I decided to write this post to provide a little technical information aimed at non-programmers (Project Managers, Department Heads and other Busy People) who want to know more about the platform; how it works and what it offers. My goal is that, after reading this article, you’ll have a basic – yet thorough – understanding of how Azure is structured so that you can make informed contributions to discussions regarding the platform. This is a work in progress.

Some of the analogies used in the following article are designed to facilitate understanding on a functional level, and may therefore be technically ‘inaccurate’. If you’ve picked that up, you’re probably more technical than this author had in mind as the intended audience!

As always, we’re all learning – if you have ideas or suggestions for improving this article, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Web Roles and Worker Roles
3. Resources
4. Storage
   • Blocks and Pages
   • Addressing blobs
5. Databases

An introduction to Windows Azure (for Busy People)

In the Azure world, you can have databases and applications all running in the cloud environment. By now, most of us know that a ‘cloud environment’ in its most basic form describes an environment in which you don’t ever see or touch the physical hardware or infrastructure as these are determined, managed and provided for you by the cloud service provider.

Developing and deploying applications onto the Azure platform requires a different approach to traditional application development, but developers can still continue to use all their existing tools (such as Visual Studio 2010) and don’t require any new software to get started. In fact, it’s actually possible to write applications for the Azure platform using the free Expression edition products provided by Microsoft.

Physically coding your applications, however, does require developers to change the way in which they build their applications, if only a little. That’s really a topic best left for someone else, or another post, to address.

On Azure, applications are referred to as ‘roles’, and there are two types of role: a “web role” or a “worker role”.

Think of a web role as a web site¹, and a worker role as some repetitive computational task that takes place behind-the-scenes without any user interface at all (a good example would be processing statistical data, or – to use examples from other blogs – a thumbnail generator for images).

Roles

Web Roles are similar to web servers, in that they allow public computers to connect to your application over standard HTTP and HTTPS ports. Typical Azure deployments consist of one – maybe two – web roles, and a number of worker roles. Worker roles are also publically accessible; that is they can talk to each other and the outside world, and other Azure services.

It is important to note, however, that one web role is not actually a web server in and of itself. It is simply an instance of your software running on a web server that is publically accessible.

Azure would not be complete without two other key service offerings: storage (some place to store all your data) and SQL Azure (a variation of SQL Server, which provides relational database capabilities to your cloud applications deployed on the Azure platform).

To recap then, Azure is a platform that provides:

• Some place to run your applications from (via web and worker roles)
• Some place to store all your application files
• SQL Azure – a relational database like SQL Server

Each of these functional areas are referred to as ‘hosted services’, and as you might expect there are limitations imposed by Microsoft as to the amount of resources available to each service.

Resources 

Though theoretically unlimited, in order to ensure all customers have resources available when required, Azure packages and limits what resources are available to specific deployments. Databases, storage and application instances are artificially capped according to the current limits (published online ², updated regularly and these are commonly expected to grow over time).

Web and worker roles come in four varieties: small, medium, large and extra-large. That’s because they are actually virtual machines (VM’s – software ‘simulations’ of physical servers, many copies of which can run on a single physical server). Each represents an increase in pricing and has a different set of specifications that govern how much RAM, local storage space and CPU cores are available to the role as described below:

Each VM is provisioned when required. The ‘magic’ of Windows Azure is that when you provision a VM, the Azure platform actually provisions a further two identically configured VMs. One acts as a recovery image, the other as a failover. If Azure detects a fault condition, it takes appropriate steps to automatically recover the damaged VM.

This is one of the most useful features of Azure, and you get it for ‘free’ – i.e., you don’t need to do anything particularly special to get this to happen, it’s simply a by-product of deploying your applications on to Azure.

Getting to Azure

To utilise Azure, you need an Azure services account (one per customer). Each account has the following overall limitations:

• Maximum 20 hosted service projects (projects contain instances)
• Maximum 5 storage accounts
• Limitation of 5 roles per hosted service project (i.e. 3 different web roles and two different worker roles, or any such combination)
• 20 CPU cores across all of the hosted service projects

Configurations of the Azure platform represent significant architectural decisions as deployments not only require the correct determination of ‘size’ but also the appropriate number of ‘instances’ of that deployment which will concurrently run. It is possible, therefore, to have two instances of a ‘small’ worker role running the same application. This would consume two of your maximum 20 cores. It is worth mentioning at this point that one can, at any time, reconfigure a deployed instance to utilise a larger VM or have a higher instance count, but that some (relatively minor) downtime would be incurred.

Storage

Storage in the cloud doesn’t work like any traditional disk-based system. That is, you’ll never have a “C:\” drive or a “D:\” drive³ (local storage is a topic I’m not going to cover here). The Azure platform makes disk space available as three distinct entities: Blobs (block and page), Tables and Queues. These three entities essentially abstract space on physical disks away into different logical units, within which programmers will never be able to ‘see’ the underlying disks or access them directly. This looks a little something like this:



Blobs are stored within containers and you can have as many containers as you can fit within your storage account quota. They’re a bit like folders, but only if you consider that you get to name them once they are created, and they cannot contain subfolders (or sub-containers, for that matter). Azure tables aren’t like tables in relational databases such as SQL Server or Microsoft Access, while queues provide a mechanism through which web and worker roles can talk to each other (instance A sends a message to instance B, which might – but doesn’t have to – process the message right away, hence why it is called a queue).

