From a textbook on learning Spanish:

Found via Reddit. Click the picture to see it at full size.

The text:

To ask what people do for a living

¿A qué se dedica el señor Machado?

What does Mr. Machado do?

To respond

Es programador. Sabe diseñar páginas Web mejor que nadie.

He is a programmer. He knows how to design web pages better than anyone.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What is WebMatrix?

By now, you’ve probably seen the tech news reports as well as Scott Guthrie’s announcement about WebMatrix, Microsoft’s lightweight web development web development system that packages a web development tool with a number of new web technologies:

• IIS Developer Express: a lightweight, free-as-in-beer web server with simple setup, runs on all versions of Windows and is compatible with the full-on version of IIS 7.5
• SQL Server Compact Edition: a lightweight, free-as-in-beer file-based database with simple setup that can be embedded within ASP.NET applications, supports low-cost hosting and whose databases can be migrated to the full-on version of SQL Server.
• ASP.NET “Razor”: A new view engine option for ASP.NET for easy and clean templating with a simple syntax. You can use Razor to embed C# or VB into HTML.

WebMatrix ties these goodies together in a nice simple package that the beginning web developer will find easy to use and that the pro web developer will find handy for building quick sites. These parts are also available individually to ASP.NET developers and will soon be available to ASP.NET MVC developers.

If you’re looking for a quick video tour of WebMatrix, chack out the Channel 9 video below:

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod, MP3, PSP, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

A Quick Look at WebMatrix’s Parts

WebMatrix provides a simple, task-based interface for quickly creating web sites, both static and dynamic:

It makes it easy to include open source ASP.NET- and PHP-based web applications in your site:

It’s also easy to manage applications in a WebMatrix site:

If you’d rather write your own web app in WebMatrix, you can do that too. There’s a rich file editor:

And database definition and management tools:

There’s also sample code and web helpers to make your life easier and show you what’s possible, such as this handy sample that makes it easy to make a Twitter client. Here’s the code that takes advantage of the sample:

…and here’s the result:

If you need to get hardcore, you can open your WebMatrix project in Visual Studio or even the free-as-in-beer Visual Web Developer 2010 Express:

Previewing your WebMatrix site in multiple browsers is a snap:

Deployment is nice and easy once you’re doing editing your site:

Find Out More

I haven’t had a chance to take WebMatrix out for a proper spin yet, but I’m hoping to over the next few days. It’s a collection of cool technologies (which I ‘ll also use in my regular ASP.NET MVC development) wrapped together by a nice, simple tool that’s great for the web developer who’s not working on enterprise sites. I can also see myself using it as a handy prototyping tool.

If you’d like to find out more about WebMatrix, take a look at these:

• The WebMatrix site
• Scott Guthrie’s blog article, featuring a very comprehensive tour of WebMatrix
• Channel 9 video: Simon Calvert and Scott Hunter show off WebMatrix and Razor’s syntax

WebMatrix has just been released as a beta and available for download right now! We want you to try it out and let us know what you think, because we’ll be refining it based on what you tell us.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve decided to learn HTML 5 and are looking for a good introduction, I can’t think of a better starting point than Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML 5. If Mark’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve heard of his books Dive Into Python and Dive Into Accessibility. As you can see, he’s taken a theme and he’s running with it.

Dive Into HTML 5 covers a number of topics, including:

• A quite biased history of HTML 5. Not necessary for HTML 5 development, but if you’re the sort of person that likes to know the “back story”, Mark covers it quite nicely.
• Detecting HTML 5 features. Your web apps will need to know if the browser they’re running in supports specific HTML 5 features, and this chapter covers that.
• What the various tags (especially the new ones) mean.
• Drawing on the <canvas>. Now supported in IE9!
• The <video> element. Also supported in IE9!
• Geolocation.
• Local storage. Native client apps have had this as an advantage over web apps, but not anymore!
• Forms.
• Microdata.
• and coming soon: chapters on threads and web sockets.

Mark has a knack for explaining things, so I’m always happy to point people to his books. I consider Dive Into HTML 5 to be pretty comprehensive; you could create a course based solely on the material in this book, and thanks to the licensing, you can!

