In a couple of weeks I will be giving a talk on using PhoneGap for cross platform mobile application development at the WPUG #NotAtMWC12 event on Tuesday, February 28, in London. Here’s a brief overview of my talk and a video:

Windows Phone 7 and the Silverlight framework are a great pairing; they allow you to create beautiful Metro applications with ease. The excellent tooling, coupled with the Nokia partnership, should make WP7 a big success. Will we see a future dominated by WP7? I doubt it, and the analysts at Gartner seem to agree, with their 2015 predications indicating that Andoid, WP7 and iOS will all still have a significant market share for a few years to come. If you are developing a smartphone application this means you either make a choice between one of the three, or you have to write the same application three times, once in each of C#, Java and Objective-C. However, there is another way … all three phones have highly capable browser, in many ways more capable than their desktop counterparts where many people still use quite archaic browsers! All have good HTML5 support, which allows you to create applications that run within the browser. With this technology you can potentially write your mobile application just once using HTML5 (JavaScript / CSS) and reuse it on all three platforms. This sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? This talk will focus on the use of PhoneGap for the development of cross platform applications and look at the compromises you make, and the benefits you receive, by using this approach.

I’ll be talking quite a bit about Property Finder, a PhoneGap application I wrote for WP7, which I have now ported to iOS (using PhoneGap build):

Hopefully see you there!

Regards, Colin E.

I have just received an email from Chris Maunder, co-founder of CodeProject, informing me that I have been awarded CodeProject MVP status for 2012. I am very pleased to have received this award, which is given to a small handful of individuals each year.

What I like about CodeProject is the fantastic quality of the articles submitted by the thousands of authors that participate in this site, with the only payment being their own please in the writing.

I have not written that many articles throughout the year, just four of them. However, I have put a lot of effort into each one of them – and thankfully they have been very well received. It is great that CodeProject favours quality over quantity. My articles for 2011 were:

• Declarative Codesnippet Automation with T4 Templates
• Developing a Windows Phone 7 JumpList Control
• From Silverlight to HTML5
• XAMLFinance – A Cross-platform WPF, Silverlight & WP7 Application

I do also circulate some of my blog posts via the CodeProject Associate program..

On that note, it is almost three months since I last wrote an article … fortunately I do have an idea for the next article, so I had better get on with writting it …

Regards, Colin E.

In this blog post I take a look at Windows 8 on the outside, from a user perspective; and on the inside, from a developer perspective to see how it will change the way we develop with Windows on tablets, smartphones and the desktop when it is released next year.

In Anaheim, California, the Microsoft //build/ conference is drawing to a close. And as the attendees head for home, with their shiny new Samsung tablets under their arms, the news of Windows 8 and the impact it has on end-users and developers is starting to sink in around the globe.

There is no doubt that the impact of Windows 8 is going to be very large, it heralds the biggest change in the Windows architecture since 1993 and from an end-user perspective it is like no other version of Windows before it.

So why such a radical change to both the UI and the architecture? and why now? The answer to this question is quite simple … tablets. Previous versions of Windows have been targeted primarily at the desktop, laptop and netbook form-factors where the primary input devices are mouse and keyboard, and memory, disk-space, CPU performance is aplenty. Tablets have made the odd cameo appearance in the history of computing, but it is only recently with the launch of the iPad that they have suddenly become mainstream.

To take the Windows OS to a tablet it needs to be stripped-down, made faster and support multi-touch (or touch-first – a new Microsoft buzzword) and with Windows 8 Microsoft have done just that. With the requirements of a tablet interface being so different to a desktop, how have Microsoft reconciled these differences? The answer is a little surprising … they haven’t! They could have launched a dedicated Tablet Windows OS, just as they have done on the mobile with Windows Phone 7, but instead they have launched a single OS that works for both tablet and desktop. As a result it has something of a split personality. You can choose to run either the Metro or the ‘classic’ desktop UI on your tablet computer and you have exactly the same choice on your desktop.