Block blobs and Page blobs

Block blobs are optimised for streaming, while Page blobs are optimised for random read/write operations. Block blobs are targeted towards streaming operations specifically because writing them is a two step process: first, you upload all of the individual blocks that will comprise the blob. Next, you must commit the blocks via a block list. During the commit phase, you can add/change or remove blocks from the blob. Page blobs, on the other hand, are updated immediately – no commit phase is required.Page blobs consist of an array of pages, where each page is 512 bytes and the blob size must be a multiple of 512 bytes.

Both block and Page blobs can be read from any byte offset in the blob, meaning it’s possible to read only a specific ‘chunk’ of either blob when it is on Azure Storage.

Page blobs: primary characteristics

Page blobs are fast and range-based, which means you can read from and write to specific ranges of a blob at a time. Page blobs are initialised with a Maximum Size, but if only half the blob contains data, you’re only charged for what you actually store in the blob. Page blobs also support leasing, which means it is possible for your application to ‘lock’ a specific range of the page blob while it is updating it, then release the lock.

The Windows Azure Storage blog has this to say about Page Blobs:

Another use of Page Blobs is to use them for custom logging for their applications.  For example, for a given role instance, when the role starts up a Page Blob can be created for some MaxSize, which is the max amount of log space the role wants to use for a day.   The given role instance can then write its logs using up to 4MB range-based writes, where a header provides metadata for the size of the log entry, timestamp, etc.   When the Page Blob is filled up, then treat the Page Blob as a circular buffer and start writing from the beginning of the Page Blob, or create a new page blob, depending upon how the application wants to manage the log files (blobs).   With this type of approach you can have a different Page Blob for each role instance so that there is just a single writer to each page blob for logging.  Then to know where to start writing the logs on role failover the application can just create a new Page Blob if a role restarts, and GC the older Page Blobs after a given number of hours or days.  Since you are not charged for pages that are empty, it doesn’t matter if you don’t fill the page blob up.

Block blobs: characteristics

Block blobs consist of, well, blocks! I’d say, in my experience, most people would want to be using block blobs over page blobs because they’re a little more flexible in terms of their sizing. For instance, a block blob does not have to declare its size when you create it: you just keep adding blocks to the blob until you’re done. There’s another benefit, too. With block blobs, you can send blocks in any sequence, then arrange them later on when you call your commit function. This makes them ideally suited to transferring large files, where your client is able to use a few threads to send the file in chunks.

Understanding the limitations of block and page blobs

Storage, like the other Azure services, is also subject to some limitations (and its own pricing structure), and the current limits are described in Table 3 below:

You can mix and match block and page blobs within your account, but a block blob cannot suddenly ‘become’ a page blob, or vice versa. Once a blob is created as one particular type, it will always remain that type. A block blob cannot contain pages, and a page blob cannot contain blocks for instance.

Addressing blobs

Blobs aren’t accessed or written to like traditional file systems, with a nice path-to-folder-and-filename approach (e.g. “C:\My Documents\My File.jpg”). Blobs use URIs to organise their data, e.g.:

blobname/which/can/have/slashes/but/dont/represent/folders/file.jpg.

It is precisely because this system is URI-based that it can be so vast and resilient to failure, as there are many copies of each individual physical drive. Therefore, it’s safe to say that when you upload a file to Azure and store it in blob storage, it’s pretty safe!

Earlier, I explained that a blob should be thought of as a container for files. This is not strictly true, but the analogy is very similar. In actuality, blobs are containers for blocks (chunks of a single file) and pages (more on those below), and blobs are actually organised into containers themselves. One file may be one block (if it is under 4MB in size; the maximum size limit for a block), or it may be several thousand. If the file is over 64MB in size, it must be split into blocks. Azure, perhaps confusingly has two varieties of blob storage: block and page.

Let it suffice to say that block blobs can be no larger than 200GB, and page blobs can be no larger than 1TB. Any combination of the latter must not exceed 1 TB. You can therefore see that the storage system in Azure is much more complex than the traditional system we are used to, but that it offers significant advantages over the former.

Databases: SQL Azure

Microsoft has redesigned some of their core applications (such as SQL Server) to work specifically on the Azure platform, and as such, they have some very appealing advantages over the versions of the products that you can buy commercially.⁴

In typical server-based implementations of SQL Server, it is common to find one server acting as the master while the other one monitors it to take over should it fail (the slave). This means the database is subject to the limitations of that server (storage space, processing power and bandwidth). It also means that although you have two servers powered on and dedicated to the task of serving a database, only one is ever actually working at any one time, which represents half the total available computing power and is a good example of why paying for hardware through a traditional hosting company is actually a less appealing concept.

On Azure, SQL Server has become SQL Azure – and now, the concept of master/slaves has gone and you have multiple servers all serving the same database, resulting in massively higher processing power and greater throughput capacity. What this ultimately means is that one can work with that database much more quickly than one can with SQL Server.

