The most recent articles from Personal Computer World

T-Mobile launches Google phone

Clive Akass — 2008-09-23T16:17:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 23 September 2008 at 16:17:00

G1 uses open-source Android platform, with both touch-screen and qwerty keyboard interface

T-Mobile and Google have launched the first phone to use the open-source Android platform.

The quad-band 3G T-Mobile G1 has a touch interface – not multi-touch, like the iPhone, but with a neat slideout Qwerty keyboard. Apple's phone relies on a software keyboard.

It will be free on a £40-a-month contract which includes unlimited web access, and will be available in Britain in early November – earlier than the rest of Europe. Pre-orders are already being taken. The US price of the handset was quoted at $179 (£97).

Google executives were stressing the advantages of the open platform, but made no reference to a row over Apple's alleged blocking of rival third-party software.

The interface has been designed to facilitate web browsing on the small screen, allowing you easily to zoom in on to an area of interest.

The phone is hooked into Amazon, so that users can download music tracks in much the same way as iPhone users can access iTunes.

The G1 will also provide access to Android Market, selling applications for the phones.

Click here to see images of the G1 and for barbed reaction from the LiMo Foundation promoting mobile Linux.

Firefox brings back the command line

Clive Akass — 2008-08-12T11:31:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 11:31:00

Add-on lets you share information over the web more easily

Mozilla is expected to launch a Firefox add-on this week that combines the advantages of the command-line and the graphical interface.

The new functionality, called Ubiquity, is designed to facilitate sharing of information over the web. If you spot a picture on a web page that you want to send to your friend, you right-click on it to get a text box into which you can type: "Send to Joe Bloggs".

Firefox will then open an email client, look up Joe's address and send the image.

Chris Beard, vice-president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, told MIT Technology Review: "You just type in things that feel natural to you."

Ubiquity, which uses Javascript, will come with a choice of instructions, known as "verbs", but you will be able to add your own. The first version is also expected to be fairly primitive.

Atul Varma, one of those working on the project, wrote in a July 23 blog that it was still in the prototyping phase. He also warned that it favoured freedom of expression and experimentation over security.

"The particular dilemma that needs to be solved here is: how can one end-user trust that a word won't do anything harmful to their data or privacy – be it intentional or accidental – while still providing a a low barrier of entry for aspiring authors to write and distribute their own verbs?"

Comment: Bring back the command line, all is forgiven

Acrobat 9 gets Flashy with video

Clive Akass — 2008-06-02T05:15:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Monday 2 June 2008 at 05:15:00

Technology acquired with Macromedia embeded into portable document format

The latest version of Acrobat, published today, incorporates Flash technology developer Adobe acquired two years ago with its purchase of Macromedia.

Native Flash support in Acrobat 9 will allow video to be incorporated into documents and shared across multiple platforms.

A single Portable Document Format (pdf) portfolio can incorporate drawings, emails, spreadsheets and multimedia files into a single compressed file.

You can also capture web pages, or entire sites, in pdf format that preserves the original interactivity.

Other new features include a forms wizard and improved collaboration with the aid of hosted services, currently in beta, at Acrobat.com. And you can now navigate pdf pages using a Vista-style carousel.

The enhanced Flash support, including video, is also available in the new free Acrobat reader modules. There are three products in the paid-for range: the entry level Standard Editor, the Pro edition, and the Extended edition.

You need the extended edition to convert video to flash, and new geographic information features for pdf maps. Adobe bought Macromedia three years ago for an estimated $3.4b (£1.74b).

One irritating Acrobat feature has not been improved. Text capture in the Adobe 9 Reader is still rudimentary, taking no account of columns and other formatting, and ending each line with a paragraph mark.

Capture is blocked by design on many pdf documents, for copyright reasons, but the difficulty of extracting text in others severely the format's use for information exchange.

Steven Partridge, UK business development manager, said that some user companies did not want the feature enhanced. He added: "Many people have asked for it and the subject comes up every year when we go through the feature list. It will probably happen some day."

