the data back. To do this Veeam makes use of the fact it is running in a virtual environment. Each time you take a backup, Veeam automatically creates a virtual machine in your own environment and runs that virtual machine from the backup file that’s just been created. The testing process starts the virtual machine and its operating system, and makes sure everything is working. The virtual machine that it creates is isolated from all your production and test machines, so the only drawbacks of this scheme are the overheads of having one more virtual machine running for the duration needed for a successful start-up.

Quest vRanger Pro is also designed specifically for VMware, including ESXi, and can be used to back up a whole virtual machine, an individual file or anything in between. You can also choose to back up just the changed information to make the process less resource hungry. Backups can be taken while the source machine is still running, and you can use multiple ESX hosts for simultaneous jobs, so minimizing the time spent backing up your systems. The product comes in two versions: the basic vRanger lets you back up and restore your files, objects and applications; vRanger Pro adds support for VMware replication to local or remote sites.

One advantage of vRanger Pro is that you can mix the type of backup you use to make best use of the licensing scheme. You can have some servers licensed for backup and replication, while less important servers are configured to be backed up but not replicated. This mix can still be managed from the one console, so you don’t lose track of what you’re managing but don’t waste cash either.

You can run backups from CIFS, NFS, FTP, and SFTP repositories, and choose whether or not to compress to save space. Backups can be run in real time, or scheduled to run under various conditions such as once every so many days, or when the amount of data to be backed up reaches a particular size. Quest vRanger Pro gives you the option of how you choose to make incremental backups. VMware does offer Change Block Tracking to work out which data has changed, but vRanger extends this to Active Block Mapping. Change Block Tracking is used to tell vRanger which data blocks have been changed, but this can waste time backing up deleted data. Active Block Mapping identifies and skips deleted and zeroed data blocks to save time and space.

One attractive feature of vRanger Pro is a catalogue of all the images in your backup repository so you can find the version you want more easily. You can search for specific files for restoration and right-click to select them for recovery.

The latest version of vRanger Pro has a Fibre restore feature that lets you send data over a Storage Area Network (SAN) Fibre Channel instead of clogging up your normal network with the extra traffic. This allows you to send several data protection streams at once without bringing the entire network to a standstill.

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Systems

Find out more...

iSymantec Backup Exec 2010 R3 at www.greymatter.com/p311220CA ARCserve Backup at www.greymatter.com/p264918NovaStor NovaBackup at www.greymatter.com/p781758Acronis Backup & Recovery Advanced Server at www.greymatter.com/p764731Veeam Backup & Replication at www.greymatter.com/p713094Quest vRanger Pro at www.greymatter.com/p709000

rather than virtual machine.You can set up backups for specific files

and folders, and in addition to working with file servers and PCs you can also use the software to back up SQL Server, Exchange and VMware virtual machines. The latest version of NovaBackup has support for differential backup, so you can back up only the data that has changed since the last time the backup was run, so greatly reducing the amount of time taken.

The options you get for storing your data ranges from DVD drives through standard disk drives and tapes to online storage across the Internet. There’s a wizard to help you select which disks to include in the backup, the backups can be set to run on a time schedule, and you can define schedules and then apply them to a set of machines. Applications such as SQL Server and Exchange Server can be backed up while users continue to access the databases or send and receive emails.

If you need to restore the data, you can choose the version to restore using a Time Slider view that essentially offers you a single

restorable file set without the need to select the backup source device. Using the Slider, files are listed based on the range of time the backup was run. You can choose to restore specific files,

and you have the choice of overwriting existing files or restoring to an alternative location.

In addition to offering online backup to single companies, NovaStor has an option for service providers. NovaBackup xSP is designed to give service providers, system integrators, resellers and other IT companies the means to offer customers backup services such as cloud backup. As a result, services such as Fasthosts’s Online Backup can offer smaller companies a secure and

easy way to use online storage for a low monthly fee, giving customers the ease of use of NovaBackup without the overheads.