Dive Into HTML 5 is available for free online and is a work in progress. It seems to be largely complete with only a couple of missing chapters, and when it’s done, it’ll be available in a couple of forms:

• For free, online
• For money, in the form of an O’Reilly book

As with Dive Into Python and Dive Into Accessibility, Dive Into HTML 5 is published under a Creative Commons “By” 3.0 license. You can freely share the contents of the book and even take it and adapt it any way you please: into your presentations, into a lecture or blog article series, or even your own book on HTML 5 – as long as you give Mark credit for creating the original work.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Peter-Paul “ppk” Koch writes in his blog, QuirksBlog (which lives on his site, QuirksMode):

In the past few days I’ve been revising the CSS compatibility table with information about the latest crop of browsers. There’s no doubt about it: this is IE9’s show. It just supports nearly everything. No hassle, no buts.

…

Microsoft has finally taken the big leap forward we’ve been waiting for ever since they announced their decision to restart IE development back in 2005.

IE9 promises to be an excellent browser. Its CSS support is now at par with that of the other browsers — although each browser still has its specific areas where it performs less. But we cannot in good faith say that IE is behind the others any more.

In the article, he does a run-down of CSS selectors and finds that the upcoming IE9 does an excellent job of supporting them.

Go take IE9 for a spin – download Platform Preview 3 and try it out – and make sure to try your hand at CSS 3 as well!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As announced in yesterday’s posting, Platform Preview 3 of Internet Explorer 9 is out, and it’s faster than snakes on ice. Some of the credit goes to “Chakra”, the new JavaScript engine, and some of it goes to IE9’s hardware acceleration, which bypasses the layers of abstraction between your web app and the “metal” (namely, your browser, and then the underlying OS).

Download Squad have posted a video showing IE9 Platform Preview 3 blazing past Chrome 6 in side-by-side sessions of the “FishIE Tank” canvas demo. Even on my “medium performance” machine – a Dell Latitude XT2 tablet whose graphics card gets a 3.2 on the Windows Experience Index – I have to push the fish count to 250 before the frame rate drops below 30 fps. Here’s a screenshot taken from that laptop running FishIE Tank, rendering 250 constantly moving and scaling fish sprites between 22 and 29 fps:

The Mr. Potato Gun canvas test is amusing. You load a reasonable facsimile of a popular toy into a potato gun, pull the trigger and watch the hapless tuber’s components fly all over the screen:

Here’s a demo featuring a more practical use of canvas: Amazon Shelf, which presents a bookshelf of some of Amazon.com’s current bestsellers:

Click on a book in Amazon Shelf to get a better look at its cover:

Click on that cover and get the publisher’s blurb and customer ratings:

Take IE9 out for a spin! Visit the IE9 Test Drive site, download IE9 Platform Preview 3 and hit some canvas-enabled sites.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Back in March, when the first platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 was released at the MIX10 conference, the IE9 team promised to release new previews of the browser about every eight weeks. Eight weeks after MIX10, they kept their promise and released Platform Preview 2. It featured improved JavaScript performance and better adherence to HTML5/CSS/JavaScript standards.

Eight weeks has passed since Platform Preview 2, and it’s time for another release. I’m pleased to announce the launch of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3! Go ahead, download it, and read on to find out what’s in this new Platform Preview.

Not so long ago, if you were using an application, chances are that it was a desktop native app running on top of your operating system. These days, the odds are that the apps you’re running are web apps, which run inside your browser, which in turn run on top of your OS. Even if you’re not factoring in network latency, that extra layer of abstraction slows things down. Hardware acceleration is one fix to this problem, and that’s a major focus of Platform Preview 3. IE9 takes advantage of your computer’s GPU to render HTML graphics and text with greater speed.

When we say “HTML5”, we’re talking about more than just HTML and the associated styling, but JavaScript as well. Luckily, we’re not only speeding up HTML rendering; we’re also cranking up the JavaScript engine, codenamed “Chakra”, which is even faster in this release.