Microsoft wins format standards battle

Clive Akass — 2008-04-02T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 2 April 2008 at 00:00:00

ISO vote endorsing OOXML ends vicious committee wrangling

Microsoft has won its battle to have the Office Open XML (OOXML) formats, used in the latest version of is office suite, accepted as a global standard.

The decision by the International Standards Organisation, which required a two-thirds majority in a vote by standards bodies from different countries, follows months of sometimes vicious wrangling with accusations of rigged votes and other skullduggery.

It means Microsoft can compete for contracts with governments that had pledged to use only open formats endorsed by ISO. OOXML had already been approved as a standard by the European industry body ECMA.

A preliminary vote late last year went against Microsoft, which then submitted amendations to its OOXML specification answering criticisms by national bodies. The objectors were then asked if they wished to change their vote.

Their decision means that there are now two ISO document standards. Supporters of the rival Open Document Format claimed OOXML is not truly open because it was not designed by an open process. They also suspect Microsoft will find ways to retain control.

Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance, complained as the final vote began that many critical issues with OOXML, including intellectual property rights, had not been discussed; and a crucial decision about how an OOXML standard would be maintained had been delayed.

The battle has also been a case of corporates trying to gain market edge, with IBM and Sun backing ODF. And even if OOXML had failed to get endorsement, it could still have ended up as the most used format, making a de facto standard more important than an official ISO one.

Office programme manager Brian Jones said in a blog that the pro-OOXML vote had been around 75 percent. He added: "Now it's time to move forward and start to worek together in the ongoing development of these standards."

Sun buys MySQL for $1bn

Clive Akass — 2008-01-17T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Thursday 17 January 2008 at 00:00:00

Purchase of open-source database firm shows that 'free' software can make money

Sun Microsystem is to buy Swedish database developer MySQL for about $1bn in a deal which suggests the open-source business model is working.

Software from MySQL AB, founded in 1991, drives around 11 million websites including those of Google, Nokia and Facebook.

Both companies give open-source applications away, and make their money by selling premium editions to corporates and charging them for maintenance and support.

Sun has been heavily pushing this model for its version of the Openoffice.org suite, which is seen as a rival to Microsoft Office.

It reckons that about 100 million copies of the free version of MySQL have been downloaded, and an additional 50,000 are downloaded daily.

The company said in a statement: "This broad penetration, coupled with MySQL's strength in Web 2.0, software as a service, enterprise, telecoms and the … embedded market make it an important fit for Sun."

Excelsior writes its own spreadsheets

Clive Akass — 2007-11-27T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 27 November 2007 at 00:00:00

High-level language allows Excel spreadsheet to be scaled to suit different tasks

An Oxford researcher has written a high-level language called Excelsior with a compiler that can generate Excel spreadsheets.

Jocelyn Paine, who lectures in Artificial Intelligence and works as a consultant, says it can save a lot of time by because the same program can be used to generate different sizes of spreadsheets.

"This is very useful for … developers who need to produce many different versions," he said.

Excelsior describes spreadsheets in terms of named tables, declared in a similar way to C++ or Java arrays. Formulas use Excel syntax but refer to table names rather than cell addresses, making programs easier to understand, according to Paine.

Paine has used the system for financial modelling but has posted an example that models rabbit-fox populations over different time scales – and another that generates Sci-fi stories.

He is selling copies of Excelsior for £350 at www.spreadsheet-factory.com but admits that it won't suit all Excel users because it lacks a graphical interface: the compiler is driven by a command line, and the programs are text files.

"However, the Excelsior language is small, and easy to learn if you know languages such as C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby."

Excel component library – see Test Bed

Thousands petition against OpenXML standard

Clive Akass — 2007-07-13T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Friday 13 July 2007 at 00:00:00

Microsoft accused of manipulating ISO standards process

More than 20,000 people have signed a petition against the fast-track adoption of Microsoft's new Office formats as an international ISO standard, according to the organisers.

Standards committees in countries across the world are being asked to vote this summer on whether the Open XML formats, used in the latest Office 2007 suite, should be endorsed as a standard.