Now, there are some fundamental differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server. For example, one cannot do everything one can with SQL Server within SQL Azure. Bear that in mind when your developers explain this to you, as the two products are not exactly the same.

Databases require somewhere to store their data. SQL Azure has the following database packages available:

In addition, data transfer charges apply to the standing monthly charge:

SQL Azure offers the opportunity to pay only for what one actually uses. The standing monthly charges are amortised over the month and you only pay for the days on which you actually have the databases in each specific tier. This makes it a very cost-effective way to purchase database space in the cloud.

Also, being based on the Azure platforms means that there are a number of additional advantages:

• Data stored in an automatic high-availability environment
• Fault tolerance included
• 99.9% “Monthly Availability” SLA ⁵

This concludes our basic high-level introduction to the Windows Azure platform and I hope you have enjoyed reading it. If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Foot notes:

A web role does not have to be a web site – it could be a web service, such as an API. A web role is publically accessible via the World Wide Web.

Available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee814754.aspx

Service quotas are expected to grow over time and automatically become available to hosted services.

“Local storage” excepted; in this document I am discussing globally available storage.

Azure is a proprietary technology and no company can install their own private instance of it. Microsoft software written purely for Azure is not available to any third party to install and host on their own infrastructure.

See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla/ for all the Azure platform SLAs

http://www.ccpact.com/

Pick up the phone and call almost any large corporation, and it is likely you’re going to have to wrestle with more than just the issue that prompted you to call in the first place. What’s worse, though, is to tell your customers that – after they’ve spent 30 minutes on hold – they need to ‘go online’ to raise a support ticket, or email them instead.

If that seems odd to you, then you’re very lucky you’ve never had to deal with companies that operate in this manner (yes, they exist).  Just last week though, I had encountered a problem with some of the servers at our hosting company that we couldn’t fix (network issues). This meant I had to make a support call. That call went something along these lines:

• Good afternoon, [Acme] support. How may I help you?
• Yes, hello – I’d like to talk to someone about [the issue].
• Sure, can I take your account number?
• [I give the account number]
• Ok, what’s the problem?
• [I describe the problem...]
• I see. Have you tried [this]?
• Yes, that didn’t work. It’s a network issue, we can’t resolve this ourselves.
• Ok, sir, I’m afraid you’re going to have to raise a ticket in your online control panel so that we can direct our engineers to take a look at it.”

Now, at this point, if you’re that someone at Acme who decided that’s what needed to happen, you should be sacked. Or at least beaten a few times with a printed version of Wikipedia (yes, that would be a lot of paper, and yes - that would sting). Let’s review the reasons why:

• The person calling you is a customer – which means, they’ve given your company some money
• The product or service they’ve bought isn’t working as it should, or they need some help getting it to work
• They’ve made the decision to phone you, on a number you’ve listed as a support line, rather than email you, probably because they need or want a speedy resolution
• They’ve waited on hold – probably patiently – and even put up with your repetitive music loops and reminders of how important we are to you
• And they’ve described their problem to your agent on the telephone
• Your agent made some suggestions, but they didn’t help

So when you ask them to hang up the phone and repeat everything they just said but in writing, you’re wasting their time. More importantly, however, you’re telling the customer that you [as the agent on the phone] just don’t care enough about the problem – and by extension the customer – to raise the ticket internally to get it dealt with.

Ultimately, the customer doesn’t care – and shouldn’t have to care – about whatever processes you have to go through internally in order to get a result. As far as they are concerned, they’ve reported a problem to an agent of the company. If that person does not have the ability internally to take whatever steps are necessary to get a resolution to the customer, then I’m sorry, but the management of Acme is failing its customers. Every person in your company should have the customers at the forefront of their minds. If they don’t, you don’t want them working for you. That’s not some wishy-washy mantra, either: it’s based on a rather solid principle:

“You will get more customers, and keep the existing ones happy, if you make them feel valued.”

‘Value’ is a relative term, agreed. I think most people would agree, though, that ‘value’ in this context during a typical conversation between them and you is:

• Quick reply
• Informative reply
• Speedy resolution
• .. and I’m not even talking about ‘going the extra mile’ here, this is just the standard stuff.

Every time you tell the customer that they need to do something else to satisfy your own requirements, you’re just putting up barriers. Do it for them, or, better still – remove the barrier, because you probably don’t need it. If your own support processes are so inflexible that an agent on the phone can’t walk over to, or call, the 2nd level support guys, change your support processes.

Human beings live connected lives. We are social creatures. As individuals, we don’t see the point in lengthy processes or bureaucracy because we should just be able to explain a problem to someone and have them deal with it – and get us the response we need. But ‘business analysts’, and those who go to ‘customer service school’, believe that a flowchart is a much better way to provide a service. And they’d be wrong, simply because your customers can never follow your own ‘critical path’ – they don’t know it. And they shouldn’t need to.