All this work means that IE9’s performance has been improving steadily since it was first shown (but not released) to the audience at the PDC conference in November. Here are the results of the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark for a number of IE9 iterations (and a Firefox thrown in for good measure):

And here’s a “wider” version of that chart, showing more of the Esteemed Competition’s browsers:

This puts IE9’s JavaScript performance within 50 milliseconds of the fastest browsers – that’s the time it takes sound to travel less than a couple dozen paces.

As the IE9 team will tell you, while JavaScript speed is important, many sites spend cycles in a browser’s subsystems that aren’t JavaScript. They’re always benchmarking against more than just the SunSpider test, but against some of the most popular sites on the net, a real-world test of a browser’s performance, and they’re not done optimizing yet.

By the bye, IE9’s JavaScript isn’t just fast, it adheres better to the ECMAScript standard and even implements new features in the 5th edition of the spec, known colloquially as ES5. They include new array and object methods, as well as other language enhancements for working with strings and dates, and the IE Test Drive site has some demos showing them in action.

Speed is just one dimension of browsing – standards is an important one, too! The support for the <audio> and <video> tags we talked about at MIX10 has been baked into Platform Preview 3.

There is one tag that was conspicuous in its absence, leaving a number of cynics, wags and conspiracy theorists to jump to the conclusion that it would never be included in IE9. Well, it’s here…

That’s right, Platform Preview 3 introduces the <canvas> tag to Internet Explorer. And it’s hardware-accelerated, too!

We’ve got a number of demos on the Test Drive IE site showing off hardware-accelerated <canvas>, including “Asteroid Belt”, shown below:

So how does Platform Preview 3 fare on the Acid3 test suite, the supposed bane of Internet Explorer’s existence? Not too shabby, jumping up to 83 out of a possible 100 (if you recall, Platform Preview 2’s score was 68):

There’s a lot more in Internet Explorer 9’s Platform Preview 3, but in the spirit of “Show, don’t tell”, I’m sending you to the IE Test Drive site to download it and take it for a spin, and please let us know what you think!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Checklists

To put it into programmer-speak, checklists are unit tests for everyday life. Like unit tests, checklists appear to be additional make-work that take valuable time away from performing the task at hand. However, when done right, checklists save time by helping ensure you’re doing everything you need to do and can even function as a sort of specification for the task (in fact, like unit tests, checklists often end up being the “real” specification for all intents and purposes).

Checklists may seem to the be province of by-the-book, obey-all-rules-and-regulations slaves to procedure, but I think it’s one thing those Poindexters got right. I would argue that the structure and order that they provide free us to spend our energy on those less controllable, more chaotic parts of our lives, work and play. As I like to say, “preparedness enables spontaneity”.

I could go on about the power of checklists and how even a pretty random goofball such as Yours Truly has benefited from them (at least when I use them), but I’d serve you better by pointing you to Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. In it, Gawande writes about how checklists have improved the outcomes in his own surgical practice, as well as in other fields such as piloting, where bad outcomes are really bad.

Launchlist

In spite of repeated threats from your client, the odds are that no one will get injured or die if something’s wrong with the web site or application that you’re working on. I hope that you still have enough pride in your work and your profession that you want to get things right. If you do – and I hope that’s why you’re reading this blog; you’re the sort of reader I’m going after – you’ll want to use tools like unit tests and checklists to ensure you’re getting things done properly.

One such tool is Launchlist, a simple-but-useful web application that acts as a checklist for web developers and designers. Built by Jay Hollywood (coincidentally my stage name should this computer fad blow over and I need to become an “exotic dancer” to pay the rent) and Lee Karolczak, it is:

…intended to help and encourage web designers and developers to check their work before exposing it to the world at large.

The product was born out of frustration. For too long we had been using archaic methods to conduct pre-launch testing and the web was an obvious choice to do it better.