A different Open Document Format (ODF) has already been adopted but there is nothing to stop ISO accepting second specification. Both formats are based on the XML description language.

A lot of money is at stake as Microsoft stands to lose lucrative government contracts if OpenXML is not endorsed. Among its backers is the British Library.

The battle has turned nasty with each side accusing the other of being driven by commercial interests. ODF is backed by IBM and Sun.

The petition against Open XML has been organized by a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII). Benjamin Henrion, who wrote it, claimed people were outraged by the Microsoft application. "It's gone global. Users are happy with the existing international standard for documents, and can't see why Microsoft is forcing its own standard except in pure self-interest."

FFII president Pieter Hintjens accuses Microsoft of manipulating the standards process by "stuffing ISO national committees with its business partners so it can buy 'yes' votes."

He claimed: "In Italy, an eleven-member committee suddenly found itself with 70 members. The same has happened across the world. We are witnessing the rape of the international standards process by a convicted monopolist."

Graham Taylor, chief executive of OpenForum Europe, said: " The market wants a single truly open standard that can act as safe harbour for our documents for the next hundred years, and encourage innovation and choice in applications."

Microsoft argues that it needed to developed Open XML to be completely backwards compatible with its old binary office formats, which are a de facto standard by virtue of the fact that nearly everyone uses them.

There's a lengthy exposition of the rest of its case here

Make your own Wii games, says Nintendo

Martin Lynch — 2007-06-29T00:00:00.000Z

Martin Lynch, Personal Computer World, Friday 29 June 2007 at 00:00:00

Users can create titles using new development kit will sell them online

Nintendo has just announced a software development kit to allow consumers to build their own games for the hugely popular Wii console.

Known everywhere else as WiiWare, but strangely renamed Wii Software in Britain, the kit allows people with big ideas but no budget, to create Wii games which will go on sale online at the Wii Shop Channel, once Nintendo has quality-checked it. Nintendo said it will not vet game content, but ‘Adult Only’ or ‘Over 18’ titles are not welcome.

WiiWare will compete with Microsoft’s XNA development software which allows people to create their own downloadable games for the Xbox 360 console.

Nintendo believes Wii users with some development skills could be could be the key to the ‘next big game’ for the Wii platform. The key benefit to Wii owners is that the resulting games will be cheaper than retail Wii games from software publishers. The variety is also expected to be greater.

“Independent developers armed with small budgets and big ideas will be able to get their original games into the marketplace to see if we can find the next smash hit,” explained Nintendo of America president, Reggie Fils-Aime. “WiiWare brings new levels of creativity and value to the ever-growing population of Wii owners.”

The first WiiWare games are expected in early 2008.

University offers MSc in smartphones

Clive Akass — 2007-05-11T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Friday 11 May 2007 at 00:00:00

London Metropolitan course focuses on Symbian development

An MSc course in smartphone development starts at a London university this September.

The Mobile Applications Development (MSc) course at London Metropolitan will be based on the Symbian operating system and prepares students for the Accredited Symbian Developer (ASD) examinationt.

Just under 51.7 million Symbian smartphones were sold worldwide last year and more than 110 million have been shipped in all.

Course leader, Dr Yanguo Jing, said: ‘With the smartphone market set for continued expansion, there is a growing need for professional Symbian developers."

London Metropolitan University Department of Computing, Communications Technology & Mathematics http://www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/dds/mad/

Get set for the mobile web gold rush

Clive Akass — 2007-05-04T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Friday 4 May 2007 at 00:00:00

Prepare to cash in on boom in people accessing web on the move, urges .Mobi evangelist

Mobile web use is about to get a similar boost to the one given fixed line-access by the introduction of flat-rate charges, according to the chief technology officer of the company responsible for .mobi registrations.

Mobile operators are beginning to offer similar affordable flat rates, and web use will be further encouraged by innovative devices like Apple's iPhone, said dotMobi's James Pearce.

He predicted a rush of people trying to cash in on the mobile boom. "I'm a great believer in the evolution of the internet. There will be a lot of people putting up .mobi sites and most of them will be bad. But that way we will find out what works."