An end-user perspective

The Windows 8 user interface uses the same Metro style that Microsoft introduced with Windows Phone 7, bright colours, clean edges, a lack of drop-shadows and other adornments. The style is heavily influenced by fonts and designs used for road and street-signs. The same concepts of clarity-at-a-distance translates very well to a small smartphone screen and should be equally at home on the tablet.

When applications are launched they run full-screen, with a similar multi-tasking model to Windows Phone 7 where hidden applications are suspended. These features, combined with the fast shutdown / restart times make sense for tablet users where limiting the work that the processor does will significantly enhance battery life.

You can run multiple applications side-by-side in a split-screen mode:

The current preview of Windows 8 has a few of the familiar applications available in the new Metro-desktop, these include IE which is now chromeless, i.e. it is permanently in full-screen mode. Gestures are used to reveal the open tabs or URL. Notably the Metro IE does not support any plugins, i.e. Flash, Silverlight – more on this later!

Metro applications for Windows 8 are distributed via the Windows Marketplace in much the same way as they are for Windows Phone (and iPad, Android etc…).

The Windows 8 UI clearly has tablets in mind and recent reviews by Engadget and Gizmodo seem to indicate that the experience is very good and agree that when released it could be a serious competitor to the iPad.

However, hidden behind the glossy Windows 8 UI sits the more traditional Windows 7 style desktop. Simply click (or touch) the desktop button and the old-familiar Windows desktop appears. It almost feels like the desktop is an app running within the new Metro UI – you can also run a split screen which combines the Metro and desktop UIs:

Interestingly if you want to run IE with plugins, there is a fully-featured version of IE present on the desktop. Try explaining these differences to your grandmother!

For a tablet, Windows 8 gives you the best of both worlds, an immersive and tactile Metro interface, plus the old-familiar Windows desktop.

On the desktop, Windows 8 does feel a bit strange. Metro applications are designed to work with the mouse and the keyboard, so it functions just fine, however, on a desktop monitor the Metro UI feels like a bit large and a touch gimmicky. The Metro concepts work well for small screens, but in my opinion are less effective on a large desktop monitor, especially in the absence of touch. I doubt it will make a big impact for desktop users, but at least they have the choice! When used on a PC with multiple monitors the new Metro UI is confined to a single screen, again further illustrating its tablet focus.

A developer perspective

Windows 8 marks a radical change from the outside, but what about on the inside? What is the developer story?

One of the most important diagrams revealed in the keynote is the Windows 8 architecture diagram:

It is clear that the split personality of Windows 8 runs very deep. In this diagram you can see that Metro style apps and desktop apps share the kernel, but nothing else. This is a pretty significant change in Windows architecture; Metro apps are finally free of the Win32 APIs which .NET has been built upon.

The APIs for developing Metro apps reside within the WinRT. A few keys things to know about this new architecture are:

• WinRT applications are chromless, fullscreen, with no pop-up or modal dialogs
• WinRT is an Object Oriented replacement for Win32
• WinRT is very similar to .NET, however a number of APIs such as file I/O, security etc… are not present.
• You can develop with C++, or C# etc… in much the same way as .NET applications
• The UI defined using XAML, as per WPF and Silverlight
• You can potentially port Silverlight applications to WinRT by changing a few namespaces
• JavaScript is a first-class citizen of Windows 8, using a HTML UI

The above already tells us a lot about WinRT and Metro applications. My first thoughts are that they are much more similar to Windows Phone 7 applications than desktop WPF applications. They live within a sandbox which uses a restricted subset of APIs, you certainly cannot write a virus checked or hard disk partitioning tool with WinRT!

Furthermore, when developing Metro UI apps, Visual Studio ‘deploys’ your application too your Windows 8 Metro desktop in exactly the same way as it does with the WP7 phone.

So what about existing .NET applications? The important thing to know is that all the ‘old’ APIs are still there. Your WPF, Silverlight and WinForms applications are safe! There were also a few new WPF features announced at //build/ as part of .NET4.5, but they are not very interesting, it is clear that Microsoft has been putting its energy into other things.

