Yochay Kiriaty

Last week, for 3 day somewhere in San Francisco, Microsoft conducted a marketing experiment for the next version of Windows code name "Mojave". Microsoft gathered over 120 computer users (common folks - consumers not the usual computer experts) whom are all critics of Windows Vista. The promise was to give them all a sneak peak of Windows Vista successor and use their criticism to build a better product.

Windows Mojave was Windows Vista. The same product. The critics did not seem to realize and apparently loved the new operating system. More than 90% gave positive feedback on the operating system which is incredible if you consider that all gave negative feedback about the same product earlier on.

I have to say, that is an amazing marketing trick which is just one of many other marketing efforts to bring Vista back to life.

Tomorrow, July 29th, the results of the experiment will be publicly publish The Mojave Experiment (http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/)

Full article can be found at CNet here

It took me 25 min to write this post. Any feedback is welcome.

My love to Live Mesh grows from day to day. In case you  don't know what Live Mesh is, in short "Live Mesh puts you  at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about — available wherever you happen to be"

The available (today) CTP enable you to setup your "Ring of devices" and share files, content between these devices. Also you can share specific folders / items with your friends making Live Mesh the idea technology for image and music sharing.

I have only 2  devices - my work computer and home computer, but all my Live Mesh are totally synced.

The current version of Live Mesh enables me to synch few very important files between my home computers and my work computers. Imagine it as it is like free back up, this gives me the option to seamlessly setup new "back up folder" and have my wife use is as if they are just another folder - BTW Live Mesh folders are just like any Windows folder, just they can sync!

As you can see my "Install less" folder contains few folders and files. One I add or delete file to this (or any other Live Mesh folder) they are all automatically replicated to all my other machine base on configuration. You can see that each file and folder that is updated in this folder is automatically synced with my other device.

The next version of Live Mesh will allow you to program against the Live Mesh infrastructure. Doing so allow you to share application and application context between devices. I highly recommend you take a look at a web cast Ori Amiga did in his Channel 9 Web Cast. The next version of Live Mesh will also include a Developer SDK for which we can use this infrastructure to create real cool application and share data between users and devices across the web. Think about the implication of using this service from Mobile deceive, and no just Windows Mobile, but platform like Nokie's S65 (and up) and Apple's iPhone!

But until the next version I want to be able to share my application. How can I do that? Well to some degree you can have similar experience. Here is an idea I got from Jeff Sandquist (the founding father of Channel 9, Channel 8, and Channel 10). I have a folder of applications that I always need and use that do not require installation, Like Note++, Reflector, ZoomIt, and etc (see large picture) that I uploaded to my Mesh. Once these files are on my Mesh, from any computer (any where) I can simply log-in to my Mesh, double click the app, and there you go. The app will RUN - it is like magic. Even more, now when I install a new computer, all I need to do it connect to my Mesh and I can automatically sync this folder, practically "installing" these application on my new machine in no time. All so sweet :)

(It took my about 60 min to write this post.)

Before you start reading this post, please notice that everything I write is my own opinion and is NOT related to me being an MS employee, nor I used any contact that is not public. Enjoy.

As we say in the holly land "the writing was on the wall". It was only a meter of time before Google will announce its own could services and application environment named Google App Engine.

it is no secrete both Google and Microsoft are in a race to complete the amazing computer data-centers infrastructure in order to enable simple safe hosting of YOUR applications. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other large web presence companies have a Gazilion (that translate to a lot of data centers around the world with 10 of thousands of computers). For example, Amazon Web Services such as Amazon S3 storage service, Facebook has an application SDK enabling over 27K applications today. Google has a lot of services and APIs. And what about Microsoft, well Microsoft also have  lots of services, probably more than any other company out there. By far Microsoft Live services is the most comprehensive web services offering by one company, and when you tie in other Microsoft assets like Live Messenger, and over 400M registered active Live ID users, you get a really valuable services that can enhance your app and even more important retain and acquire new users and it is all for free (up to a point).