DotMobi, backed by the likes of Microsoft and Nokia, is charged with promoting as well as managing use of the top-level domain designed specifically for mobile devices.

It has just announced 500,000 .mobi names have been registered, in a total of 104 countries. How many of these are companies registering names to prevent people squatting their brands is unclear.

But Pearce argued that mobile phone users were more likely to use a site that they knew had been specially formatted for a tiny screen. He claimed browsers such Opera and other software that attempts to reformat for mobiles on the fly never did so satisfactorily and made pages hard to read.

DotMobi has posted some very easy-to-use tools to enable non-programmers to set up and test .mobi sites.

Mathematica gets a thousand new features

Emil Larsen — 2007-05-02T00:00:00.000Z

Emil Larsen, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 2 May 2007 at 00:00:00

Version 6 of maths suite is biggest upgrade for 19 years

A new version of Mathematica has been released with "nearly a thousand new computational and interface features", according to developer Wolfram Research.

Mathematica 6 is aimed at scholars and maths-centric scientists and is "the most significant upgrade to the Mathematica system since Version 1.0 was released in 1988" according to the company founded by British-born Stephen Wolfram, who caused a minor sensation in 2002 with a book on the implications of the mathematics of organic growth.

The program is used by university students, academics and commercial mathematicians to carry out intense simulations covering financial to astronomy problems.

It also performs a range of mathematical calculations without having to compile code first, which is described as "instant interactivity" and means simulations can be turned into fully interactive applications, sometimes within seconds.

Notable new features include real-time 3D graphics, 3D printing and scanning support, equational theorem proving, integrated graphics editing and drawing, geometric computing and extended number theory support.

Version 6 costs £2035 exc VAT for professional use; academic and upgrade discounts are available.

Examples of the new interactive capabilities have been posted onto Wolfram's website.

Hands on: How to test your website

Tobias Hause — 2007-04-13T00:00:00.000Z

Tobias Hause, Personal Computer World, Friday 13 April 2007 at 00:00:00

Making sure your website works in every browser can be a lengthy process. Luckily, help is at hand

To build a successful website, you have to do more than just put the pages together using a tool such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage. You also need to test and optimise the site. This is usually done by developing with one or two browsers and then testing the site on a few more.

Links are tested with the help of the site map when the site is finished. Often that’s as far as testing goes, and it leaves gaps. This approach misses some important browsers, perhaps because no Mac or Linux setup is available for testing. And dead links and similar errors are difficult to track down by hand.

To ensure your site is working properly, you need suitable tools and a plan for testing. In this feature we’ll describe a typical test cycle and look at some useful tools and optimisation tricks.

Browser compatibility

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, on the web it’s often due to the browser. What the user sees in their browser can determine the success or failure of the site. It’s obviously crucial to know what individual browsers can do. You can find lists comparing the capabilities of browsers at sites such as this.

If you’re a web designer you’ll also have to do a juggling act with various operating systems. Konqueror needs to be tested on Linux, Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on the Mac. Konqueror and Safari might have common roots, but they are now sufficiently different that you need to test your site with both.

If you find it impractical to keep multiple computers or partitions running different operating systems, the best solution is virtualisation. A virtual computer runs in its own window on your system.

Microsoft offers two products for this: Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005. Virtual PC is fine to test websites and the Windows version is a free download. The Mac version of Virtual PC has to be paid for unless you own the Mac version of Microsoft Office Professional.

VMware offers a much wider range of products. Its entry-level product is the Player, which enables you to run previously created virtual computers, and can be downloaded free. You can find a wide selection of virtual computers for use with the Player here.

If, however, you would prefer to create your own virtual machine, then you will need to buy at least VMware Workstation version, although the free sample virtual machines will often do for simple testing.

Screenshot services

Virtual machines are practical for testing but require a fairly powerful host computer to run on, and all of the browsers to be tested have to be installed and configured. That’s a lot of effort, especially if you want to cater for the more exotic browsers.