The JavaScript / HTML5 story is a bit of an odd one. Clearly Microsoft has embraced these technologies, with JavaScript having full access to the WinRT. Furthermore, they have added APIs for creating Metro UIs with HTML. However, I am not sure why someone would want to use JavaScript to create Windows 8 Metro applications? The main strength of JavaScript and HTML5 is the portability due to its support on a wide range of browsers, tablets, phones, etc… The Windows 8 JavaScript Metro apps are ‘tied’ to WinRT so are in no way portable.

Questions …

Lots of questions … the rather complicated nature of Windows 8 has resulted in quite a lot of confusion.

Is Silverlight Dead? – this was probably the most oft asked question before //build/ and it is still being asked. The news that the Metro IE10 will not run Silverlight is certainly not good news for the technology, however, it does not mean it is dead – Silverlight is still present in the desktop IE10 browser (as is Flash). Recently Silverlight has been re-positioned as the technology of choice for more complex line-of-business applications, the types of application which sit better in the Windows 8 ‘classic’ desktop. Furthermore, whilst the Metro UI is leading the push into tablet computing, I doubt it will take off on the desktop. So, no, Silverlight is not dead, but it has unfortunately missed out on being part of the Metro UI for tablets.

There is a relatively simple migration path for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 applications to the new Metro WinRT. This might work for full-screen Silverlight applications, but will not work for applications that mix HTML and Silverlight content within a browser.

Is WPF Dead? – Again, for much the same reasons as Silerlight the answer is “no”. WPF is a framework intended for line-of-business applications, and those belong on the Windows 8 desktop.

How does this impact Windows Phone 7? – it doesn’t. The next version of WP7 is going RTM shortly and there has been no change to these plans. In fact for WP7 developers Windows 8 is a great opportunity. The WinRT seems most closely related to Silverlight for WP7, so your skills and code are readily portable to the tablet.

Should I write my app as a desktop or Metro app? – this is probably the single hardest question that the Windows 8 preview has raised. As application developers we now have two very different ways which we can deliver applications to the desktop and tablet, either the new Metro UI, powered by the (deliberately) limited WinRT; or desktop applications using WPF or Silverlight. I think it will be very interesting to see how Microsoft tackles this problem with its own applications. So far the Windows 8 preview has Metro UI based Twitter, Weather and Social Networking applications and a desktop based Visual Studio. There is also IE which is available in both desktop and Metro, albeit with quite different functionality. Where will Outlook, Word, Excel sit in the new Windows 8?

I think there are rather a lot of applications that will want to make use of both Metro and desktop UIs. Take Outlook for example, you could imagine a simplified Metro interface sitting on one of your monitors, but a more feature rich desktop version available on the other.

One other point worth considering is ‘reach’. It will take a long time before everyone is running a Windows 8 PC, so if you choose to deliver your application as a Metro app, you are restricting yourself just to the Windows 8 user-base. However, if you are targeting the Windows tablet, you can of course guarantee that they will run Windows 8.

Conclusions

Windows 8 presents a significant change in the way we develop Windows applications. The split personality of the Windows 8 user interface and architecture is going to cause confusion on many levels.

The technical implications of WinRT and how it relates to .NET are slowly starting to become clear, thanks to great blog posts like “WinRT Demystified”.

Personally what I think will take a little bit longer to understand is how we design applications for Windows 8, as we start to discover what works well in Metro, what should remain on the desktop and what we deliver to both.

Regards, Colin E.

I am happy to have been invited by NEBytes to give a talk on cross-platform XAML applications later this month. The event kicks off at 6:30pm on August 17th at Room 120, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, with the event including both my presentation and a talk on Office 365 by Jonathan Noble and Andrew Westgarth. You can sign up for the event via the NEBytes eventbrite page.

An abstract for my talk is as follows:

WPF and Silverlight: Unifying the Development Platform for Desktop, Web and Mobile with Colin Eberhardt

The recent boom in mobile and tablet devices and the ubiquity of the web mean that we, as software developers, have found ourselves developing for a wide range of devices. All-to-often applications destined for the web, desktop and mobile are developed separately at great cost. This talk will look at how the XAML based technologies of WPF and Silverlight allow you to use your skills to build application for a wide range of platforms. Furthermore, with the use of simple design patterns, it is possible to share a common code-base for all three. In this talk I will cover the differences and similarities of WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, with a practical demonstration of cross-platform application development.

