First Thoughts Regarding Windows 8

With all the hubbub around Microsoft's BUILD conference and the developer preview of Windows 8, I thought I'd grab a copy to check it out. This is what I found; it's going to be pretty short...

Installation

I downloaded a copy of Windows 8,^[1] created a new machine in VirtualBox, attached the downloaded ISO to the CD and booted the machine.^[2] It started the install OK and then hung part way through. After waiting awhile, I powered off the VM. On restart, it tried to do an install restart but this time give me a failure message. So I powered it down again and then back up. This time during the restart it showed me the partitions on the drive. I deleted all the previously created partitions and it finally ran through the install to the end. When it finished, it did the typical Windows reboot but hung during the reload. I turned the machine off, detached the ISO image from the CD and turned it back on. This time it booted just fine. It asked me a couple of standard questions, like user name and password and took me to a phone/tablet looking screen.

Cursor problems

At this point the cursor pretty much went wonky. Yes, that's a technical term. When moving the cursor from the host OS to the Windows 8 machine, the cursor would jump to an odd place and then jump back off the guest screen back to the host. It was pretty much unusable. I tried installing VirtualBox's guest additions. The installer asked all the startup questions but then stopped when I told it to begin the actual install saying it didn't support that version of Windows. I suppose that's not too surprising. As a last ditch effort, I moved the virtual screen off my large secondary screen to the laptop's smaller main screen and all of a sudden the cursor started working correctly. At this point I'm not sure if it's a problem with VirtualBox on the secondary screen or if it's a Windows 8 incompatibility or perhaps some of each. In any case, the cursor problem doesn't show up on the main screen and the mouse/keyboard capturing works as I'd expect; i.e. once the guest OS has control, you have to hit the Host button to get back out.

Operation

Once the cursor started working correctly, I played around with a bit. IE10 works pretty much like you'd expect a browser to although the UI is somewhat different in keeping with the Metro design. The biggest thing is the address bar is at the bottom of the screen. Other than that, it worked OK. Google returned search results. GMail showed me my mail. However, when I went to YouTube, it needed the Flash plug-in. I knew the Metro version of IE didn't support plug-ins, so I wasn't sure what would happen. But everything worked, sort of: clicking the link took me to Adobe's web site, downloading and installing worked just fine. Yet when I went back to YouTube, it still complained about no plug-in. I went to the desktop (one of the many tiles on the "start page"), clicked on the IE icon there and then navigated to YouTube. It worked. This is one of those differences between the Metro version and the desktop version. However, I had to know that going in, otherwise it would have simply looked like it didn't work. There was no indication saying the Metro version didn't support plug-ins or that the desktop version did.

I tried clicking on some of the other tiles on the start page and didn't get too far. Most of them seem to need features unique to mobile devices. Word Hunt wanted me to "bump" with a friend's device to initiate the connection. I assume that's some sort of bluetooth thing. Labyrinth simply sat there staring at me. No instructions. Clicking, click-dragging and other random character presses yielded no results. I'm guessing it wanted some sort of tilt sensor input. The last thing I tried was BitBox. I had high hopes of getting somewhere since it actually started with a mini-tutorial. My hopes were dashed on about the third step when told to do a pinch operation to continue. Um, how do you do multi-touch with a mouse?

At that point I pretty much gave up and turned the thing off. That was a bit of an adventure itself. First I tried sending the power off signal from VirualBox. This is equivalent to pressing the power button on a typical PC/Laptop. Nothing happened. I looked around a bit for a shutdown option. All I could find was logout. I ended up going to the desktop and pressing Alt-F4. That has worked since at least Windows 3.1, and it still does. I got a familiar "what do you want to do? shutdown, restart" type dialog. (I have subsequently learned there is a power button that's available after you logout.)

Opinions

My first impression after about an hour of playing with it is that it seems fairly comparable to the iPad and Android regarding user experience. (I've played around with both these about as much as I have Windows 8.) Basically there are big squares that slide around and you can click on them. The applications open in full screen mode. Shrug. I guess some people might get excited about it. To me, it seems about the same as everything else on the market.

What I find interesting about these devices is the infrastructure, development environment and community support that grows up around them. The iPad and Android ecosystems both have their strengths and weaknesses. I think it's too early to tell much about what will happen with the ecosystem around Windows 8. Will Microsoft learn from both their previous successes and mistakes, as well as those of Apple and Google, to become a market leader? Will they become another fairly equal player? Or will they become an also ran in this race?

From an internal design perspective, I like the direction Microsoft is going better than Apple or Google. Apple has a split between the desktop/laptop OS X and the mobile device iOS. Google is trying to scale the mobile/browser experience to the desktop in ChromeOS. I think both these are weak strategies.

Apple has two, separate code bases to maintain, much of which could probably be combined. I think long term this is going to cause compatibility problems much like Microsoft has had between the mobile/embedded Windows and the desktop version and more lately between WPF and Silverlight. Very similar systems with differing code bases have made the developer community pretty aggravated at times.