AcronisThe Acronis range comes in versions for server, small business server and workstation. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 offers both disk imaging and data backup. The software works with both Windows and Linux, and with physical and virtual machines. The virtual machines can be running on VMware vSphere, ESX or ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or Parallels Server 4

Bare Metal. All the versions use a management console to give you control for creating and running backup policies and specific backups, as well as restoring data and managing backup devices. If you want to store your data online there’s a separate version in Acronis Backup & Recovery Online which is fully integrated with the other products and is managed from the same console as Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.

The software can be used to create an image of the hard disk of a machine, including the operating system, applications, user settings and all data. You then use this if ever you experience a major crash to restore the entire machine. Alternatively, you can back up individual file types for particular applications, or choose to exclude particular file types to concentrate on business data. You can choose to use incremental and differential backups to reduce the time and space taken to carry out a backup, and block-level deduplication to create smaller backups.

If you need to restore specific data, you can view the files to locate the data you want. Acronis comes with integrated support for applications such as Exchange and SQL Server, allowing you to back up open files and if necessary restore down to individual email or record level.

Acronis has good support for virtual machines and, like NovaBackup, offers reasonable licence arrangements in such environments. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Virtual Edition supports an unlimited number of migrations to and from one physical host, and you can use a single host-based agent for VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to manage all the virtual machines on a host at once.

Scheduling a backup from the Acronis Backup & Recovery management console.

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Scheduling a backup using NovaBackup’s Backup Wizard.


Systems

Straight talkingTim Anderson discusses the implications of Microsoft’s

bold move towards ‘cloud plus device’.

Microsoft BUILD was the company’s most interesting conference for years.

Windows 8 is not only a new version of Windows, but brings a radically different user interface and embraces a different model of computing based on cloud plus touch-controlled devices. It also promises to be a safe environment in which applications are sandboxed and communicate with each other only through limited and controllable contracts, while getting their data from cloud services.

If Microsoft manages to shift its customers to this new form of Windows it will be an

extraordinary achievement. The question though is whether this revolutionary approach will work. Metro looks nice; but we have work to do, and for most of Microsoft’s customers that means running desktop Windows applications.

Fortunately Windows 8 also supports traditional desktop Windows. But if we will be spending all our time in desktop Windows, then what is the point of Metro?

The answer is that Microsoft is trying to break out of a tight spot. Windows is imprisoned by its legacy; it will never be truly secure or truly touch-friendly because it was

designed before either of those things mattered. Apple’s iOS has shown that there is an alternative, based on a locked-down operating system, a curated app store, touch control that works, and overall design excellence. Windows is slowly but surely losing market share to the iPad and other tablets, and the primary intent of Windows 8 is to recover that lost ground.

At the same time, everything that is in Windows 7 is still there in Windows 8, with the possible exception of the old Start menu. If you start up a desktop app, it runs in the desktop environment. There are even two versions of Internet Explorer 10, a metro-style version which runs full-screen and in which plug-ins such as Flash and even Silverlight are disallowed, and a desktop version which runs in a resizable window just like IE9.

By delivering both Metro and desktop Windows in one operating system, Microsoft hopes to keep faith with its legacy while also transitioning to a new model that could in time dominate client computing.

The obvious difficulty is that if Windows 8 machines run full-fat Windows alongside Metro, then users will need suitably powerful hardware as well as keyboard and pen or mouse in order to operate desktop Windows applications. That will make Windows 8 machines expensive: the Samsung tablet handed out to conference delegates, complete with Bluetooth keyboard, would likely cost over £1,000.

And what is the point of making Metro secure when users can easily pop into desktop Windows and bypass all its protection?

