Before hitching up with Windows Phone and Windows 8, Microsoft's cross-platform rich Internet application framework gets a modest upgrade
Microsoft Silverlight has had a topsy-turvy year. Apparently doomed or at least marginalized by HTML5, Silverlight found a foothold in Windows Phone and has more recently emerged as a key component of the Jupiter application framework and programming model for Windows 8. If Silverlight has become less important as a rich Internet application (RIA) framework, it has become more important to Microsoft's desktop and mobile platforms overall.
In the meantime, the cross-platform RIA framework is still kicking -- though development has clearly slowed. More evolutionary than revolutionary, the "new" capabilities in Microsoft's Silverlight 5 beta merely incorporate existing Microsoft technologies and port functionality previously seen in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
[ Also on InfoWorld: Microsoft offers developers early access to Windows Phone "Mango." | Keep up with the latest developer news with InfoWorld's Developer World newsletter. ]
More than a year has gone by without a major Silverlight release, and with none due until late 2011, I expected the forthcoming version 5 to be a major rev that would cement Silverlight's superiority over Adobe Flash. Instead, I was disappointed to find that many promised Silverlight 5 features are still missing or meager. Even the included code previews for satellite projects -- such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) RIA Services and Expression Blend -- do little more than gussy up existing capabilities.
In short, the Silverlight 5 beta looks more like a dot revision with feature creep than a major upgrade. Rather than extending Silverlight to continue hammering away at Adobe Flash, Microsoft seems to be working toward a desktop smackdown with itself -- adding Windows-specific platform invocation calls, Component Object Model (COM) support, and untethered file system access that push Silverlight deeper into the domains of .Net and WPF.
This blurring of these lines shouldn't come as a total shock. After all, Silverlight was originally code-named WPF/Everywhere. Plus, it undoubtedly makes good fiscal sense for Microsoft to consolidate internally with Windows 8 and a new version of Windows Phone on the horizon. Microsoft has said that the next version of the Windows Phone OS (aka Mango) will sport the Silverlight 4 runtime, and that there will be no support for running Silverlight applications in the Windows Phone browser.
Silverlight 5: Improved tools
I appreciate that Silverlight 5 is prerelease, and perhaps I shouldn't be looking at it so critically. Stepping in from the big picture, there are a number of improvements to Silverlight's runtime and development tools that shouldn't be ignored.
I installed the Silverlight 5 Tools Beta to Visual Studio 2010 SP 1. The Beta included the Developer Runtime, SDK, and a new preview of WCF RIA Service v1 SP2. Instead of Visual Studio, you could use Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 as the development platform.
Read the views of online Certification Experts, which provide the real questions and correct answer and explanation for the students / professionals who are seeking or enhancing their level of expertise. more at certkingdom.com
July 6, 2011
July 5, 2011
Internet Explorer market share continues to sink
June numbers are in, and Internet Explorer continues its precipitous fall while Chrome and Safari pick up the slack
Last month I talked about Internet Explorer's inexorable decline in market share.
The June numbers are out, and Internet market tracking firm Net Applications shows yet another significant decline in IE market share worldwide, to 53.68 percent from 60.32 percent for June of last year, down about 7 percentage points in the past year.
Internet Explorer market share continues to sink
Picking up the slack for Internet Explorer? Chrome, once again. It's risen from 7.16 percent in July of last year to 13.11 percent in June of this year, up about 6 percentage points in the past year. But Chrome's being aided and abetted by Safari, which has risen from 5.09 percent market share in July of last year to 7.48 percent in June of this year, a phenomenal gain.
Firefox market share has declined in the past year, although not by a significant amount, from 22.91 percent last July to 21.67 this June.
It looks like the Safari increase is due, in no small part, to increasing popularity of the iPad. For the first time, the iPad now accounts for more than 1 percent of all browsing worldwide, and more than 2.1 percent of all browsing in the United States.
The times, they are a-changin'.
Last month I talked about Internet Explorer's inexorable decline in market share.
The June numbers are out, and Internet market tracking firm Net Applications shows yet another significant decline in IE market share worldwide, to 53.68 percent from 60.32 percent for June of last year, down about 7 percentage points in the past year.
Internet Explorer market share continues to sink
Picking up the slack for Internet Explorer? Chrome, once again. It's risen from 7.16 percent in July of last year to 13.11 percent in June of this year, up about 6 percentage points in the past year. But Chrome's being aided and abetted by Safari, which has risen from 5.09 percent market share in July of last year to 7.48 percent in June of this year, a phenomenal gain.
Firefox market share has declined in the past year, although not by a significant amount, from 22.91 percent last July to 21.67 this June.
It looks like the Safari increase is due, in no small part, to increasing popularity of the iPad. For the first time, the iPad now accounts for more than 1 percent of all browsing worldwide, and more than 2.1 percent of all browsing in the United States.
The times, they are a-changin'.