The bottom line is, there should only be one critical path when a customer calls you. It goes something like this:

• Receive call/email/fax/letter/visit in person
• Take the time to understand what they’re saying and what their concerns are
• If you can’t deal with it there and then, hand over to the person that can and inform the customer what is happening, then, crucially:
• FOLLOW IT UP

This process can of course only work if every person in your company is dedicated to putting the customer at the heart of what they do. If you don’t think that’s something you can achieve, then you should be looking at your work force and firing those that don’t think your customers are important, because your customers are who pays your salaries. Happy customers = more customers = fat paychecks, bonuses and a less stressful environment for everyone.

The problem is that common sense seems to have gone on holiday in some organisations

I don’t think management books are required, here. If you’re that company with the problem, all you need is to stand back and take a common-sense approach to structuring your teams. Better still, common sense says that if you have a bunch of people who all share the same principles, they’ll organise themselves to get the job done.

Customer service oriented process diagrams only exist because companies are frightened that the service they provide to a customer will be inconsistent between employees.

Providing the quality of interactions remains high, then surely it doesn’t matter what route the employees take to get the job done? At the end of the day, if all the employees subscribe to some of the basic principles of good customer service, they’ll all reach the same goal – and this leaves you the task of managing quality, learning more about your customers and how you can improve your products.

And let’s face it, spending your time improving your products is probably much more rewarding than ruining your customer’s day while you drag them ass-first through your ugly, bloated processes. Scrap them. Keep it simple, and remember:

That’s the end of my rant, feel free to leave a comment. If you’re looking for more inspiration, head over to http://www.ccpact.com/ and learn more about the Company-Customer Pact. It’s a great starting place to improve your relationships with your customers.

I’ll provide more details about the PC’s specification soon, but I wanted to share some information about the various ways in which SSDs can be configured and how they affect performance. There are plenty of articles out there regarding SSD design, from a technical point of view, but I haven’t found any that have compared AHCI to IDE so that I could figure out which might give my Colossus the best chance of performing well. So, I decided to run my own basic test.  

Motherboard  

For this test, I am using the Intel DP55KG motherboard running BIOS version KGIBX10J.86A (17th Feb 2010). The DP55KG has 8 on-board SATA ports, six of which are powered via the board’s PCH, and two via an integrated Marvell 88E6145 chip (check out this post for an excellent review of the DP55KG).  

The SSD  

The drive under scrutiny here will be the OCZ Colossus 120GB. On paper, according to OCZ, the drive supports read and write speeds up to 260MB/sec, with sustained write around 140MB/s. This was the best drive I could find of this capacity in the price bracket.  

The 3.5" 'Colossus' SSD by OCZ

The test  

I wanted to know, “Which performs better, AHCI or IDE?” followed by “will IDE mode on the Marvell chip out perform IDE mode on the Intel PCH controller?”. To find out, I will use Passmark Performancetest 7.0 from Passmark. It provides a simple, standardised means of testing my SSD’s.  

• To test the Intel PCH:
  • Configure the controller in IDE  mode
  • Install Windows 7 Ultimate
  • Install the latest Intel Chipset drivers
  • Restart
  • Install Passmark PerformanceTest 7.0
  • Run tests
  • Repeat these steps, but next time configure the controller in AHCI mode.
• To test the Marvell Chip:
  • Connect the OCZ Colossus to port 0 on the board
  • Verify controller is in IDE mode (AHCI is not supported by the Marvell chip)
  • Install Windows 7 Ultimate
  • Install the latest Intel Chipset drivers
  • Restart
  • Install Passmark PerformanceTest 7.0
  • Run tests

Results  

Here are the raw test results. Note that the figures quoted are in MB/s.: 

Here’s the corresponding bar chart (click to enlarge):  

Intel DP55KG PCH IDE vs AHCI, vs Marvell IDE

VESA mount-it, stand it up, or lay it flat

 The vision  

Recently, I ditched Sky+, a subscription-based satellite TV service that comes with a personal video recorder and subscription TV service in one package. The PVR element is actually pretty darn good: very quick, responsive and the guide functions are adequate. The interface is a bit bland, but it is responsive and clear - and that’s what really counts. However, we realised that we just weren’t watching enough of the actual subscription channels (Sky 1, for instance) to warrant the monthly cost (no point paying for what you don’t use, right?). The trouble with ditching the service is, the PVR functionality is also disabled – which means no more ability to pause Live TV, or schedule programs to record. Darn.  

What I wanted, then, is to be able to use Media Center (a better product than the bog standard Sky+ box will ever be), with Digital Terrestrial TV (free-to-air). Media Center also allows you to watch and consume digital content stored on the rest of your network. Combine this with the HP Media Smart Windows Home Server’s ability to stream media, and you have a winning combo. To satisfy this need, I wanted a PC directly connected to the main TV in our living room, as my experience with using the Xbox 360 as an extender to my Win7 Media Centre box just didn’t cut it performance-wise.  

In addition to the PVR element, I also wanted a device that would enable me to consume the other digital content stored on our network: and the Sky+ box just can’t do that. Likewise, I can’t access recordings stored on the Sky+ box on my home network (nor could I back them up). So, the more I looked at it: the more Sky+ had to go.  

In moving toward a more connected, content-oriented home, there had to be a better way. And, at long last, I believe I have found it.  