Launchlist features a set of questions about the site you’re working on, based on Hollywood’s and Karolczak’s own experiences building sites. You should be able to answer “yes” to all of them before you unleash your site upon the world:

Launchlist could’ve been a simple site using checkboxes and bog-standard form elements, but in the age of modern web apps and increased appreciation of design that’s both functional and beautiful, I’m glad to see that they went the extra mile and worked some CSS magic. The “yes/no” toggle switches are beautiful, yet function quite well as checkboxes, and even the “Product Details” section, which would’ve functioned quite adequately as a bunch of ho-hum text fields, is pleasing to the eye:

Here’s a set of items on Launchlist’s checklist that shows what “checked” and “unchecked” items look like:

Launchlist’s creators came up with a set of questions that should apply to most web sites. However, if some of them don’t apply to your site, you can simply mark them as “not applicable”:

You can even add a comment to an item in Launchlists’s checklist, in case a simple “yes/no” answer isn’t sufficient:

And knowing that you might have checklist items that are unique to your projects, they gave Launchlist the ability to house up to 10 custom ones, like the one I created, shown below:

The status report is at the bottom of the list, which is also where you can add your own custom items to the checklist. If any of the applicable items in the checklist remain unchecked, the status report will read “Launch not advisable” and report the number of unchecked items:

If you checked all the applicable items in the checklist, Launchlist declares that your site is ready for launch:

Once you’re done checking and unchecking items, you click the “Submit report” button at the bottom, after which you’ll see this:

…and as the text in the “Your report has been sent” message says, you and the intended recipient of the status report are emailed. Here’s the text of the report that Launchlist sent to me:

Launchlist Submission Report for Test (http://joeydevilla.com):

Status: Launch not advisable – 5 items are still outstanding.
We recommend you resolve these items before launching your website.

ITEMS OUTSTANDING (NOT CHECKED)
—————————————————————————-

- Required fields have been tested?
- Forms send to correct recipient?
- Web Statistics package installed and operational?
- 404 page exists and informative?
-

APPROVED ITEMS (CHECKED)
—————————————————————————-

- All text free from spelling errors?
- Page & Content formatting has been tested?
- Print stylesheet exists and tested?
- Meta data has been included and is appropriate?
- Page titles are descriptive and SEO friendly?
- Images have appropriate alt tags?
- Title tags are appropriate and SEO friendly?
- Favicon has been created and displays correctly?
- Footer includes copyright and link to site creator?
- HTML has passed validation?
- CSS has passed validation?
  Comment – Todd says he’ll have it fixed by Friday.

- There are no broken links?
- JavaScript is error free?
- Displays & functions correctly in ie7?
- Displays & functions correctly in ie8?
- Displays & functions correctly in Firefox (Mac & PC)?
- Displays & functions correctly in Chrome (Mac & PC)?
- Displays & functions correctly in Safari (Mac & PC)?
- Displays & functions correctly in Opera (Mac & PC)?
- Tested at 1024 x 768 resolution?
- Tested at larger resolutions?
- Forms have been tested and processed correctly?
- Picture of Sean Connery in "Zardoz" outfit on every page?

—————————————————————————-

This report has been crafted and delivered via Launchlist http://www.launchlist.net

Follow Launchlist on twitter – http://twitter.com/launchlistapp

Lessons from Launchlist

Here’s a quick run-down of what I think can be learned from Launchlist. I’m sure that I’ll think of more after I’ve published this article…

• Design matters. Launchlist could’ve been built without all the stack we like to call "HTML5” (it’s really HTML5, CSS and JavaScript working together) and the gorgeous design, but without it, you wouldn’t be compelled to use it. And the design goes beyond its good looks; there’s also a great deal of usability and user experience design in Launchlist, from its clean layout to the controls that pop up only when they’re needed.
• You can do HTML5 in Internet Explorer. Launchlist works just fine with Internet Explorer 8 (the screenshots I took for this article were taken from a Launchlist session in IE8) – a quick “View Source” reveals that they used the HTML5 Shim for IE. And of course, there’s IE9, which the Internet Explorer team is working furiously on.
• Do one thing, and do it very, very well. I think that this is a good app philosophy, and I believe it applies doubly to those of you planning to build apps for mobile devices, whether they’re phones or tablets.
• “Freemium” (or: Apps can be ads). Launchlist’s creators say that the version of Launchlist at Launchlist.net will always be free, but that they’re working on a paid subscription version with more features. I think this is a good approach – there’s no marketing like a “starter” version, especially when what you’re making is so nice.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Earlier this week, I was asked to make a short video that would be shown during a round table discussion on a hot topic: HTML5 vs. proprietary rich internet app technologies, such as Flash and Silverlight. My video was supposed to take the “RIAs complement HTML” side of the debate, while someone else would produce a video taking the “HTML5 trumps RIAs” side.