Help is at hand in the form of websites that capture browser screenshots of a specified URL. All you have to do is to put the site to be tested on the web and then request a screenshot.

Browsershots.org is a good free service. Currently, it’s still in the testing phase, and to ensure reasonable performance it works with a queueing mechanism. This means you enter the URL to test and the browser and resolution to use and then you’ll receive a URL for the results. You can check the address regularly until the screenshots have been made, and you can use the Queue page to see the current state of the queue.

This service has its disadvantages. The queuing obviously doesn’t help your workflow, and both the queue and screenshots are publicly available. In addition you can’t take screenshots of areas protected by HTTP authentication.

Many web developers have access to all of the big browsers except Safari, which is only available for Mac OS X. Help with that is offered by sites such as Browsrcamp.com, which specialises in providing free Safari 2.0 screenshots.

The screenshots this service provides don’t show the browser frames; if you do need to see them, we recommend Webdesignerstoolkit.com. This has Photoshop files of the various current browsers at different resolutions. Thanks to the clear way in which the layers are structured, draft designs and tests can easily and quickly be inserted.

As well as the free screenshots, Browsrcamp offers paid-for remote access to a virtual Mac; prices start from $2 (about £1) on a daily basis, reaching $100 for a year. Screenshots are also available from commercial sources such as Browsercam.com.

The big advantage here is the huge choice of browsers and operating systems. You can also request screenshots of sites protected by HTTP authentication. There’s also remote access to various operating systems. The prices for screenshots start at about $20 (about £10) per day, and a year’s access costs about $340 (about £174).

Running more than one version of IE

A common problem for testers is that you can’t install different versions of Internet Explorer; each one will replace the other, so many web developers resort to using virtual systems with a different IE version in each. However, there is a workaround for installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer, and you’ll find a handy install routine for it here.

You should only use this solution on test systems or on a virtual PC, as older versions of IE are not always stable in combination. The installer includes Internet Explorer 3, 4, 5, 5.5 and 6. You can install Internet Explorer 7 in parallel. Javascript is supported, alongside HTML and CSS.

Futureproof with XHTML

XHTML is one of the key buzzwords for web designers. You gain little from XHTML conformity in itself. The most important argument in its favour was always that HTML should follow the XML rules in order to be portable and editable in different parsers. But this is usually brushed aside in practice, as that kind of flexibility is really only required in very complex workflows.

On an ordinary website, HTML’s only purpose is to enable the browser to display content – and at the moment it still does not matter whether HTML or XHTML is used. XHTML conformity is usually only introduced along with CSS layouts and accessibility optimisation, as it does not require much additional effort. If you’re concerned about future-proofing your newly created website, however, XHTML should be the language of choice.

Valid code

You can complain about this bilingualism, or you can take a more relaxed attitude, like the father of the web and W3C chairman Tim Berners-Lee. Accepting that HTML and XHTML can exist side by side is arguably more appropriate to the real world than vehemently demanding standards-compliant websites.

Whether you choose HTML or XHTML, it’s crucial to stick to the standards. Newer browsers, such as Internet Explorer 7, adhere more closely to them and are more likely to give display errors with sloppily coded pages – so validating your code is vital.

The first port of call should be the W3C’s official validators for HTML and XHTML, and the css-validator for CSS. In addition to this, similar tests are implemented in the current versions of HTML editors such as Dreamweaver.

Many editors make use of Tidy or similar libraries which clean up your HTML and CSS code. Tidy came from Dave Raggett and is now available as a command-line tool and as a PHP library. The main project is hosted by Sourceforge.

Accessibility

Even if accessibility is not your top priority when first designing the pages, accessibility test tools can be very useful as an adjunct to simple validation. And, of course, you will need to consider accessibility sooner or later.

The W3C offers testing tools and there are other testers available online. One classic is the offering from Watchfire, which was originally called Bobby. Watchfire’s tools are integrated in many HTML editors. An unusual online test can be found here. The results of the analysis are shown on the page with icons and you can click on the icons to see sub-pages. A similar approach is taken here. The source code is displayed, highlighted for accessibility.