My new setup: the hardware  

• Acer Revo R3610
• Windows Home Server (obviously!)
• PlusLink Dual DVB-T USB tuners
• Windows 7 Home Premium (for Media Center)

The Acer Revo was the key that unlocked everything and made it all possible – but out of the box, it isn’t configured in a way that was an exact match to my requirements. The model I purchased came pre-installed with 2GB RAM.  

Upgrading the Revo  

To get the performance I desired, upgrades were essential. I purchased the following extras:  

• 2GB RAM upgrade from Crucial UK
• OCZ 120GB Solid State Hard Disk

The result is a system that is simply stunning. It’s ready to boot from cold in just 30 seconds, and takes around the 15 second mark to resume from hibernate. It plays HD (1080p) content from TV channels, or from media streamed from the Windows Home Server. Plus, using the “Live TV” function in Media Center acts exactly as it should: it is swift and responsive.  

This is basically Sky+ on speed, using Media Center’s beautiful and clutter-free user interface with direct connection to the rest of the network which enables us to enjoy all the digital content we create.  

Now, even with Freesat and Digital Terrestrial TV (which gives us over 100 free channels, many of which are very good, particularly the BBC ones), we can now watch and record HD content speedily and consume that same content elsewhere on our home network.  

You can ditch the Sky+ subscription and still access Sky TV content  

Windows Media Center is just a modern wonder of the world. A recent update to WMC means that you can now access Sky TV content over the internet, with programmes directly listed inside the Programme Guide. You then have the option of renting the programme with prices starting from 99p. Pretty cool – so I really can ‘have my cake and eat it’.  

What did it all cost?  

Not including the Samsung Series 7 46” LCD TV it is connected to, the Acer Revo R3610 from Amazon.co.uk was £239.99. A 2GB RAM upgrade from Crucial UK cost £34.59 and the 128GB Kingston Technology SATA SSD was £168. The TV Tuner was an impulse buy from Maplin Electronics some time back and cost £24.99.  

At the end of the day, my ’dream media setup’ cost £469.  

The added advantage as well is that we get a lightning quick Windows 7 PC connected to the TV via HDMI – so other digital content, Youtube, and the like, even iGoogle, is just a click away.

In this article, I cover:

• Introducing Windows Media Centre
• How To: Set up Windows Media Centre
• How To: Connect your Xbox 360 to Windows Media Centre
• Windows Home Server and your digital media

Feel free to skip to the section that interests you most.

An impulse purchase that changed the way we consume media in our household

At the weekend, something happened that rocked my world. It didn’t happen accidentally, either. I was out shopping and I just happened to walk past Maplin (RadioShack, to you US folks) who had a special offer in their window: a KWorld PlusTV DVB-T Dual Freeview HD Tuner for the princely sum of just £24.99. That’s a small USB stick with an antenna connection on it that contains not one, but TWO HD Freeview TV tuners, giving the ability to watch one programme while recording another: for £24.99.

In the UK, Freeview gives access to about 100 digital channels, and, although they don’t broadcast in HD yet, in early 2010 the HD rollout begins.

Right now, the only way to get free HD TV over the air is to get Freesat HD or Sky+ HD, both of which require a satellite dish to be installed and cost a fair amount in set up and subscription fees.

At the time, like many geeks, I didn’t know why I wanted this particular gadget, but I the little voice inside of me compelled me to buy it. I figured, “hey, even if I don’t know what to do with it, perhaps Windows 7 will”. And that is where the fun began.

Introducing Windows Media Centre

With the recent release of Windows 7, millions of people globally have been busy remarking how much simpler the ‘simple’ things become when you install Windows 7.

Unlike Apple (for whom I shall now depart momentarily to direct a slight dig) who only have to worry about a limited number of devices on a limited platform of hardware, Microsoft have to build software that is actually compatible with hundreds of thousands of different devices and at least twice as many combinations. That is by no means an easy thing to accomplish, but Windows 7 seems to do it with dare I say it a certain degree of sentience: plug and play has actually come to life. Everything… every single USB gadget I own was detected first time, without me first needing to supply a driver CD. If Windows didn’t have the drivers, it ‘magicked’ them off the internet for me. Marvellous.

This includes the £24.99 TV Tuner from some anonymous company I’ve never heard of before. I plugged it in, and up popped the “Driver Installation” window and it downloaded the relevant drivers for me (I’m so glad it did as well – I don’t like installing drivers and software from anonymous small name companies).

A few minutes later, everything was successfully installed with zero effort on my part. In fact, the most strenuous part of this entire exercise was trying to open the box the device came in – which was apparently designed to survive a small tactical strike.

And this is where Windows Media Centre comes onto the scene – an incredible suite of technologies that’s designed with simplicity in mind. Shipped with Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate editions, Media Centre has – at its core – the ability to act as a centralised hub for all your digital media: music, videos, recorded and live TV. For anyone who’s seen TiVO or Sky+, Windows Media Centre does exactly what those two services do, but better, faster and subscription free.