Google has a similar problem with the bifurcation between Android and ChromeOS. Android probably has the potential for making a pretty nice desktop OS. Give some development effort, it'd be pretty comparable, from a design perspective, as Windows 8. The high-level design documents for both would look very similar. However, Google has decided to try to expand the browser into an operating system. I've experimented with ChromeOS and it works acceptably if all you want to do is available on the web. But frequently I want to use my computer off-line and the whole ecosystem is not up to this task. Perhaps in 5 years everything will be a web app. I doubt it though.

Microsoft is pairing down the core of Windows and then placing different layers on top of it. From a design perspective this seems like the best long term solution. It has always appeared that desktop Windows was the first-class citizen and the embedded/phone OS by the same name (which only had passing resemblance to its big brother) was second-class. By putting a desktop UI on the same core as the mobile device UI, they can both become equal products, just for different markets. As a desktop developer, the biggest fear I have is, instead of raising the mobile UI to be equal to the desktop's, they are going to push the desktop down to second-class status. As it stands with this preview, the first and primary experience is the Metro look and feel. It works great on a tablet. I have yet to see it work well on a desktop. Without major changes to the current experience, I predict Windows 8 will work well on mobile devices but will not be adopted in the desktop world. Hmm, will Windows 8 make the year of the Linux desktop finally a reality?

Updates

The above all happened on Friday. Monday morning, I started the Windows 8 virtual machine. It hung during boot. I turned it off and tried again. Again it hung (at a different place) during boot. I deleted the image. Too much hassle at this point.

Monday evening: I created a VirtualBox machine hosted on my MacBook Pro. Pretty much the same configuration as I had on the other one hosted in Windows 7: 50GB hard drive with about 2.5GB of memory. It installed perfectly the first time and so far has worked flawlessly. (Well, other than the weirdnesses of a touch based interface driven by a keyboard/mouse.)

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1. Download Windows 8 preview here

2. This is not intended to be a tutorial. There are already good tutorials to install onto a hard drive and into a virtual machine available.

Utah Code Camp: Spring 2010

Utah Code Camp is a free, day long software conference run by volunteers with workshops presented by local developers. This spring, the day is loaded with 47 workshops in 11 different tracks. The topics range from various Microsoft .Net technologies to open source projects and architecture to career development. The next camp is this Saturday.

Several have been organized, but the first UCC I have been able to attend was last fall. The opening keynote was by Alistair Cockburn and he talked about Hexagonal Architecture. This was followed by six workshop time slots with multiple options available. I chose to attend ones on WCF, Powershell, Microsoft's Multitouch API, new features of C# 4.0, usability, the WIX installer and finally Windows Azure.

I'm looking forward to this event and encourage any developer in the Salt Lake City area to check it out. It's still up in the air if I'll make it. I hope I can.

For those looking for more information, check out the Utah Code Camp website or follow them on Twitter.

PDC2008.Last;

I reported on the first half of PDC2008 the other day. Today I reflect on the last half of the conference.

Wednesday's keynote reviewed work being done by Microsoft Research, a division that's involved in pure research. They're an impressive group. Started in 1991, they have grown to over 850 PhD researchers in six locations around the world. Each summer they have 1000 graduate student interns working on projects. 25% of Computer Science PhD graduates in the United States have worked for Microsoft Research by the time they finish their degree. 15% of the division's budget is granted to universities. 30% of papers read at peer-reviewed conferences are submitted by Microsoft Research fellows.

One of the most interesting items they presented was a highly modified surface device. (A surface device is a multi-touch sensitive table top display.) This particular device was configured such that if you put another semi-opaque surface over it, something like a piece of tissue paper or frosted plastic, then a different image would be seen on the secondary screen. An example was a picture of an animal on the primary display. Hold a piece of paper over it and text about the animal was seen. Pretty cool stuff!

Another really cool piece of software technology presented in one of the sessions on Wednesday was the Concurrency Analysis Platform, or CAP for short. This is a low-level library used during the testing cycle that inserts itself between the application and the operating environment and replaces the thread scheduler. There are implementations for both Win32 and managed code. This provides a means for testing tools be built that explicitly control the scheduler. Think about this for a second. The scheduler is no longer non-deterministically interrupting your code, but rather can be controlled in a deterministic manner. Very, very cool.

CHESS is an automated tool built on this framework that analyzes a project and finds the points where schedule interleaving may make a difference. Without this analysis, it would have to run each thread with each line interrupted by the scheduler. This problem's scale is n^nk where n is the number of threads and k is the number of lines. With the double exponent, relatively small numbers cause this to explode to more permutations than there are estimated atoms in the universe. By analyzing the code, the problem space can be reduced to (n²*k)^c*nⁿ where c is a small number, like 2 or 3, and n and k are as defined previously. This becomes a much more tractable problem space.

Within this reduced space, the tool runs the code with each permutation of schedule interleaving to detect assertions, dead-locks, live-locks and data race conditions. When a failure is found, the problematic interleaving can be captured to directly, consistently reproduce the problem. Over my career, this could have saved me literally weeks of debugging time. During the session, they presented a couple real life case studies where this tool was used to find and fix very obscure, rare threading bugs in non-trivial code bases. They have also used it on several projects to find and fix bugs that have not yet been experienced. Obviously, using a tool like this throughout the development cycle has the potential to significantly increase the reliability of threaded applications.