But, before you can start using web services you  need to build your application. And after you created your web app, you need to deploy it. And deployment can become an issue as you need to deploy on physical machine, either you but them, or more probably you choose a web hoster. The Web Hoster is responsible to host your app on web server and usually give you database and runtime for your app. And the big questions is what about scale and performance.

in Facebook, you can write application just for Facebook. Which is limited to Fackbook  runtime. However, still, you can write cool apps and add-in, one of them is Microsoft Live Messenger plug-in for Facebook - where you can add Live Messenger capabilities to your facebook app or page.

Recently Google presented a Beta program for Google App Engine. "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users."

Sounds cool and fun right? Well, the answer is yes BUT. There is a big BUT build in to this offering. You have to code only in Python, and as great as python is, it is not the easiest programming Lnag out there to use - any I am rusty on using Python, which mean I need to do some reading tonight. Your database is bound to be represented only in objects, and unlike other ORM vendors, this implementation (which is easy as it can get) makes it hard on dev to drive complex SQL statements because ANY SQL you write is bound to a real object you created and used in your application. But these are relatively small obstacles on the way of Google to become one of the biggest virtual web application hoster in the world. And I am sure Google will bring in the Ad engine to tie in the $$$.

Where are Microsoft application hosting capabilities? All I can say these are exciting times. . .

See Google Web Engine in action.

Feel free to comments and start a discussion around these topics:

What do you think about Google Web Engine?

And how does Client Vs Web fits in?

(It took me about 2.5 hours to write this post)

It is time to for Moonlight!!! Monnlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both  Silverlight v1 and Silverlight 2 builds.

While Silverlight still has some long way to become widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, it is Microsoft's main web browser plug-in that is driving a change to the way we write Web Rich Media Applications today.

Moonlight is not a Microsoft project, but Microsoft has been working together with Mono,  an open source project sponsored by Novell, to develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix, to make a Linux version of Silverlight happen.

The Moonlight project is more than "just" running SL on a Mac or a Linux machine. Microsoft is taking these steps no just to increase the adoption of the SL browser plug-in. Microsoft is taking these steps to becoming more open and embracing a more open attitude towards the "rest of the world". Take a look at the last announcements about Live  Mesh and the over all Windows Live platform to understand that Microsoft is changing. . . and we in Microsoft understands that the days of a single application for a single machine are long gone and realizing that fact and changing the way we address our future development is an important aspect of the new Live attitude. And it is not just Microsoft, Recent announcements by Google, Yahoo,  MySpace, and Facebook also indicate a general trend toward opening up the software world.

Welcome to a new world.

Almost forget! There is a Open Source contest Amir Shevat is running and the prize is Free ride to PDC08!

I want to thank Goksin Bakir for this blog insight

And Rohan Thomas for his original blog post

Pop quiz. how can tell me what is the difference between List<T> and Collection<T>? And even more important question "Which is the preferred implementation of a generic list these days?"

from a quick look at the classes one can see that Collection<T> is some sort of a customizable wrapper for List<T>... Collection<T> gives more for use as a base class where you can hook the "standard collections" like Insert, Remove, Clear, Set and such. . . This will give you the option to customize these methods according to your needs.  Internally, it's Items property is backed by a List<T>.

where List<T> is a read-to-declare-and-use dynamic array of T's, it is represents a collection of objects that can be individually accessed by index. While Collection<T> defines methods to manipulate generic collections.

According to FxCop, List<T> should only be used as an implementation detail, and never be exposed in an API, since you can't easily extend List<T> after the fact. While List<T> isn't sealed, it has absolutely no extensibility points.

Personally, while I never publicly expose properties or methods of type List<T>, I often declare them as IList<T> and implement them using List<T>. This provide the best of both worlds.

When creating your own "collection" class:

• Base class for your custom collection classes Should be Collection<T>
• For internal implementation (private fields and local variables) use - List<T>
• External interface (public properties, methods, and collections) use - IList<T>, ICollection<T> and a good practice will be to use IEnumerable<T>

But let's not forget the other collections type and I certainly do not want to limit to just choosing between Collection<T> and List<T>... remember to consider Dictionary<TKey, TValue> or KeyedCollection<TKey, TItem>, or HashSet<T> if you're collecting things with identity where duplicates shouldn't be allowed, or where fast lookup by key is required or will perform a lot better than linearly searching a list.