Microsoft’s iPad alternativeThe answer (though this was not clearly articulated at BUILD) is that Windows 8 on ARM, not on x86, will be Microsoft’s iPad competitor. ARM systems on a chip (SoCs) are the industry

Inside Windows Server 8

Windows 8 client so thoroughly dominated proceedings at BUILD that grabbing attention for Server 8 was difficult. However I was fortunate to attend a press workshop the previous week, where Server 8 was presented in detail. It is a huge release, and while Windows 8 client is something of a journey into the unknown, the improvements in Server 8 are solid progress which system administrators will enjoy. Here are a few of the main points:lServer Core, which lacks the Windows GUI, becomes the preferred deployment. Lead architect Jeffrey Snover told us,

“We don’t want management GUIs to run on servers – that’s a bad thing.”lMoving between Server Core and the full GUI is done by adding and removing features, and is no longer irreversible.lPowerShell is greatly expanded with over 2,300 cmdlets that work locally or remotely. Everything can be scripted.lServer Manager has been redone, with a slick new design and the ability to manage multiple servers. The intention is

that you run this remotely.lHyper-V virtualisation is massively improved. A guest can have up to 32 virtual CPUs and 512GB of memory. Hyper-V

Replica means anyone with two Hyper-V hosts can have a fail-safe virtual machine. Live migration also works between any two Hyper-V hosts.

lStorage in Server 8 is changing. Storage spaces let you maintain a pool of drives with RAID-like resiliency, simply adding and removing drives as needed. Disk volumes on storage pools can be thinly provisioned, so that you can create huge virtual drives and add physical backing only when and if it is needed.

lDe-duplication is built into Server 8, making storage of files with large amounts of duplicate content (such as gold images for virtual machines) much more efficient.

lVDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) support has been redone with new tools that make it easier to setup and configure.lServer 8 is a better operating system for multiple tenants with strong isolation and throttling of shared resources in

both Hyper-V and the IIS Web server.Server 8 is currently a developer preview and there are rough spots in this initial release, especially in the GUI tools. It

does look promising though, and will further speed progress towards running virtual servers as the norm for businesses of any size. Better virtualisation is also great for developers, who can easily develop and test multi-tier applications.


Back End

Straight talking


Back End

standard for tablets and enable low power use and relatively high performance.

Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky said in his keynote that “the demos that we’re showing you today are equally at home on ARM and on X86.” Despite that, there will be important differences. The first is that existing Windows applications will need to be recompiled to run on ARM. The second is that Microsoft may be intending to lock down Windows on ARM to a greater extent than on x86. There were no BUILD sessions on recompiling for ARM, and Microsoft is not encouraging this; we even heard that the Windows 8 online Store might be the only way to install apps on ARM, and that they will all be Metro apps.

If Microsoft follows through with this, then Windows 8 ARM tablets will be price-competitive with Android and iPad, and will not require keyboard and mouse or pen, because none of the old applications which require this will be present.

However this also implies that the only reason to buy a Windows 8 ARM tablet will be to run Metro apps, of which none currently exist beyond a few samples. This means that Microsoft will be keen to promote Metro app

development to populate the store for the launch, and of course we heard plenty about Metro-style development at BUILD. Every Windows 8 machine will have Metro, ensuring the ubiquity of the platform.

One point of particular uncertainty is what will happen to Microsoft Office on ARM. It seems implausible that Office will be ported to Metro in time, though we may see efforts to

make the product more touch-friendly in the desktop environment.

Incidentally, desktop Windows does exist on ARM: we saw this in the ARM samples on display. Metro is not yet a complete operating system and access to desktop Windows is necessary for some tasks, such as access to the full control panel. It would not surprise me though if Microsoft has in mind to remove desktop Windows from a future version running on ARM.

Personally I am looking forward to Windows 8 tablets. They will solve the tricky problem business travellers face: do you pack the iPad with its convenience, instant-on and

long battery life, or a Windows laptop with the applications you need, or both? If Microsoft do it right, a Windows 8 tablet will be the ideal combination, though I will be looking for x86 and its compatibility rather than ARM.