My own personal belief is that HTML5 – actually the stack of HTML5, CSS3 and Java/ECMAScript – has closed the interactivity gap between the web and desktop apps and will continue to close it. However, for the time being, there are still cases where HTML5 just can’t cut it – for various reasons, such as performance, browser compatibility or designer-friendliness – and that’s where RIAs shine. Hence I found it rather easy to put together an amusing little video titled HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with Benefits (5:47, YouTube).

I did the production work on Tuesday afternoon and evening using the following tools:

• LifeChat LX-3000 headset as my microphone
• Audacity to record and edit the audio
• Fireworks to edit the pictures
• Camtasia Studio to build and produce the video
• Silvetta piano accordion for the music

Enjoy the video!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon!

What is MIX?

The email sigs for people involved with MIX claim that it’s a “designer/developer lovefest for the web”, and I think it’s a pretty one-line summary of the event. It’s a conference for people who develop and design for the web, with particular attention paid to user interface and experience. This will be the 5th MIX conference, the first one having been held in 2006.

What Sort of Sessions Will There Be at MIX10?

Here’s a selection of some of the sessions and workshops at MIX10:

• Boot camps on up-and coming frameworks, such as Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• Molly Holzschlag’s all-day HTML5 workshop
• Sessions on user experience such as:
  • Design Fundamentals for Developers
  • The Art, Technology and Science of Reading
  • The Laws of User Experience
  • Running with Wireframes: Taking Information Architecture into Design
• Technology sessions such as
  • Building Cloud Services with Windows Azure Platform
  • Miguel de Icaza’s session on The Mono Project
  • Robots at MySpace: Massive Scaling a .NET Website with the Microsoft Robotics Studio
  • Touch in Public: Multi-Touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences

There are some other cool things happening at MIX10 that I can’t talk about until the conference. Be there, or if you can’t, watch this space!

You Get to Vote!

You can help choose some of the content for MIX10! We took a number of submissions for presentations in an open call for content, and now it’s time to vote for them. You can see all the submissions here, and voting ends on Friday, January 15th.

Early-Bird Discount

If you register for MIX10 by January 15th, you’ll save US$600 off the admission and pay only US$795 – and you’ll also get a free night at the conference hotel, Mandalay Bay! After the 15th, the price goes up to a full US$1395, so if you want to go, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’d like to know more, see yesterday’s article about Make Web Not War. If you’d like to register, visit the registration page.

The “sea change” that’s been going on at Microsoft for the past little while is one of the things that convinced me to join the company and one of the factors in their even asking me to come in for a job interview. One of the most telling signs of this sea change is in Microsoft’s new approach to open source and web, with initiatives like the Open Source Lab, improved standards support in IE8, PHP on Windows, the Web Platform Installer and Open Source Initiative-approved MS-PL license, to name a few.

We know that the web is a big salad bar of various technologies put together by different vendors and organizations, and at long last, it seems that we’re cool with that. We’ve been reaching out to web developers of all stripes, from Microsoft “true believers” to people who don’t typically build their stuff with or on our stuff.

Make Web Not War is an event being held in Vancouver on June 2nd and Toronto on June 10th where we invite people building solutions on the web – whether you build on Microsoft tech or not – to get together and:

• Hear from people who build on open source and Microsoft technologies
• Network with other web developers living and working in your area
• Learn about the latest Microsoft technologies and how they work with open source
• Get technical training to build your web development portfolio
• Win prizes and get your Web Warrior DVD featuring all the latest Microsoft Web Resources

The Vancouver event takes place today, June 2nd at Microsoft’s Vancouver office (1111 W. Georgia, 11th floor). It’s a half-day event featuring a presentation by Morten Rand-Hendriksen from Pink and Yellow Media as well as breakfast, a web partner community showcase and a lunch social.