Any Feedback or ideas?

(It took me about 35 min to write this post.)

One might ask what is the connection between Microsoft's Photosynth and the popular TV series - CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), Well just read this post and find why you need to be in PDC 08.

PDC 08 is due in few months (October 27-30, 2008) and as I wrote in a former post, if you are a developer, it is the one place for you to be.

This is the second post on a series of PDC 08 Preview posts. Previous post:

• PDC 08 Preview : Live Mesh

This time we are going to talk about Photosynth. If anyone doesn't already knows what is Photosynth or Seadragon, please take a look at this video. You can also play with this technology yourself.

Well you may say, this is not new. So what is the deal with PDC08 - which all about new stuff and the future? Ah, for PDC we are planning to show some amazing new features associated with Photosynth. Most of them are related to Web 2.0, sharing and combining Photosynth collections. Really exciting stuff. . .

But for the time, you way want to check the next episode of CSI in which the good guys solve a  case by reconstituting the crime scene using Photosynth.

My advice for you, start collecting picture for future synth ;)

blog post statistics: write time 25 min

PDC 08 is due in few months (October 27-30, 2008) and as I wrote in a former post, if you are a developer, it is the one place for you to be.

In this year PDC we are going to talk about a lot of cool things. Some you heard already like Oslo, some are completely new like . . . I wish I could told you but then it will not be a Surprise. However, last week, the Live team, unveiled a new technical preview of Live Mesh service.

What is Live Mesh? Well Live Mesh is a "Software-plus-services" platform and experience that enables PC and other devices (Mobile, XBox, Zune, Mac, etc...) to "come alive" by making them aware of each other through the Internet, enabling individuals and organization to manage access, and share their files and application seamlessly on the web and across their world of devices.

Or in a more simple terms, Live Mesh is a "Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration."

Basically, the current version enables you to synchronizes data across multiple devices. I am sure most of you owns more than one computer. One at home, one (or more) at work and one laptop. And you have some much storage place (for all the emule downloads) that you cant find anything. I want to ask you a question, did it ever happen to you, when you need one specific piece of content, and at the end you find out that this specific content is on some other machine, just not the one you have right now. using Live Mesh will solve such features.

And what about accessing your computer from remote, without using VPN?! Another extremely cool feature Live Mesh enables you is to have a similar experience  to Remote Desktop over the web across firewalls!!!, called Live Desktop. (just make sure you do not break your work security policy)

How it works?

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (formatted as ATOM, JSON, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). The main transport is FeedSync - which is an open source (under Microsoft Open Source License) data syndication protocol based on Atompub service.

Every piece of data entered into a user's Mesh either it is a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device, is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information (meaning file A may sync with Users 1, 2, and 3, while File B may only be told to sync with Users 1 and 2).

Using Silverlight from any web browser, or from a client based application, you can launch the "Ring of devices" (one ring to rule them all). Here are two images showing the Windows client and the Web versions.

Live Mesh client on the desktop showing all the devices

Live Mesh shows you your synced devices in a cute animated "ring"

Once you have a device you can easily setup "Mesh" folders and start syncing between devices as show in the next image

And if this is not enough for you. Here is Live Desktop, which enables me access to my desktop from anywhere in the web

• Few disclaimers. Live Mesh is a limited technology preview and only by invites. And sorry I have no invites!
• It is not a full product, it is not even a beta or a CTP.
• It will be shown in great detailed in PDC08
• And It is extremely cool!!!

• Introduction to Live Mesh - an interview with Ray Ozzie who is the father and mother of Live Mesh.
• Hands on with Live Mesh - a 25 min video showing Live Mesh
• Ten things to know about Live Mesh - a detailed blog
• A gimps of Live Mesh Architecture on Channel 9

More to come soon. . .