Thursday marked the end of PDC2008. We had the same number of break-out sessions but ended early since there was no keynote speaker and only a short break for lunch. As I attended the sessions, it seemed like they had saved some of the best material for last.

First up are two new things coming out the research arm: CodeContracts and Pex. These two independent but complementary technologies are designed to improve code quality.

Inspired by Bertrand Meyer's Design by Contract work and rooted in the earlier Microsoft Research project Spec#, CodeContract is a .NET library to enforce method and class contracts. Calls to the CodeContract class are put at the beginning of methods to indicate requirements (pre-conditions) and expectations (post-conditions). As far as the build process is concerned, these become part of the method signature, so warnings and errors are emitted during build for cases where static analysis can detect calling code that violates the contract. Further, parts of classes can be marked as invariant, allowing the same checks on derived classes without re-declaring the constraints. Lastly, these same conditions can be placed on interfaces. This allows the checks to automatically be applied to all implementing classes without the class having to explicitly declare them.

Pex is a static code analyzer which works without CodeContracts but will use the additional information contained in them if they exist. It provides additional information about the warnings emitted by the CodeContract as well as the facility to automatically generate test cases based on method signatures and branches within the code that it has analyzed. Basically, it maximizes code coverage in the target class while minimizing the number of test cases needed for that coverage.

The last session I attended was a well presented introduction to the newish language F#. It is a functional language^[1] in the same way C++ is object oriented. The purpose of C++ is to write object oriented code while not excluding procedural code. Similarly, F#'s purpose is to write functional code while not excluding an object oriented paradigm. F# has been around for a couple years as a research language and has matured to the point where it's going to become a fully supported language in the near future.

The presenter started with a common, simple math problem and implemented it in F# using a typical procedural approach. It was basically line for line how it'd be written in C# with F# syntax. He then rewrote it in a slightly more mathematical way and then again using a fully functional approach.

Following this he presented a more realistic problem of downloading a CSV file from Yahoo's financial web site, slicing the data apart, running it through a function and emitting some results. He leveraged existing classes of the .NET framework for the data gathering and used a bit of F# code to do the data manipulation and glue things together. The first implementation had a single thread of execution. He finished with a highly impressive finale: with very minor changes to about three lines of code, he transformed this into a multi-threaded app that gave the same results in significantly less time.

All in all, this was a great conference with a lot of really interesting information. Videos of the sessions are available at microsoftpdc.com/.

1. One of the major tenets of functional languages is side-effect free methods. This eliminates many dependencies on order of execution, in turn making threading a much easier problem.

PDC2008.Length mod 4 = 2

I'm now at the half way point of my first Microsoft conference. I've attended many conferences in the past, but this is my first sponsored by the Redmond giant. For a Monday morning start, I flew into LA Sunday afternoon on a CRJ-700. I must say it was the quietest plane I've ever flown on. Sunday evening I had a delightful dinner with some family who live in the area.

Overall, the conference itself has been very good. Good presenters. Great information. Super food. The purpose of this conference is for Microsoft to cast their vision of the computing future. It is mostly about new technology that has not been released yet. This spans the gamut from next versions of current products to things in research to directions they think the industry is headed.

In Monday's keynote they talked about a new product called Windows Azure that they are positioning to be the OS for the web. It's made up of a number of coordinating services such as .Net Services, SQL Services and Live Services that they host in their data centers. The idea is they take care of the infrastructure and you use it to put your applications in. It reminds me of Amazon's offering on a larger, more ambitious scale. As they talked about it, I kept having two thoughts: really cool technology! And, how do they pay for it? I thought they were going to finish without answering the question. But at the very end, they finally claimed they haven't worked out all the details, but it'll probably be a subscription service based on traffic and needed reliability.

In Tuesday's keynote, Windows 7 was presented. It's the next version of the desktop client to replace Vista in 18 or so months. Each attendee was given a hard drive, as well as a CD, with the install for Windows 7 and a host of other software to support it. I tried installing it on a virtual machine from the CD but got errors about a file not being found. It installed flawlessly, and much faster, from the HD. So far I haven't had a chance to use it other than playing around with a few settings, but as a pre-beta release, it seems pretty mature. Someone claimed everyone at Microsoft is using it for their day to day work.

So far there have only been two down sides to the conference: the bumper music has been awful; it makes me want to do violence to some sound equipment. And secondly, the special event last night was at Universal Studios. I was there once before and sort of ambivalent about going, but the food was free and I figured I'd check out the changes they've made in the last 20 years. It was terrible. None of the rides held any interest to me whatsoever and the lines were long enough I didn't feel like wasting any of my life on them. The worse part though was they were prepared for Halloween. This meant they had people in costume that would try to scare people, get in their face and generally be highly annoying. In addition, smoke machines limited visibility to 4 feet in places and the music (using the term loosly) was loud enough I couldn't hear the people taking my order for food. Needless to say, I didn't spend more time there than needed to get dinner and leave. They did a great job at changing my ambivalence about going to outright refusal for future visits.