Last week Silverlight 3.0 was released. In Toronto, ObjectSharp put
on a very cool launch event, with lots of great demos and compelling reasons to start
using Silverlight immediately. I was impressed, but I’m a Microsoft fan-boy
(fan-boi?), so that doesn’t count. It was certainly fitting that ObjectSharp
propose using Silverlight for some parts of our new website www.woodbineentertainment.com,
seeing as they won the bid to build the new site. I saw the potential; as did
a few others on the team. However, some executives did not see the benefit.
I respect their opinion, somewhat because I have to – they can fire me after all,
and mostly because they have business sense on their side.
The company is very much on the cutting edge of technology in a few respects, but
very conservative in the way we choose technology. For instance, our new site
will be built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I’d wager there are
less than a hundred publically facing websites on the internet that use MOSS (probably
due to complexity and cost), yet we chose to use it because of the potential in further
developing it in future iterations.
Silverlight on the other hand is a different story. Recent reports peg Silverlight
penetration at around 25-30% of all browsers. Whether or not this is accurate,
who knows. It’s the only data available. Flash penetration is at 96%.
Now, in my opinion 25% growth in 2 years on Silverlight’s part is impressive.
Flash has been around for nearly 2 decades. There is definitely a correlation
to be made in there somewhere.
At this point, I was sold on using Silverlight. The exec’s still weren’t.
Seeing as Silverlight is a browser plug-in, it must be installed in some way, shape,
or form. At 25%, that means our customer demographic would have around 10% penetration.
That is terrible. Getting them to install a plug-in to view site content is
a tough sell. The executives didn’t want to scare away customers by making them
install the plug-in. SharePoint doesn’t need a browser plug-in.
And here in lies the Catch-22
To expand our marketed audience, we build on Silverlight to give them more content
that is better authored to their needs. In doing so, we lose customers because
they need to install the plug-in. There is no metric at this point in time to
help us extrapolate the difference. There is a reasonable risk involved with
using such cutting-edge technology. We will use it when browser penetration
is high enough, yet browser penetration won’t grow if sites like ours don’t use Silverlight.
Ah Well
I’m a technology risk taker. I live on the bleeding edge. I run Exchange
2010 beta, on Server 2008 virtualized on Hyper-V, with IIS7 running this site, browsed
by IE8 on Windows 7 RC, and authored in Office 2007 (2010 if Microsoft would give
me the flippin bits!). The company, not so much. Risk is good – as long
as you can mitigate it properly. I can manage my risk, as it’s not the end of
the world is something here crashes. I don’t lose an audience. If the
company can’t market to it’s customers because the tools in use are too new, it will
lose audience. Period. And that means lost revenue.
Maybe we can convince the exec’s in Phase II.
Reposted without* permission from the Canadian
IT Pro blog.
I
just wanted to post a reminder that the Windows 7 Beta is set to expire on July 1st,
2009. What does that mean? Well it isn’t going to explode, eat your data
or lock you out. What is going to happen is that the PC will force you to reboot
every two hours. But have no fear there is a way to fix this, simply install
the Windows 7 Release Candidate which you can still download.
While an upgrade isn’t supported, and I strongly recommend a clean install,
you can find
a workaround that will allow you to do an in place upgrade.
Grab the Release
Candidate here!
* I never asked. I doubt they will care. Correct me if I am wrong, Rodney!
Some of you might be getting crashes from your installers. Here’s what the error looks like in your event logs:
Faulting application name: msiexec.exe, version: 5.0.7000.0, time stamp: 0x49432105
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7000.0, time stamp: 0x49434898
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000ebbaa
Faulting process id: 0x12dc
Faulting application start time: 0x01c979f516ed5e4e
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
This happens whenever you try to install anything that uses msiexec.exe on Windows 7. The workaround is to do a simple registry edit.
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions
Remove all entries except default.
Don’t ask me why that works, but it works. I’m back to installing things. It seems people are having this problem just recently. Hope this helps anyone having this problem.
Some days you just have to shake your head and wonder. As it turns out, I'm a
little late to hear about this, but nonetheless, I'm still shaking my head.
It turns out that Windows has gone open source. And (!!) it's not being made by Microsoft
anymore. Well, Windows™ is still made by Microsoft. Windows is now made by a group
under the gise of ReactOS.
ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system
based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims
to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level
right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares
none of the unix architecture.
So essentially, these people are taking
the Windows architecture (based on XP/2003), and redesigning it from scratch. Or rather,
are re-coding it from scratch, because redesigning would imply making something different.
Sounds vaguely familiar to, oh, something called Vista. Except uglier.
Now, that nagging feeling we are all getting right about now should be visualized
as a pack of rabid lawyers. Isn't this considered copyright infringement? They outright
define the product as a copy.
And what about the end users? Are all programs designed to run on Windows supposed
to be able to run on this ReactOS? Why bother with testing? The XP architecture is
now almost 8 years old by now. That means anything designed to run on Vista, or soon
to be designed to run on Windows 7, wouldn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, running
on ReactOS.
I would love to see how a .NET application runs on it.