So it is obvious that Microsoft’s new direction is risky. Metro will be a hard sell to businesses, many of whom will look at Windows 8, see little change in the part of Windows that they actually use, and stick with Windows 7. It took Microsoft ten years to displace Windows XP, and I foresee an equally long life for Windows 7.

As for the consumer market, even if its OEM partners deliver attractive Windows 8 tablets at a competitive price, Microsoft will not find it easy to displace iPad or Android.

Much depends on the quality of the Metro apps in the store when Windows 8 tablets start appearing in, I presume, autumn 2012. That in turn depends on developers, which is why Microsoft was happy to give them shiny new machines at BUILD.

Whether Windows 8 Metro succeeds or fails is uncertain, but the one thing beyond doubt is that client computing is changing radically and that Windows 7 is in one sense the last of its line.

“Windows is slowly but surely losing market share”

…and another thing

Jon Honeyball ponders the implications of Apple’s

lock-down of the Mac App Store, and how far

Microsoft might follow Apple’s example.


Back End

Frankly, this is fantastic news for users. Apple’s Mac Store has followed on from the huge success of the iOS AppStore by allowing for extremely simple application purchase, download and installation. It is normally just a one-click operation, and really couldn’t be simpler. Not only does this work well for small utilities as well as larger apps, it has worked just fine for the huge upgrade from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion OS versions too.

For a user, it is a win-win. Simplicity of purchase and install, and then a one-stop shop for upgrades too. Better still, almost every app in the AppStore allows you to install onto multiple machines provided they are owned by you and logged in with the same user account. Any developer will understand just how much this has changed the landscape for application development on that platform.

Now one key differentiator for the iOS AppStore was that it only allowed full walled-garden digitally signed applications from the beginning, with no exceptions. The Apple desktop operating system, OSX, is different. Just as with Windows, you can build your app and sell it with no digital certification required. With the recent arrival of the Mac OSX AppStore, it still allowed for applications which did not follow the sandboxing rules. But that changes shortly.

The deadline from Apple is interesting – it was originally going to be November 2011, so it has been delayed. Doubtless this was a pragmatic decision based upon the uptake from the community. What will the sandboxing limit? Well, you can kiss goodbye to inter-application scripting and interactions, and you won’t get system-wide file system access either. In a Windows context, this might mark the final death throes of OLE

Automation. It will be interesting to see how Apple will handle the Automator scenario.

The question to be asked is this: how brave will Microsoft be with the Windows 8 platform? The 64-bit version of Windows 7 does not allow for the installation of unsigned drivers by default, but this does not extend to sandboxed and digitally signed applications. Rumours are circulating that Microsoft will be considerably more robust about this on Windows 8, especially on the ARM platform. With the ARM platform, there is no prior history of existing applications, of course, so the entire platform is starting from a blank sheet of paper. This makes it much easier to require and enforce tougher requirements for developers. Whether Microsoft will allow the same, or allow for a user-settable value of ‘only run sandboxed and digitally signed applications’, is something we will have to wait to see. Personally, I would happily enable such a setting on all of my day-to-day computers without hesitation. It would make them far more robust against malware attacks and all the other nasties which seem to consume much of our time on our computers at home and at work.

Even if Microsoft is its usual hand-wringingly slow and apologetically tardy self over such a matter, the writing is now clearly on the wall. The movement is simply inevitable. Application writers need to start thinking long and hard about how their applications will run in a new world order where operating systems will lock down applications in a much tougher walled-garden regime. It will not be enough to ensure that the code is clean enough to cross-compile onto ARM: we should expect a whole host of extra requirements for security, sandboxing and so forth. And also, quite likely, an inevitable shift in licensing away from the one-user/machine one-license world we have had for many years. Maybe we will get one user

The email that just landed in my inbox made me perk up and take notice.