Setting-up Media Centre

Launching “Windows Media Centre” from your Start Menu brings up a little animated Window:

Having detected that I had now installed a USB TV Tuner, Windows Media Centre asked me if I wanted to configure it. Allow it to complete the setup process, which – including the time it takes Media Centre to scan the TV frequencies in your country for available channels – took me about 10 minutes.

When the process is completed, Windows Media Centre is able to give you a TV guide showing weeks’ worth of programming schedules. The guide alone is worth ditching Sky+ for:

• Beats Sky’s “Series Link” function by adding numerous extra functions giving greater control over what is recorded and when
• Search for TV programmes by keyword in the title, or by cast members
• Create wish lists: specify your favourite actors and actresses, and the guide records any programmes it finds with those stars as cast members
• Manage potential recording conflicts before they arise and set priorities for your favourite shows

The list does actually go on. Have a look at some of the guide screenshots below:

The trouble is right now – this is TV on my PC. My PC is in my office – not my front room. We need to break out of here and I’ll be damned if I’m going to run a VGA cable from here to my 42” LCD TV in the front room. Nay – I want an easier way!

Xbox 360

Those of us with an Xbox 360 (or three) laying about the house know that we’re supposed to be living in some futuristic media-utopia where our TV’s can access all our music, videos and photos. Even TV (alright, that’s slightly pointless but you get the picture). But, even with Vista, this wasn’t particularly easy to set up. So I never bothered with it. It just didn’t quite work as expected.

Turn on your Xbox 360 while your Windows 7 PC is on, and you’ll receive a polite little notification that “Windows has discovered a Media Centre Extender”. Discovery – what an appropriate word. It popped up, and I thought to myself …. “Please, continue”. And so Windows did. After being informed a few seconds later that everything was installed correctly, I wanted my Xbox 360 to be able to access the juicy goodness of Windows Media Centre.

Follow these steps:

• Go to “System”
• Go to “Computers”
• Go to “Windows Media Centre”
• If you’ve already set up (or tried to set up) a Windows Media Centre connection before, you’ll first want to choose “Disconnect”. If you’ve not tried that before, that option won’t be available to you.
• Now, choose “Connect”.
• Your Xbox 360 will search your network for available Windows Media Centre computers. After a few moments, your Windows 7 Media Centre should be discovered, and your Xbox 360 will display a two-part eight digit code on your screen.
• Note that code down, and fire up the Windows Media Centre application on your PC.
• Go to “Tasks”, then “Add Extender” to bring up this screen:

  

• Type in the eight digit code you were given by your Xbox 360, and press “Next”.
• You’ll then see a screen similar to this:

  

• This process might take a little while to complete while your Media Libraries are constructed.
• Once complete, you’ll see a screen like this:

  

• By this time, your Xbox 360’s display will have changed and will be displaying a very similar (if not completely identical) display to the Windows Media Centre application on your PC.

And that’s it, you’re done – your Xbox 360 is now connected to your Windows 7 Media Centre.

What about Windows Home Server?

Ah, the “server in the home”. Got one? I have. If you haven’t, you should.

It takes care of backing up all your PCs, laptops and personal devices and my HP MediaSmart Home Server even automatically backs up my iTunes Libraries and streams them over the network. In fact, they’re so good I’d recommend them even for small businesses. Just plug them in, install the software on your PCs and laptops and you’re safe from day one (you can even do a bare-metal rebuild if you are running Windows 7 – that rocks).

Even cooler is that with the PowerPack 3 Beta recently released by Microsoft you can now install a connector for Windows Media Centre that allows it to take full advantage of the awesome storage capacity of your Windows Home Server.

The Windows Home Server Media Centre Connector (desperately in need of a shorter name, though it is hard to imagine one more descriptive) adds a little tab to your Windows Media Centre menu that, in a nutshell, allows Media Centre to archive your recorded television programs off to your Home Server automatically. It also adds some other nifty functionality to allow you to view most of the information contained on your Home Server Console on your TV, too.

In summary

It starts with the purchase of a TV tuner ‘dongle’. With Windows 7, in literally just a few minutes you can pretty much overhaul the way you access your digital content in the home. Chuck an Xbox 360 into the mix, and you’ve got the capability to stream HD content to your TV, listen to your music and browse all your photos right from the comfort of your armchair. I’d also recommend getting your hands on a great media remote (this one from Logitech is awesome) because you’ll quickly get bored using the Xbox 360 controller. The Logitech remote can also control many other devices so you can ditch the collection of remotes you’ve probably already got.

With Windows Home Server chugging away too, you’ll never lose any of your digital recordings again and since storage is so cheap these days, you’ll have a very easy mechanism for expanding your storage on demand.

BizSpark has already helped hundreds (thousands, now, perhaps?) of startups to succeed, and Websitespark looks set to do the same for smaller teams of web professionals. With no up-front costs and no long-term commitments (just a $100 exit fee at the end of the programme period) , what more could you ask for?

Full information is online and available at http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

If, like me, you’ve been eagerly awaiting the official release of Windows 7, you’ve no doubt wanted to install it on just about everything you have. We have a couple of Acer Aspire netbooks: fantastic, highly portable machines but, not fantastically powerful. Windows 7 boasts better performance on lower-spec hardware than it’s predecessor, so putting Windows 7 on the netbooks seems a logical choice.