July 4, 2011
The 10 worst cloud outages (and what we can learn from them)
Sending your IT business to the cloud comes with risk, as those affected by these 10 colossal cloud outages can attest
As a concept, there's a lot to like about the cloud. Drop those bulky servers and get yourself a big, white hard drive in the sky. Someone else handles the upkeep and lets you put your data where you want it. Even the word "cloud" itself brings to mind a heavenly (if slightly fluffy) fantasy.
The reality is, of course, a mixed bag. What you gain in avoiding upkeep, you lose in control. And the security concerns are considerable. But nowhere is the nightmare as vivid as it is when your cloud service goes down.
[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors' 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]
Just ask any of the businesses affected by Amazon Web Services' high-profile outage in April.
"We were pretty blown away," says Nick Francis, whose startup, Help Scout, had launched just one week prior to Amazon's problem. "We definitely weren't prepared."
Francis wasn't the only one caught off-guard. Big-name properties like Reddit and Foursquare fell flat when Amazon's cloud sputtered.
"The cloud has been sold as this magical thing that just works and is totally reliable," says Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a cloud provider that's seen its fair share of outages. "The truth is that buying through the cloud is another way of buying computing, and computing is inherently flawed. If you want to make sure those flaws don't hurt you, you have to plan ahead."
To help keep your business pain-free in the cloud, we offer these hard-earned lessons at the hands of 10 of the worst cloud storms the Web has weathered.
Colossal cloud outage No. 1: Amazon Web Services goes poof. Freeing yourself from network maintenance gruntwork is a chief selling point for doing business in the cloud. The downside? Standing by helplessly when your cloud vendor's routine configuration change grinds your business to a halt.
That is what many AWS customers experienced this past April, when Amazon's Northern Virginia data center suffered a glitch and -- to use the technical term -- went totally nutso.
The error started during a network upgrade, when a misrouted traffic shift sent a cluster of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes into a remirroring storm, as they sought out available boxes into which they could insert backups of themselves -- perverse, I know. That set off a series of events that ultimately took down much of the company's U.S. East Region.
That's the short version, anyway -- if you're interested in the full nitty-gritty, clear out 47 hours in your schedule and read Amazon's novel-length explanation.
The problems persisted for about four days. But while many businesses struggled, others such as Netflix took the storm in stride. The key to survival? Designing your systems with these types of failures in mind.
"Our architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and the SimpleDB, S3, and Cassandra services that we do depend upon were not affected by the outage," Netflix engineers wrote in their "Lessons Netflix Learned From the AWS Outage" blog post. Stateless services and multiple redundant hot copies of data across availability zones were key to avoiding AWS cloud fail pain.
As a concept, there's a lot to like about the cloud. Drop those bulky servers and get yourself a big, white hard drive in the sky. Someone else handles the upkeep and lets you put your data where you want it. Even the word "cloud" itself brings to mind a heavenly (if slightly fluffy) fantasy.
The reality is, of course, a mixed bag. What you gain in avoiding upkeep, you lose in control. And the security concerns are considerable. But nowhere is the nightmare as vivid as it is when your cloud service goes down.
[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors' 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]
Just ask any of the businesses affected by Amazon Web Services' high-profile outage in April.
"We were pretty blown away," says Nick Francis, whose startup, Help Scout, had launched just one week prior to Amazon's problem. "We definitely weren't prepared."
Francis wasn't the only one caught off-guard. Big-name properties like Reddit and Foursquare fell flat when Amazon's cloud sputtered.
"The cloud has been sold as this magical thing that just works and is totally reliable," says Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a cloud provider that's seen its fair share of outages. "The truth is that buying through the cloud is another way of buying computing, and computing is inherently flawed. If you want to make sure those flaws don't hurt you, you have to plan ahead."
To help keep your business pain-free in the cloud, we offer these hard-earned lessons at the hands of 10 of the worst cloud storms the Web has weathered.
Colossal cloud outage No. 1: Amazon Web Services goes poof. Freeing yourself from network maintenance gruntwork is a chief selling point for doing business in the cloud. The downside? Standing by helplessly when your cloud vendor's routine configuration change grinds your business to a halt.
That is what many AWS customers experienced this past April, when Amazon's Northern Virginia data center suffered a glitch and -- to use the technical term -- went totally nutso.
The error started during a network upgrade, when a misrouted traffic shift sent a cluster of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes into a remirroring storm, as they sought out available boxes into which they could insert backups of themselves -- perverse, I know. That set off a series of events that ultimately took down much of the company's U.S. East Region.
That's the short version, anyway -- if you're interested in the full nitty-gritty, clear out 47 hours in your schedule and read Amazon's novel-length explanation.
The problems persisted for about four days. But while many businesses struggled, others such as Netflix took the storm in stride. The key to survival? Designing your systems with these types of failures in mind.
"Our architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and the SimpleDB, S3, and Cassandra services that we do depend upon were not affected by the outage," Netflix engineers wrote in their "Lessons Netflix Learned From the AWS Outage" blog post. Stateless services and multiple redundant hot copies of data across availability zones were key to avoiding AWS cloud fail pain.
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