The Toronto event takes place on Wednesday, June 10th at the Ted Rogers School of Management (use the entrance at 55 Dundas Street W.) and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.. It’s a full-day event with presentations by:

• David Crow, Microsoft
• Mano Kulasingam, Digiflare Inc.
• Brendan Sera-Shriar, PHUG.ca / Rich Media Institute
• Stephen Nichols, Softcom
• Yann Larrivée, PHPQuebec

The Toronto event will feature breakfast, keynote, web partner community showcase, another keynote, lunch, breakout sessions, a Windows Server 2008 InstallFest, a web developer technical session and the FTW! competition final showdown. It’s be a very full day.

The registration fee for both the Vancouver and Toronto events is “donate what you want”, with a suggested donation of CAD$10. The money will go to a good cause: PREVnet.ca, the anti-bullying network.

Whether you’re a died-in-the-wool ASP.NET type, think in PHP or create new web applications by typing in rails mynewapp at the command prompt, Make Web Not War has something for you. For more details about Make Web Not War, check out the official site.

Mental Models and Bill Buxton’s “Draw a Computer” Exercise

In the mid 1990s, well before he was Microsoft’s user interface guru, Bill Buxton often asked people to carry out a simple little exercise: draw a picture of a computer. Most, if not all, of the people he asked would draw something that fit the common mental model of the desktop computer of the era: cathode ray tube-type monitor, keyboard, mouse and that box housing the motherboard and drives that many people mistakenly refer to as “the CPU”.

If Buxton were to ask the question today, the drawings of computers might look like these:

If he asked the question in the mid-to-late 1980s, the drawings might’ve looked like these:

And had he asked the question in the mid-60s, the drawings might’ve looked like this:

Buxton likes to point out that the changes in computers from the 60s onwards are largely in the implementation technology, processing power and outward appearance. When most people draw computers, he said, they’re merely drawing their mental model, which is based on the outer packaging.

However, if you use the mental model of a technologist, computers have been essentially the same instruction/ALU/storage/input-output boxes whether they’ve occupied whole rooms or fit in your pocket. They’ve been pretty much the same at their core, in the same way that fancy tech and hybrid engine aside, there really isn’t too much that separates a present-day Toyota Prius from a Model T Ford.

If Bill Buxton could approach Microsoft Corporation as a person — and hey, that’s the way the law treats corporations, so why not? – and asked him/her to draw a computer, I suspect that s/he would draw something based on mental model of a souped-up circa 2000 computer: a desktop computer with a nice flatscreen monitor, running Windows XP and having a somewhat limited connection to the ‘net.

I think that this is a problem. I also think that the source of this problem is Microsoft’s success.

Microsoft’s Company Mantras

“A PC on every desk and in every home” was Microsoft’s longest-lived slogan and the company mantra for the first 24 years of existence. Like the best slogans, it succinctly summarized the company’s goal. The problem is that the goal has pretty much been reached. In most parts of the first world, a good chunk of the second world and even a sizeable fraction of the third world, you can easily find a desktop computer, and it’s quite likely that it’s running some sort of Microsoft software.

Since 1999, the company mantra – I really hesitate the use the phrase “vision statement” — has been a little more vague. The company’s been thrashing between them a little more frequently, as you can see in this list of mantras taken from chapter 1 of How We Test Software at Microsoft:

• 1975 – 1999: “A PC on every desk and in every home.”
• 1999 – 2002: “Empowering people through great software – any time, any place and on any device.”
• 2002 – 2008: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
• 2008 – present: “Create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of internet services across the world of devices.”

The post-1999 mantra all seem a little limp in comparison to the original. Reading them, I cannot help but think of a quote attributed to web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman:

"…provide value added solutions" is not a mission. "Destroy All Monsters." That is a fucking mission statement.

Because the old mantra lasted for so long and the new mantras just don’t have the same straightforwardness and gravitas (How We test Sofware at Microsoft quotes Ballmer as saying that we may never again have a clear statement like the original to guide the company), the original remains quite firmly etched in the company culture and mindset.