It took about 12 minutes to install Windows 7 Ultimate from my USB pen drive to my Acer Aspire netbook

A while ago I blogged about how to install Windows Vista on your Aspire A150, so I thought now it would be a good time to update those instructions for Windows 7 users. Thankfully, the process is much more straightforward for Windows 7.

In case you’re wondering why you’d want to install from a USB pen drive, and not the DVD, consider these points:

1. Your laptop/netbook might not have an optical drive
2. Keeping the media on USB key is far handier than carrying the DVD around
3. Installations are typically much faster

Before you begin, you’re going to need:

• A spare USB key/pen drive
  • I used a ByteStor 8GB pen drive from Amazon. Just about any type of pen drive will work – but you will need one with a minimum of about 4GB.
• Your Windows 7 installation DVD (or the downloaded ISO from MSDN).
  • If you downloaded as an ISO, you’re going to need software to ‘mount’ the ISO first. See Virtual CloneDrive (free).

Step-by-step instructions

Ok, to get started – you need to make your pen drive ‘bootable’. That is, your computer needs to be able to recognise it as something it can boot from, and that’s not something yours will do without a little bit of prep work.

To get started, open a command prompt window ‘as administrator’, i.e. right click the command prompt icon and choose “Run as administrator”. Then perform the following steps:

• Plug in your USB pen drive. Make sure the contents are backed up to your hard disk somewhere, first. This process will erase the data on the flash drive.
• Type the following. After each line, press the RETURN or ENTER key to execute the command you have just entered:

  DISKPART
  LIST DISK
  

• Read the list on the screen. Figure out which ‘Disk ###’ is your pen drive. Look at the size of each drive listed – you should be able to figure it out by that. Note the disk number.
• Now, type the following. After each line, press the RETURN or ENTER key to execute the command you have just entered. Please note: it is extremely vital that you note the correct disk number from the previous step and enter it correctly below. If you have chosen the wrong drive, the drive you mistakenly chose will be rendered unusable.

  SELECT DISK (type your pen drive number here, without brackets)
  CLEAN
  CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
  SELECT PARTITION 1
  ACTIVE
  FORMAT FS=NTFS 
  

• Now, your pen drive begins to format. This took about 10 minutes on my 8gb drive.
• When formatting has completed, type:

  ASSIGN
  EXIT
  

Ok, that’s the hard work out of the way. At this point, you need your Win7 installation media. If it is on an ISO, mount it and make a note of the drive letter of your virtual drive. If it is a physical DVD, insert it into your computer and again, note the drive letter. Now, go back to the command prompt window and do the following:

• Type:

  CD [your drive letter]:\          --- For example: CD D:\
  CD BOOT
  BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 U:             --- (replace 'U' with your USB pen drive letter)
  

That’s it – you’re done in the command prompt. All you have to do now is copy the entire contents of your Windows 7 installation media across to the USB drive. Quickest way to do this is to open My Computer, open your DVD/Virtual DVD, press CTRL+A and then CTRL+C. Now go back to My Computer, open your USB pen drive, and press CTRL+V. When the copying has finished, you’re left with a bootable USB pen drive that contains Windows 7.

Better responsiveness equals a better product
- A. Customer

If your application is simple and responsive, people will use it. If it is clunky and slow to load, people are forced to wait. Think of your application (it doesn’t matter if it’s a web or a desktop application) as a racing car. As the manufacturer of that car, you’ll want customers to come and test drive it. You’ll hope that they’ll fall in love with it after driving it, and want to buy it. If that test drive is a good experience, they’ll hopefully part with some of their hard earned cash to pay for it – and bingo, you’ve done what you needed to do: make the sale. 

The same principle applies to software: if you deliver a fast, responsive application with a quick user interface, your users are more likely to think you’ve built a better product – (whether that’s right or technically wrong), because to Mr and Mrs User, a slow application is a bad one.

You can optimise your web site in just a few steps

As an ASP.NET developer, here’s a look (or a reminder) at some of the things you can look at doing before deciding it’s time to dig under the hood and start to make more fundamental changes in your application:

Disable debugging in your web.config

When you release an application in debug mode, ASP.NET forces certain files to be sent to the client with each request, instead of allowing the browser to cache them. Most people forget to switch debug mode off when they release. This creates an overhead for your server, and a longer wait for the client. Debug mode also causes other changes in your web application: think of it as a bloaty way to release because it has to include data and various hooks to allow you to debug the application that aren’t necessary in order to run it:

<compilation debug="false"/>

You’ll find the above line in your web.config file.

Enable IIS Request Compression

Request compression is a feature of Internet Information Services 6 and above that causes content to be compressed before transmission to the client, and then decompressed by the browser. Most modern browsers support this, and enabling it requires no modification to your web site at all. Do bear in mind that request compression will force your web server to work harder because it has to first compress data before sending it. This creates a small spike in CPU usage, for low to medium traffic web sites that really need a performance boost the extra CPU usage will more than likely be absorbed just fine.

