Bring It On

I really don’t get it. I’ve said it before – I don’t mind if Microsoft occasionally wants to check the validity of my copy of Windows, as long as the process is effortless, quick, and as little in my face as possible.

Up to now, it has been like that. Before you download something, almost transparent verification process will happen just before you are allowed the download and off you go. The same happened to the Windows Media Player 11 download, again, just fine with me.

But why oh why does the Windows Media Player installer asks me again to validate my copy of Windows? I have already validated it! If it must, why do I have to validate in order to download?

C’mon guys, validating once is enough.

I guess the most well-known of the new Vista features is the UI – Aero Glass looks good and is sufficiently different than the current Windows offerings like XP.

Getting a cool looking app is very easy using .NET Framework 3.0 technology like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as I will show in the GUI for my P2P app. Exposing services over Internet is also very easy when you have Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) at your disposal. Both of these technologies have been covered quite a lot.

But I want to draw your attention to the other two .NET 3.0 technologies – the Workflow Foundation and Cardspace. The former is nothing revolutionary, but it does formalize something that almost all business applications do and most of the other apps too. Word “workflow” is unfortunately overloaded and it might be hard to understand what this technology is really about?

I like to think about workflow as a high-level IF-THEN-ELSE. Most of the business logic of any kind in any app written in any traditional language (not counting functional languages) is buried somewhere in code and ultimately boils down to an “if” statements all over the place. Looking at the code it is hard to figure out the overall “flow” of the code and how exactly does the code react to external (and internal) stimulus and what it does.

Workflow foundation formalizes things by providing a set of classes and events that help you not only structure your code in a way similar to many other developers, but also provides a graphical view of the whole flow and even allows you to debug that. It’s a great way, especially for less experienced developers that will not get the architecture right from the first time, to build their code on a well-thought out building blocks. Personally, I will be using state-machine based workflows for the BitTorrent protocol and my extensions. The protocol allows for quite a few states and transitions and having this kind of logic scattered around the code was never an options. I have built a mini version of Workflow myself – based on an XML file I generate a giant switch statement, inside a partial class that is merged with the rest of the code by the compiler. The system works well, but I don’t have a visualizer like Workflow does and I tend to avoid writing code that has already been written.

The other technology, Cardspace, is even more exciting. It finally brings in all of the advantages of modern cryptography packaged properly and easy to use into the field of identity. It will hopefully allow for a lot better user identification story on the Internet. I guess we are all getting tired of writing login related classes and tables for each and every user centric site on the Internet? Having a site that does not require any of this is just a tip of the iceberg. Helping prevent phishing and allowing for diversity of actual underlying technology choices (instead of a single sign-on identity silo like Passport was supposed to be) is just some of the goals and achievements of Cardspace. Unfortunately, because of a lot of cryptography related knowledge required if you want to do non-trivial things, I do not expect this technology to be widely used by developers and might prevent some from even having a look.

After a lot of hot-cold moments with Vista and related .NET 3.0, I can say that in the end, I am satisfied how things turned out. This is a great set of technologies to build the apps on.

I have mentioned my XBox several times before on this blog. Coming from a PC platform and giving such praise to the XBox says a lot I guess. Like some, I am a “single console” guy, mainly because I don’t have enough time for multiple consoles. So something like Playstation 2 was out of the question. Besides, most games today are published on multitude of platforms.

But portable factor is something completely different. If you had the chance to get a console that fits in your pocket, plays music, videos and games, has 3–6 hours of battery life, would you take it? I did.

My buddies and I have an arrangement – when one of us has a birthday, the other three contribute financially toward a gadget or two – thanks guys! This year I decided to go for the Playstation Portable (PSP) with 2GB of MemoryStick “storage”. Based on several comments from people like Scott Hanselman, I knew that besides from playing the games I will be able to use the PSP as a cheap portable media player – at the moment, 2GB black version is slightly over 250€.

The console is great. It has a clear, wide screen, good battery life, plays videos in a standard mp4 format, as well as mp3 and wma audio formats (the last one was added recently). The UI looks quite like Microsoft’s Media Center UI, which is good – it’s easy to navigate through and reasonably organized. Firmware updates are trivial – just configure the network access and click “Network Update”. PSP has 802.11b Wi-Fi built in and works with WPA encryption. New features are added all the time as new firmware versions come out. At the moment, I am running version 2.81. Games ship on a proprietary UMD media which is write only (and there are no recorders out there). UMD discs are very small and fit about 1.8GB of data, which is plenty for an average game. I’ve been playing burnout (see the screenshot above) and it looks great, slightly less cars and detail but in general just like its PS2 or XBox counterpart, soundtrack and all included.

But the great thing about this is timing – I ordered the console from French Amazon and a few games from Amazon UK. Both shipped the same day, the former was supposed to arrive a day before my birthday and the latter a day or two later. My birthday was on Saturday which means that if postman did not find us at home I would have to wait till Monday to pick any package at the post office.

But the stars aligned and both of the packages arrived and were delivered on Saturday  Talk about great timing.