From Apple Developer with a title of ‘Sandboxing and the Mac App Store’, the email goes on to say:

“Sandboxing your app is a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users’ systems.

As of 1 March 2012 all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing. Enabling the default sandbox environment is as simple as checking the Enable Entitlements checkbox in Xcode target settings, allowing you to begin sandboxing your app. If your app requires access to sandboxed system resources you will need to include justification for using those entitlements as part of the submission to the Mac App Store. Apps that are being re-engineered to be sandbox compatible may request additional temporary entitlements. These entitlements are granted on a short-term basis and will be phased out over time.”

This could not be clearer. As of 1 March 2012, any app sold through the Mac App Store must use sandboxing to protect itself and other code on the computer.

Demos that make your head spin

There was one demonstration at BUILD which made my head spin. Microsoft showed its forthcoming version of Hyper-V Server which can do a move from a local network to a cloud host. That’s clever enough, but is only the start. The move was of a virtual machine which was running at the time. And there were effectively no dropped packets – it just continued to work despite moving several thousand miles in the process. And there was obviously no shared-storage strung between the two hosts either.


account, multiple machines as in the iOS and OSX AppStores.

Or maybe it is time to look at innovative pricing and runtimes. For example, last night I had dinner with a group of senior developers from a well-known high-end systems management tools company. We talked at length about new ways to license their product, and I came up with the “give me access for an hour” model. This would allow for on-the-fly licensing for a restricted time period to use their tool. After which, it would simply stop working until “more money is put in the meter.”

For a tool that you might use only occasionally, maybe once every few months, this sort of innovative licensing becomes interesting. My fellow diners are going away to think about ways of implementation such a scheme, and what the functional value is of their tool on a per-hour runtime usage model, rather than a convention “buy N seats covering M IP addresses, plus an extra 20 per cent for a support contract”. Pay for play is really just around the corner for even mainstream applications, and I am not sure enough developers are thinking in a truly innovative way about where their future revenue streams will come from.

deliver a feature-complete Beta in January, followed by something around April, with completion fairly soon after that, then the clock is ticking at a quite furious rate.

That said, I would far rather Microsoft use every second up till its internal lock-down deadlines to make improvements rather than stick its head in the sand and pretend its customers don’t exist. A number of other well-known software companies could benefit from taking such a pro-actively open development process, even if some of it is inevitably marketing spin.

Is Microsoft listening?Microsoft is running a major blog all about the Windows 8 development process at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/ and it is getting a flood of responses from developers and other interested parties. Even better, they seem to be listening to the feedback and, to my surprise, acting on it. Why am I surprised? Well, Microsoft has traditionally been really rather inward looking when it comes to the development process. I know it routinely trots out the line that it listens to its customers, prioritises key features and so forth. But the reality is that much of that is simply validating what it was going to do anyway.

Nevertheless, it is somewhat fascinating to see how they are modifying and changing the user experience, especially for the Metro part of the desktop. It might be pertinent to ask that this is happening really rather late in the day. If Microsoft is aiming to Looks like Microsoft might actually be listening to what its users want of Windows 8.

Back End

Short Cuts is normally irreverent (OK, rude) in

its coverage of industry figures, but just this

once we’re being serious, as we remember one

of the undisputed giants of the IT business.

Short cuts

Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011


Memories are long in the Short Cuts office, stretching back to the 1970s and the birth of the microcomputer industry. Apple was

always a part of it, and, except for a disastrous period without him between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steve Jobs was always leading Apple from the front.

Given Apple’s shut-tight hardware policy today it might seem strange that they popularised the open-up-the-case, plug-in-what-you-like expansion bus slot with the Apple II, one of the most successful micros of the 8-bit, pre-PC age. One beneficiary of this was a small outfit called Microsoft, who plied a trade in Z80 second processor cards complete with CP/M operating system. This allowed users to run applications, such as the market-leading WordStar word processor, that Apple’s own OS didn’t support. However the Apple II turned out to be the end of the company’s ‘Garage’ phase, based on the engineering excellence of co-founder Steve Wozniak. From then on Jobs, no engineer but an intense product visionary, took the lead.