At this talk I will demonstrating various working examples including XAMLFinance a cross-platform WPF / Silverlight / WP7 application I have been working on:

Hopefully see you there!

Regards, Colin E.

Readers of my blog will probably have noticed that I have a keen interest in both charting and performance. My friends over at Visiblox have combined these both to create what is one of the fastest charts for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, see my recent benchmark blog post for details. What’s more, this performance has been achieved without sacrificing API clarity; the Visiblox charts can be instantiated with concise and clean XAML or manipulated from code-behind.

The guys at Visiblox told me that they are giving away free licences for their charting products to anyone who is a current Microsoft MVP, so I thought I’d share that with you in case you’re interested. For more details on this offer please contact Visiblox directly.

If you are an MVP, give these charts a whirl …

I’d better get back to work on the cross-platform (WPF, Silverlight, WP7) application that I will be demoing at the next Silverlight UK User Group meeting, and yes, it uses Visiblox charts!

Regards, Colin E.

Yesterday Gartner released its latest mobile smartphone sales predications, with the figures showing a dramatic turnaround in their predictions for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform. The latest predictions are charted below (I find this much easier to visualise this data in a chart versus the tabular form which Gartner publish!):

We can see from the chart above that Gartner predicts that Android will increase the lead that it has so rapidly acquired, BlackBerry’s RIM and Apple’s iOS will see moderate growth, whilst Microsoft will rise as Nokia’s Symbian declines, with the headline grabbing prediction being that Windows Phone 7 will outsell iPhone by 2015. It is also worth noting that net smartphones sales are predicted to hit 1 billion by 2015, that’s twice the sales figures expected for desktop PCs.

The prediction that there will be two smartphones sold for every one PC highlights just how important smartphones are as a platform for application developers. Regardless of OS, smartphones are powerful enough to support almost any application that you might have targeted for desktop production, therefore, if a smartphone version of your application is not on your roadmap, you are potentially missing out on 66% of your customers!

So how does Gartner’s most recent prediction compare to their previous one? If we chart their predictions for Symbian and Microsoft that they released in August 2010, the difference is quite clear (previous predictions shown as a dotted line):

Where previously they had predicted a strong rise in Symbian sales, and a poor uptake in Windows Phone 7, the tables are now turned.This is of course due to the recent news that Nokia are dropping their own Symbian OS in favour of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, with the first Nokia devices expected at the end of this year.

It is also interesting to look at how Gartner’s predictions have changed for RIM, iOS and Android from August 2010 to April 2011:

The predictions for RIM are unchanged, whilst they have increased their forecast sales prediction of iOS a little. However, they have dramatically increased their Android predications, so whilst Windows Phone 7 developers will certainly see Gartner’s latest figures as great news, it is clear that Gartner see the recent success of Android continuing and its market share increasing.

As others have reported, the smartphone market is highly volatile. The Nokia / Microsoft partnership has had a major impact on Gartner’s view of the near future, I expect that other significant events will occur between now and 2015 that these will have an equal impact on Gartner’s latest predictions, changing the landscape once again.

None-the-less, it is still a good day for Windows Phone 7 developers, Silverlight or XNA.

Regards, Colin E.

This blog post looks at the fallout after last week’s PDC conference where Microsoft were quoted as saying “our strategy on Silverlight has shifted”, and the resulting fallout in the developer community. In this post I will describe why I think Silverlight has a future ahead of it and exactly where that future lies.

Bob Puts His Foot In It!

Last week’s Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) has caused quite a stir. It was clear from Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech that HTML5 was taking centre stage, with Silverlight not getting a single mention in his opening speech.

The image below shows a word cloud showing the most frequent words in Steve Ballmer’s PDC keynote speech, rendered using Wordle

This is in contrast to previous events such as MIX9 where (just over a year ago) Silverlight 3 took centre stage. This focus on HTML5, which many see as a competing technology to Silverlight was enough to get the community a little worried, however, it was the interview that Bob Muglia gave to ZDNet that really caused a storm.