Most of these testers, of course, work on a ‘snapshot’ basis. It’s more difficult to evaluate the overall user experience and usability of a site with automated tests. Although there are some tools that attempt to filter at least the most common errors from the code, they are really just academic and experimental in nature. The only really effective way to test usability is with real users.

Once you have HTML code and browser compatibility under control, it’s time to perform more specialised tests for particular purposes. For search engine optimisation a good starting point is the basic test offered by Seekport. The site’s Seekbot tests your site against vital criteria for search engine friendliness.

Search engine optimisation

There are plenty of sites that offer classical link tests; you can find one list of them here. Some of the free ones work in a similar way to the free browser screenshot service – you have to join a queue and wait to receive a URL where you can retrieve the result.

Link checks do not have to be carried out as an online test, but can be performed as a script, because the underlying logic is not particularly complicated.

Link checking is the basis of all search engine optimisation. You can check the links that point back to your own site. To do this, www.check-link.com provides a useful online tool. The results also show estimated page rankings. Other sites provide a similar forecast, as of course does the Google Toolbar.

There’s a lot more that the diligent web developer can do to check their site before it goes live. There are software tests and load and stress tests, to check the resilience of the webserver. This begins with working out the download times and server response times.

There are free online tests, and commercial solutions such as Froglogic’s browser-independent tests and comprehensive test suites from Empirix or Mercury. However, these solutions can be costly, and are far more than most small sites will need. You can find a roundup of tools here.

Read the benefits

Websites obviously need to be tested. What isn’t so obvious is how to do it thoroughly – without taking too much time. Our collection of online and offline utilities is by no means comprehensive, but it should save you a little time and give you a few new perspectives. Because if testing in other browsers becomes less trouble, it might be done more often in future. And that’s to everyone’s benefit.

Useful tools for testing your site

- Capabilities of the individual browser

- Browser compatibility for CSS

- Virtual PC

- Vmware Player and assorted virtual computers

www.vmware.com/download/player

www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances

- Free browser screenshots

- Free Safari screenshots

- Installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer

- W3C HTML and XHTML validator

- W3C CSS validator

- List of Accessibility test tools

- Online accessibility test

- Optical accessibility test

- Accessibility test with source code viewer

- List of link-checking tools

German firm buys Xara

Clive Akass — 2007-01-31T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 31 January 2007 at 00:00:00

Deal with Magix is good for users and product, says UK graphics suite developer

UK software developer Xara has been bought by German company Magix, which sells a number of music, video and photo-editing products.

Xara sells a number of graphics packages, including Xara Extreme and Xara Extreme Pro, as well as providing online web-design utilities.

The company said in a statement: "The acquisition is good news for Xara and its customers. The new financial resources that Magix provide, together with the greatly increased distribution network for Xara products and technology, will accelerate the development and market capture of the Xara products."

The statement said Xara will trade as a subsidiary of Magix under the existing management and will continue to develop Xara products, which will be marketed under both the Xara and Magix brands.

Adobe offers Pdf as open standard

Clive Akass — 2007-01-29T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Monday 29 January 2007 at 00:00:00

Microsoft faces format battle on two fronts as Office 2007 and Vista launch

Adobe is submitting the full specification of its portable document format (Pdf) to the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for formal recognition as an open standard.

The move comes the day before the consumer release, simultaneous with Vista, of Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite, which includes a rival technology called XPS.

It means Microsoft now faces a standards battle on two fronts. The new Open XML document formats used in Office 2007 have also been submitted to ISO for approval as a standard but have met opposition from proponents of the rival Open Document Format (ODF), which has already been approved.

Several government organisations, particularly in Europe, have supported the need for open standards for document exchange between different platforms. Both Pdf and Microsoft's existing binary file formats are de facto standards, in that most people use them.

But the advent of Open XML and ODF is likely to bring the issue to the fore because organisations face having to cope with new formats whether they want to or not.

Adobe announced today that it is sending the Pdf 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, as a preliminary to ISO submission. Specialist versions of the Pdf spec are already ISO standards.

Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, said the submission of the full spec reinforced Adobe's "commitment to openness".

He added: "As governments and organisations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the Pdf specification by an external and participatory organisation will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich Pdf ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years.”

Adobe says an AIIM committee will draw up a draft submission to an ISO working group for development and approval as a standard.

Hands on: The future of C# and Delphi

Tim Anderson — 2007-01-26T00:00:00.000Z

Tim Anderson, Personal Computer World, Friday 26 January 2007 at 00:00:00

A tour round the next versions of these developer tools

At Microsoft’s Tech-Ed conference in November 2006, the sessions attracting the biggest crowds were those given by Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect of C#.

He was talking about C# 3.0, the next iteration of the language, which is set for release along with the next version of Visual Studio codenamed Orcas, possibly late in 2007.

C# 3.0 is not to be confused with .Net Framework 3.0. The latter is a large extension to the framework library, including XAML for XML-defined user interfaces and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) for inter-process or remote communications. The .Net Framework 3.0 runs on version 2.0 of the .Net runtime and is mostly written in C# 2.0.

C# 3.0 introduces Language Integrated Query (Linq), which makes database access part of the language itself.

“We have these incredibly advanced and powerful general-purpose programming languages and databases, and then we have incredibly unadvanced APIs that go between these two worlds. You put queries in strings, all the types go away, and you’ve got to cast each column from a DataReader. There’s a lot of need there for something better,” Hejlsberg said.

Here is a small snippet of Linq from one of Hejlsberg’s sessions:

Northwind db = new Northwind(…);

var contacts =

from c in db.Customers

where c.City == “London”

select new {c.Name, c.Phone};

Language integration means that the query results, contacts in this example, are in a collection variable that you can step through using foreach. Linq is n ot reserved for C#, and Visual Basic 9.0 will have a similar feature.

Under the covers, Linq makes heavy use of generic types, implemented in C# 2.0, along with lambda expressions, in which functions are treated as first-class objects. Hejlsberg says that C# 3.0 borrows ideas from other less well-known languages including Lisp and ML, both of which are classified as functional languages because they emphasise functions rather than a series of commands.

C# 3.0 will be binary-compatible with .Net 2.0. In other words, the changes are at the language and compiler level, not in the .Net runtime itself. “There has been no need to make changes,” said Heljsberg. “The big change that we needed was generics.”

In programming few things are really new. It is interesting to note that xBase programmers always enjoyed a form of language-integrated query.

All the more ironic then, that Microsoft’s conference included a session on ‘Moving from Foxpro to .Net’, in which the presenter argued that moving away from Foxpro was a necessity in the world of Vista and .Net Framework 3.0.

Foxpro is a Microsoft product, and is being equipped with extensions specifically for Vista and .Net integration, so it is not obsolete yet. Even so, .Net momentum is stronger than ever on Microsoft’s platform.

The Framework 3.0 release changes the game; with .Net 2.0, there is usually a native code equivalent to pieces of functionality in the .Net class libraries. In 3.0 that’s not the case, with both Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation offering features that are hard to replicate. Another option is to interop with .Net, but this often means long-term full migration is desirable.

Borland Codegear

It was also in November that Borland announced the future of Delphi, its excellent native-code compiler and rapid application development (Rad) tool. Having said in February that it would sell Delphi and its other IDE tools, Borland switched track and announced the formation of Codegear, a wholly owned subsidiary. Why the change of heart? Probably because Delphi looks increasingly out of place in a .Net world.

Although Delphi includes a .Net compiler, Borland has struggled to keep it up to date. Delphi 2006 targets only .Net 1.1, and remains the current release a year after Microsoft issued Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0. Delphi developers therefore tend to migrate to Visual Studio if they move to .Net.

Codegear’s main hope is that native code development remains important. There are dozens of reasons Win32 applications can be better than those in .Net or Java. Two obvious ones are simplicity of use, with few or no runtime libraries to distribute, and the ability to target every version of 32-bit Windows with a single executable. Another factor is low memory and resource requirements. For fast loading and snappy performance, native Win32 code cannot be beaten.