He had his epiphany during a 1979 visit to Xerox’s PARC development centre, and became the Guru of the GUI. Then the greatest industrial mid-race horse-switch of all time took place as IBM, until then the high priests of closed architectures (and regularly sued because of it), produced the expandable and clonable PC (complete with Microsoft OS), while Apple launched first the Lisa and then, in 1984, the Macintosh, with not an expansion slot in sight and a warning that unscrewing the case would invalidate the warranty.

Back End

It was a decision which would relegate Apple to niche player for the next 25 years, as IBM’s relaxed attitude to seeing others copy its design created the ‘PC Compatible’ industry which came to dominate desktop computing. The long-term winner wasn’t, however, IBM, but Microsoft, who eventually saw ‘PC Compatible’ replaced by ‘Windows Compatible’.

Steve, meanwhile, stuck to his guns, producing superior operating systems that only ran on Apple hardware, and superior hardware that didn’t have a lot of application software to run on it apart from a half-hearted version of Microsoft Office and a few heavyweight media and design tools. Eventually investors lost faith, and in 1985 replaced him with the man he’d hired to manage the company, ex-Pepsi executive John Scully. This left Jobs jobless and Apple with the worst of both worlds – a go-it-alone product line without Steve’s design flair and ability to inspire fanatic loyalty in colleagues and customers alike. The company came close to going bust.

Jobs returned in 1996, purchased along with his NeXT company by a desperate Apple. He’d spent his time at NeXT doing what he did best – whatever he wanted to – and Apple’s stockholders never again made the mistake of trying to make him do anything else. This was just as well, as during his NeXT period he’d stumbled accidentally into the entertainment business (he initially bought Pixar for

its IT systems, not Toy Story), and what he’d learned there helped to make Apple’s fortune.First though there was the desktop to sort out, as the Apple board let him launch the iMac with

Bondi Blue casing and no floppy disk drive, and replace the venerable Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP-derived OS X. Then Steve turned his gaze to the music industry, and they let him go ahead with the crazy idea that a computer manufacturer could take on the giants of consumer electronics in the fledgling portable MP3 player market. When he had the even crazier idea of taking on the giants of mobile telephony, they let him do it with a miniature tablet computer disguised as a phone, following it later with a full-size tablet that by then seemed to most people to be just like a phone made bigger.

For someone with a reputation for going it alone, Jobs turned out to be pretty good at getting key collaborators onside. His second-greatest coup was persuading a panicking, change-resistant record industry to let him sell individual songs for a flat rate of 99 cents each, turning the iPod into a one-stop music ecosystem (which shrewdly included iTunes for Windows).

His greatest, however, was persuading thousands of developers to produce apps for iOS and sell them through Apple’s Store on Apple’s terms, at prices nearer to songs on iTunes than shrink-wraps on software vendors’ shelves. Macs may have been short of applications, but Jobs made sure the iOS devices had the biggest range ever assembled, before most people who had one even realised they’d bought a computer.

Jobs’s legacy may turn out to be to have taken Apple’s mobile platform to the critical mass where it can remain a permanent, major market-share player alongside Android (and perhaps one other) in the cloud-connected appliance market – the only time a single-vendor consumer standard has ever achieved that (as Sony, producers of Betamax, know only too well). Or it might not, and Android may swamp iOS just as Windows did the Mac. Either way, no one person has driven the industry in quite the way that Steve Jobs did, and almost certainly no-one will again.

(Photo: Matthew Yohe)

Jobs’s greatest coup was getting thousands of developers to fill his iOS App Store with low-cost offerings, so turning the tables on Windows.

“For someone with a reputation for going

it alone, Jobs turned out to be pretty

good at getting key collaborators onside”

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