The key quotes are given below:

“[...] when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, our strategy has shifted.”

“But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform”

The above statements caused quite a stir, with calls for Bob to clarify his statements which seemed to contradict the recent “Future of Silverlight” blog post which contrasted the difference between standardisation (HTML5) and innovation (Silverlight) to show a very positive future for the technology. I think this is the first time I had seen such a direct comparison of HTML5 vs. Silverlight from Microsoft’s Silverlight team, and the arguments they made were quite compelling.

Bob Pulls His Foot Out Again

As a result of Bob’s interview, which was commented upon by virtually everyone in the Silverlight community (Jeremy Likeness, Mike Taulty, and many many more), Bob quickly followed up with a blog post where he stated the following:

“I said, ‘Our Silverlight strategy and focus going forward has shifted.’ This isn’t a negative statement, but rather, it’s a comment on how the industry has changed and how we’re adapting our Silverlight strategy to take advantage of that”

However, I think that the most important point he made came at the very end of his post:

“The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use.”

I think it is people’s misunderstanding of the differences between Silverlight and HTML that caused most of this uproar in the first place. It is this point which I would like to concentrate on, and hopefully provide a bit more clarity.

PDC is an Event

Before I focus on the differences between HTML and Silverlight I think it is worth noting that PDC is an event, and just like any other event it needs to be marketed in order to fuel people’s interest and get them through the door. Microsoft embraces a very wide range of technologies, and if the PDC tried to be a true reflection of this diversity it would be very fragmented and hard to market. It is much better that the event focuses on something new and interesting to provide an underlying theme. This year that theme was HTML5.

Interestingly after MIX9 where Silverlight was the main focus and out-of-browser support was announced, there was noticeable unrest amongst the WPF community, they felt short-changed (4 MIX sessions on WPF to Silverlight’s 31) and there was speculation that Silverlight would replace WPF entirely. However, when the knee-jerk reactions were forgotten about and a more sensible analysis of the difference between the two was considered (see Pete Brown’s Future of Client App Development blog post for example), it was clear that WPF does have a future.

The Web Landscape

Back to HTML and Silverlight, if we look at the current landscape of the internet we can crudely characterise web sites and web based applications based on the degree of interactivity that provide:

In the above diagram we see a sliding scale of interactivity and complexity with a few well known sites positioned along this scale (don’t ask me about what units I am using to measure each site!).

With the above sliding scale we can position the popular internet technologies based on their relative strengths and the types of site they are most suited to:

I have not tried to pin each technology to a specific location on the scale because in my opinion the boundaries between each are blurred … a lot. It is possible to use any of the above technologies to create a web site / web application at either end of the spectrum, however, the further away you move from the ‘comfort zone’ of each technology, the harder the job becomes.

We’ll start at the Flash / Silverlight end of the spectrum. Why not capitalise on the fact that these plugin technologies provide a controlled environment for your code to run in, providing great performance and virtually zero browser compatibility issues?

Whilst this point may not have been addressed in great detail for Silverlight, there are certainly numerous strong arguments presented on the internet which describe quite clearly why full-page Flash sites will never fully replace HTML (For a thorough analysis take a look at Emil Stenström’s blog post on Flash vs. Ajax sites). The main reasons cited are:

• Splash screens – Flash / Silverlight sites need to load the entire ‘executable’ before they can render. Contrast this with how quickly the pages from Wikipedia appear.
• Maintenance – Quick fixes are often required for websites, with HTML / JavaScript this can often be left to the support team. For Silverlight / Flash this requires a full rebuild of the application.

(There are a number of other points, including search engine indexing, etc …)

There is not a strong case for replacing simpler web sites with Silverlight. I think my fellow WPF Disciple Justin Angel’s blog, which is powered entirely with Silverlight is unfortunately a good illustration of why Silverlight should not be used to replace HTML for the presentation of largely static content. Sitting here on a train using the pitiful WiFi connection I can see Justin’s stylish loading ‘splash screen’, however, after I minute of waiting I grow tired of staring at his beard and sunglasses and little else!