Codegear still has a hot product. Unfortunately, in Enterprise development, where a lot of the money is, the rich class libraries of .Net and its high productivity count for more than fast native code. It is also a tough market for any vendor of developer tools, because of the high quantity and quality of free and open-source options.

Visual Basic not quite dead

Microsoft’s mainstream support for Visual Basic 6.0, the last version to target Win32 as opposed to the .Net runtime, ended on 31 March 2005; and even the last-stop ‘extended’ support ends in March 2008.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is still shipping a Visual Basic editor. This is because it remains the macro engine in Microsoft Office, and the core Visual Basic for Applications runtime is the same as that in VB 6.0, though the forms engine is different.

There is some confusion about this because Microsoft is encouraging Office developers to use .Net VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) in their Office automation solutions. VSTO has substantial advantages, such as access to the rich .Net Framework library and the choice of VB.Net or C#.

It has disadvantages as well, requiring Visual Studio to develop, and deployment of the .Net runtime to users. VSTO also requires at least Office 2003. Another factor is that VSTO is overkill for a simple macro, whereas VBA is ideal. Microsoft Office still makes extensive use of COM, so it works well with the equally COM-based VBA, whereas VSTO is an interop solution.

If you run Office 2007, you may wonder where the Visual Basic editor has gone. You can find it by recording a macro and then editing it, but a better approach is to turn on developer features. To do this, click the Office button at top left of Word or Excel, click Word (or Excel) Options, then check Show Developer tab in the Ribbon.

The result is a new ribbon which includes a Visual Basic button as well as other important options including form design tools and Macro security. The Visual Basic button opens the VBA editor, which is a remarkably complete Visual Basic IDE. Here you can design forms and create custom VBA classes.

The power of VBA, or VSTO for that matter, is only partly in the language and forms. The other aspect is the document object model that Office documents expose. This is once again a COM object model, and is enhanced with each new release of Office. Version 2007 is no exception.

There are numerous new objects, including oMaths, which lets you manipulate the 2007 equation editor, and some existing objects have new properties and methods. You need to be cautious about using objects that might not exist in older versions of Office, if you intend to distribute macros to other users.

There are few limitations on what you can do from VBA. At the document level, there is fine-grained and read-write control of the content, as well as the ability to respond to events such as keystrokes (VSTO had difficulty with this). You can also query databases, call the Windows API, and control external applications if they provide a COM automation interface.

An advantage of VBA is that you can often replace mouse operations with keystrokes. For example, I wrote a simple macro to control Windows Media Player in order to simplify the work of transcribing interviews. Pausing and rewinding audio from keystrokes is quicker than clicking controls on a media application, and avoids the hassle of switching application focus.

No VBA for Intel Mac

There is a blot on the VBA landscape. Microsoft Office 12 for the Mac will not include Visual Basic for Applications. The current Office 2004 does include VBA, but it is a Power PC application that runs on Intel Macs using the ‘Rosetta’ translation Power PC-to-Intel translation layer.

The Mac version of Office will omit VBA in favour of Applescript, making life very difficult for anyone in the habit of exchanging macro-enabled documents between the Mac and Windows. In many cases the problem will be Excel spreadsheets with user-defined functions in VBA.

A fascinating blog post by Erik Schwiebert from Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit explains the rationale for this decision. VBA, he explains, “is incredibly difficult to port to Intel.”

There is a ton of assembly code which is specific to the Power PC. Schwiebert adds: “For us to port this to Intel we’d have to rewrite the entire state machine and create brand new templates of IA-32 code. That’s basically writing a rudimentary compiler almost from scratch… the design simply doesn’t lend itself to being architecture-independent.”

Quite apart from the porting issues, there are already compatibility problems with Windows and Office Mac. The document models are different, and VBA code that relies on Windows COM objects or API functions will fail.

These are all good arguments for choosing Java or perhaps cross-platform .Net. In the meantime, it looks as if Mac and Windows Office will become increasingly independent.

Resource

Controlling Windows Media Player from Word