More comments on “Why Vista ?”

Several MVPs have been talking about why Vista will or won’t achieve early widespread adoption and the underlying reasons: Why Vista?, Vista and Cars, Ford Falcon or Plymouth Fury – Is Vista good enough to sell?

I like playing Devils Advocate! As I mentioned in my reply to Darren’s post, I see Vista as overwhelmingly more important for developers than end users in the short term. I agree that applications maketh the OS (isn’t that always true?). End users want new features when they make their life easier (after factoring in the pain of any re-learning process)

Being able to blog from within Office 2007 is great for people who have a blog, but does the average user care? No, of course they don’t. Where are the adaptive applications that learn a user’s habits? That adapt to specific behaviour (not quite the same as annoyingly hiding infrequently used menu items!). If you give users software that feels like ‘it cares’ about the user you get ‘buy-in’ and a higher tolerance for change from them.

Here’s an idea: build in the ‘Adaptive Decisions Widget’ that keeps a track of all (revertable) decisions that the OS and Applications make on my behalf, for instance if I consistently reply X times to the same question, ask me if I’d rather not be asked, and store a decision if one is made. It’s a bit like Alan Cooper’s design ethic: don’t ask me to confirm a delete action, just peform the action but make it un-doable. Give me a warm fuzzy glow, instead of a resigned sigh!

Mitch Denny wrote:
>>”What operating system upgrades do is set a baseline which can shorthand
>>discussions, for example, because I know that Vista is going to ship with WPF, WCF >>and WF I can simply say “you must be running Windows Vista to run this software”.”

I not even sure that will be true: what about new versions of the framework? (we’ve had two versions in this XP iteration). We have even seen people in the ausdot stanski list saying that they had to stick with 1.1 of the .Net framework, due to the inability to get 2.0 installed (due to its size). Even if it is true, I still think it directly benefits developers of new software more than end users. If you write a new application and want to maximise your target market and profits, you do not force users to have the latest OS and nothing else!

Inside many organisations, the main (even single) driving force for developing browser based applications is the zero intsall footprint. Having gone down that path, there seems little incentive for such organisations to swap to vista so that you can re-write all your web apps to run as windows forms taking advantage of WPF, WF, WCF, WWF.

There are a heck of a lot of large organisations still running Windows 2000!

I lay down a challenge: name a reason why an average office worker will be better off with Vista! (I’m not saying there aren’t any, just curious that’s all…I wonder what the official marketing line is?)

PhotoSynth

Microsoft Live Labs have recently released details of PhotoSynth, an application that takes photo collections, automatically figures out how they relate to each other, and seamlessly stitches them together into a navigable 3D space. I was intrigued because a friend has been working on a similar concept for a several years.

SQL Server Performance Tuning Resources

Here is a short list of resources for SQL Server performance tuning:

A good place to start is the excellent web site: http://www.sql-server-performance.com/
It covers basics and more advanced issues both from the DBA and developer points of view. Very readable.

SQL Team often has articles relating to performance.

Greg Linwood’s blog is a mine of information on performance tuning: for instance this article on Query Plan Guides (SQL Server 2005 only). Greg gave a great introduction to performance tuning a few months ago in Perth: the slide deck is here.

The SQL Server Query Optimisation Team also has an excellent blog, with articles like this one on Automated Auto-Indexing.

Ken Henderson’s SQL blog is here. Bart Duncan started blogging just recently, he is a recognised master. His weblog is here

Also check out webcasts by Kimberley Tripp, Bob Beauchemin and Bill Graziano to name a few. The main webcast events page is here. There is a whole section devoted to SQL Server here. There are more to watch than I can find time! These are a remarkable free resource.

There are some great books available:

SQL Server Performance Tuning Distilled by Sajal Dam is a good nuts and bolts introduction with examples.

SQL Tuning by Dan Tow is excellent but takes a bit of work to get your head around. Applicable to Oracle and many other databases.

The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals by Ken Henderson. Very thorough treatment of what’s under the hood. Not directly related to solving a particular performance problem but if you want to understand how the internals affect the layers above this book covers it in great detail.

Free Download: Microsoft MSDN Library May 2006

Microsoft has released the MSDN Library May 2006 Edition as a free download. The MSDN Library was previously only available for download to MSDN subscribers, so if you don’t have an MSDN subscription this is great free documentation. Future editions will be available as they are released:

MSDN Library provides access to essential programming information, including
technical white papers, software development kits and code samples necessary to
develop web services and applications. This is an updated version of the MSDN
Library for Visual Studio® 2005

Creating Smaller Virtual Machines

If you’re a developer and you are not utilising virtual machines (for things like testing installs, different platform installs, presentations, trialing beta software to name but a few) you probably should be. Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 and Virtual PC 2004 are both free, and VMware server is free.

Here is a very useful article posted by Jeff Atwood: Creating Smaller Virtual Machines showing how to create a minimal Windows XP Virtual PC image.