I think it’s holding us back.

The Desktop as the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

The original mantra doesn’t just focus on the desktop, it actually mentions it by name. In 1975, when computers were room-filling behemoths that you could access either via batch or time-share, the concept of a desktop computer was downright radical. If you think the iPhone is impressive (and yes, it is), imagine how mind-blowing the Altair 8800, the first commercially-available desktop computer, must have been to a geek back in the Bad Old Days. It was the platform on which Microsoft’s first product – a little programming language called Altair BASIC – was launched, and it was BASIC that in turn launched the company.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how the Altair 8800 was a golden opportunity for Bill Gates and his buddies at his fledgling company, then called “Micro-Soft”. Unlike a lot of other companies at the time, they took the desktop computer seriously. Even when IBM got into the desktop computer game in 1981, it was a product of their Entry-Level Systems division, a clear indication that they thought the PC was a machine you bought until you were ready to graduate to a real computer. I don’t think that this philosophy ended up serving them well.

Since the big boys were paying no mind to the desktop computer, upstarts like Microsoft had a big empty field in which to play, and they thrived. Crack open just about any late 70s/early 80s computer that had BASIC built in – even Apple machines — and you’ll see a row of ROM chips with a Microsoft copyright notice. It was Microsoft that swooped in with PC-DOS when a deal with Digital Research for a PC version of CP/M was slow in coming (and this is despite the fact that Gates recommended that IBM go to Digital for an OS). A lot of people’s experience with desktop computers (and Microsoft revenue) is defined by circa-1995 Microsoft thanks to Windows 95 and the results of Bill Gates’ memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave, both of whose influences are still felt to this day.

Once upon a time, it used to be unusual to walk into someone’s home or office and see a computer. These days, it’s unusual to walk into someone’s home or office and not see a computer, and Microsoft’s focus on the desktop had a lot to do with that.

The Desktop as Albatross

When electric motors first became available, engineers envisioned factories and eventually houses being equipped with a single electric motor. They imagined that the central motor would, through a series of gears and drive belts, be connected to whatever machines in the house or factory had to be driven by it. What happened in the end is that rather than relying on some central motor, electric motors “disappeared” into the devices that used them. Here’s an exercise to try: go and count the electric motors in your house or apartment right now. The number should be a couple dozen, and if you can’t find them, this article might help.

When big, room-filling computers first became available, engineers envisioned businesses being equipped with a single computer in a manner roughly analogous to the aforementioned big central motor. We know what happened in the end – while many businesses do make use of big datacenters, a lot of the computing power got spread out into desktop computers.

I have a theory that comes in two parts:

1. Just as electrical motors disappeared into the devices that needed their work, and just as computing power got spread out from big mainframes into desktop machines, computing power is now both disappearing and spreading out into mobile devices and the web/cloud.
2. Microsoft, with its desktop-centric approach, at least outwardly appears to be missing out on this migration of computing power.

Most of the company’s attention, at least to an outside observer, seems to be focused on Windows 7. Yes, chances are that with computer sales being what they are, Windows 7 will probably end up on more of laptops and netbooks than desktops, but I consider those devices to simply be the desktop computer in a more portable form. It worries me that there have been more concrete announcements about Windows 7 on netbooks than upcoming versions of Windows Mobile, despite the iPhone and BlackBerry-driven evidence that the real mobile action is in smartphones.

(Tomorrow, I’ll post an article in which I argue that netbooks are a dangerous red herring pulling away our attention from devices like smartphones.)

Even when the company reaches out beyond desktop development, there’s no escaping the desktop “gravity well”. Consider ASP.NET (that is, the “traditional” ASP.NET, not the recently-released ASP.NET MVC). To my mind, as well as the minds of a lot of other web developers, it’s a web framework that tries really hard to pretend that the web doesn’t exist. It makes use of a whole lot of tomfoolery like ViewState to create a veneer of desktop app-like statefulness over the inherently stateless nature of the web and a programming model that tries to mimic the way you’d write a desktop application. It’s almost as if it were designed with the mantra “the web is like the desktop, but lamer” instead of “the web is like the desktop, but everywhere”. Although the framework works just fine and there are a number of great sites and web apps built on it, I think a lot of developers sensed this design philosophy and went elsewhere for web development.