On the flip-side, when HTML and JavaScript technologies are used to create complex applications, development becomes costly and complex. Cross-browser problems, lack of support for business concepts such as controls and validation, performance issues all start to have a significant impact on the development. To combat this more and more sophisticated solutions are being applied, from the numerous libraries that abstract the differences in browser DOM APIs (jQuery etc…) to Google Web Toolkit, which generates JavaScript code from Java (which provides strong typing and better structuring).

Interestingly in the book Google Closure the Definitive Guide, the preface describes how Google Closure (a JavaScript compiler and mechanism for checking types) was developed to combat the problems the Google Mail development team were experiencing in developing a complex JavaScript application composed of tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript. The take-home message of this is that for complex applications you need more than the JavaScript language alone provides.

Bob’s Comments in Perspective

In the previous section I described how the web landscape can be illustrated as a sliding scale of complexity, with HTML and Silverlight at opposite ends of the spectrum and HTML5 sitting somewhere in-between. With this in mind, Silverlight developers should not fear that HTML5 will replace Silverlight. Whilst it is true that there is some common ground between the two, i.e. a certain interactivity / web-site complexity where the two technologies are equally suited, Silverlight users should feel comfortable that for the more complex problems, Silverlight has a clear advantage.

To repeat Bob’s closing statement of his follow-up blog post:

“The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use.”

I think it is the failure of the developer community to realise that there is little direct competition between HTML5 and Silverlight and failure of Microsoft’s marketing to highlight this.

The Web Increases its Reach.

However, there are some important points to note in Bob’s comments and his reference to iOS (i.e. iPhone, iPad etc…). Whilst I do not think HTML5 is a significant threat to Silverlight for web based application development, the introduction of a more diverse range of mobile devices potentially increase the market for HTML.

Most people who use an Android phone or an iPad do not use them as a replacement for their laptop or desktop PC. They use them on the train, in the coffee shop and at home on the sofa as a way to stay online and connected for more of their waking hours. HTML5 is a suitable technology for delivering a interactivity to a diverse range of devices and it looks like the overall market size is increasing.

However, if Microsoft can produce Silverlight plugins for these devices, on the Android phone for example, there is no reason why Silverlight cannot be part of this growing market, delivering more than just interactivity to the mobile platform.

Unfortunately, more recent news, like today’s announcement by the Bing Maps team that seems to indicates they will be dropping their Silverlight based 3D libraries in favour of HTML5 is going to fuel the fire which Bob and Steve Ballmer are currently trying to dowse.

Regards, Colin E.

This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex … !

This week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), there have been two big news stories. The first is the give-away of a free tablet PC to all attendees, and the second is the release of Silverlight 4 beta. Whilst the first story is sure to grab the headlines, the second is far more significant, with official launch of Silverlight 3 having passed just 4 months ago.

There are many new features in Silverlight 4 including, printing support, improved databinding, new controls, improved mouse support, clipboard, drag’n'drop, and much much more. You can be sure that Silverlight 4 will receive a lot of blog coverage over the next few months, it is worth subscribing to Silverlight Cream to get a good overview of all blogging activity. (It looks like Shawn Wildermuth is not sleeping and has blogged about the improved SL4 databinding support already!)

While the new features are very exciting, what interests me more is just how fast Silverlight is developing. Time for a bit of analysis …

Four months ago I took a detailed look at Silverlight adoptions figures, which I don’t expect to have changed much since then. This time I want to look at the rate of development of the framework itself. The following chart plots the date at which major releases of some key RIA technologies were released (plus predicted release dates for SL4 and Flex4):

(Data collected from Wikipedia pages on Flash, Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight).

As you can see from the above chart Silverlight is being developed very aggressively with major versions being released with less than a year between them. Interestingly the above chart shows an almost constant development velocity for each RIA technology. Which leads me to the next chart …

Here we can see that Silverlight development is occurring at a rate of 1.5 version increments per annum (VIPA [1]) , whilst Flex is lagging behind at 0.7 VIPAs … and JavaFX just 0.3 VIPAs!

There you have it. Unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex.

Regards, Colin E.

[1] Hey look … I’ve developed a new unit here. Do you think in years to come they might come to be known as Colins? Eberhardts?