(An aside: My old boss at OpenCola in late 2001 told me that he’d been meeting with Microsoft people and suspected that Internet Explorer 6 would be the final version of their browser. The expectation that web pages and web applications would be replaced by Windows client applications pushed over the net, a prediction similar to one made by the Java folks a few years prior.)

The same situation exists with Windows Mobile’s current user interface, which is basically a subset of Windows’ standard UI controls for the desktop, scaled down to fit smaller screens, and with a stylus standing in for the mouse. It’s almost as if it were designed with the mantra “mobile computing is like desktop computing, but lamer” instead of “mobile computing is like a mobile phone plus PDA and an MP3 player, but cooler.” If the ASP.NET design mantra is a whisper, the Windows Mobile mantra is a scream.

I suspect that the reason the XBox 360 didn’t fall into a similar kind of trap — “set-top boxes are like desktop computers, but lamer and only for games” – is that the XBox team is situated off the Microsoft Campus and less susceptible to the desktop influence.

My Mission

At my most recent one-on-one meeting with my manager John Oxley, we talked about a need for each member of our Evangelism team to define his or her area of focus. The Microsoft platform is a vast, nerdy expanse spanning the range from embedded computing all the way to Cray supercomputers; no single person can hope to cover it all.

He already had a good idea of what I wanted to focus on, and by now, I guess you do as well. I feel that just as computing expanded beyond the big computer rooms and onto our desktops, computing is expanding beyond our desktops into all sorts of different places:

• Invisibly, into the web and cloud in the form of web applications and services
• Visibly, into our pockets and living rooms, and embedded into all sorts of real-world things

While I believe that Windows 7 is a necessary part of the Microsoft platform, I’m not too worried about focusing on it – there are more than enough people at the company to promote and evangelize it. I want to focus on the platforms that I feel that Microsoft hasn’t given enough love and attention: the non-desktop platforms of the web, mobile and gaming, as well where they intersect.

It’s a big area to cover, but I think Microsoft needs to be active in this area if it wants to be true to its forward-looking roots. I even have a mantra for it: “To help web, mobile and game developers using Microsoft tools go from zero to awesome in 60 minutes.” I want to give developers both that rush when getting started with a new technology as well as the sustained passion to keep working with it, in the same way that Ruby on Rails and the iPhone got developers with an initial flash of excitement and turned it into long-term passion. It’s an ambitious, audacious mission, but no more so than the one coined by a bunch of scruffy nerds in New Mexico in the the 1970s: “A PC on every desk and in every home.”

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re going to be in the area of downtown Toronto next Thursday, May 28th, you might want to check out my presentation, Canada’s Next Top Model View Controller at the next Metro Toronto .NET User Group meeting. I’ll be talking about the ASP.NET MVC Framework, Microsoft’s answer to MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, CakePHP and Catalyst. As is my stock in trade with presentations, this will be informative, enlightening, entertaining and just might feature a rock and roll accordion performance.

The presentation takes place Thursday, May 28th at 6:00 p.m. at the Manulife Financial Building (200 Bloor Street East, Toronto, between Church and Jarvis – use the entrance on St. Paul Square). Admission for the presentation is free, but you have to register, and as of this writing, only 24 tickets remain.

For more details about the presentation, visit the Metro Toronto .NET user group site.

The major map APIs provide a “zoom” feature that lets you zoom the map in or out if you position the cursor over the map and use your mouse’s scroll wheel. Sometimes you want this function enabled, sometimes you don’t. David Janes, over at his Code Blog provides the JavaScript code for:

• Enabling and disabling the mouse wheel zoom for Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Disabling the mouse wheel zoom for Yahoo! Maps (it’s enabled by default, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to re-enable it once disabled.)

Links

• David Janes’ Code Blog: How to enable/disable Mouse Wheel actions on your map