In Internet Information Services 6:

1. Launch IIS Manager
2. Right-click the “Web Sites” node
3. Click “Properties”
4. Select the “Service” tab
5. Tick “Compress application files” and “Compress static files”. Be sure to specify a temporary directory with sufficient free resources and consider adding a maximum limit to the temporary directory size.
6. Click “Apply”
7. Click “OK”

Request compression isn’t for everybody – be sure to weigh the pro’s and con’s for your particular environment.

Use page output caching

By default, IIS thinks that your ASP.NET page is dynamic. In many applications, however, not all the pages actually are. Even if they do rely on a database for content, oftentimes it’s not necessary to hit the database on each request to the page. Output caching can be enabled on a particular page by adding one line of code to the top of your ASPX file. It is a directive that informs .NET to keep a copy of the rendered page, and serve the copy (rather than the original) from disk each time it is called. This would include, for example, any database generated content from controls on the page itself, or any embedded user controls.

<%@ OutputCache Duration="10" VaryByParam="none"%>

Page output caching can be an extremely effective way to improve your web site’s performance and responsiveness. It’s a lot more flexible than I’ve explained here, and you should be aware that there are all manner of ways in which you can control the cached version of the page (for instance, you can modify the directive to have different cached versions of the page based on a URL parameter). For more information, see the MSDN documentation.

Next steps

When you’ve done these things, if your application could still use a boost, it’s time to start profiling. You’ve tried the ‘quick fixes’ – the 10 minute jobs that are more-than-likely going to make things better, but there’s always a chance the problem isn’t with your application per sé. The next step is to figure out what’s causing the problem. First identify the scope: is it limited to one user, or a bunch of users in a particular geographic region, or is it everybody? If it’s only a small bunch of people, it might be that your ISP is having routing issues and you need do nothing at all. On the other hand, you might find that everyone is affected by the issue.

In that case what you need to do is to investigate where your bottleneck is occurring. Is it your database? Is it your disks? Or is it, yes, hold on a second – more than likely it’s the things you’ve probably overlooked: your images and other media files.

Optimising your images

Many people, particularly in smaller teams, overlook image optimisation. Most image editing programs will optimise for you – and this can often reduce a file’s size anywhere between 5% and 20%, and sometimes more. With today’s media rich sites, look at what you can do to ease the burden.

Using a content delivery network

As your web site grows ever more popular, sometimes the best way to get a performance boost is to let somebody else handle delivery of your ‘resource files’ – these are your static images, scripts, movies, SWF files, etc. One option is to purchase more bandwidth from your supplier. Another is to enlist the support of a Content Delivery Network – kind of like a private, global internet with public endpoints close to your customers.

The benefit of a CDN is that you are effectively outsourcing the delivery of your static files onto another – usually much faster – network. Often this will result in an ability for your server to handle more connections than before, since it no longer has to worry about serving up the big files over and over again.

Going direct to one of the big networks can cost anywhere from about $1,000 per month upwards, but there are companies who provide full CDN integration for a fraction of the price.

 Good luck with your web site optimisation and please feel free to leave comments and tips for others.

This, it would seem, is another victory for the European Commission and it’s competition rules. Microsoft has previously fallen foul of these in early 2008 when it was fined £765m by the European Commission for ‘anti-competitive behavior’: including Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer with Windows. Understandably then, it has decided to avoid that kind of financial pain again by bowing to the pressure.

Why?

Why does it matter what Microsoft choose to ship with Windows? It’s not like I have to pay for Internet Explorer, or any other browser by any other vendor, for that matter. So I, the consumer, am not losing out by it’s inclusion in the operating system.

Internet Explorer, like Windows Media Player, are features designed to make the operating system better, easier to use and increase the overall value of the product. Browsers should be features of every operating system.

Every major consumer-targeted operating system has it’s own browser included. Let’s take Apple’s Mac OS, for example: that ships with the Safari browser. Safari and IE browsers do essentially the same thing, and they are distributed to the consumer in exactly the same fashion: automatic inclusion by the vendor on to the newly purchased computer. Yet, Apple aren’t the target (so far as I know) of the EC competition rulings because they aren’t the market leader.

To impose this type of ruling on Microsoft because they are the market leader seems very similar to saying that Microsoft are the market leader because of Internet Explorer, which isn’t true at all. So surely, if you’re going to impose this type of rule on any vendor then surely you must apply it to all of them: that’s really the only way to give consumers a free, fair choice, right?

What’s the difference?

I assume that the EC are interested so much in Microsoft’s activities because it holds the majority market share. So too, then, I would assume it to be equally interested in Nokia, who according to this article, held 40.43% of the Mobile Device market share in Q12009, making them the market leader. Are Nokia the subject of an EC competition rules enquiry for bundling their own software with their device?

I can’t see much practical difference either, between companies like Dell and HP, who pre-bundle their own proprietary software programs and utilities onto the PC’s they ship, and this, either. Perhaps the EC will go after these companies under their ‘anti-competition’ rules, too.

Ultimately, it comes down to education

Eight or 9 times in 10, most users don’t care what browser they’re using: at least in my experience. Most consumers just want something that works. They don’t care what it is, why should they? I certainly don’t get all shirty when my new car comes with Michelin tyres, or Goodyear, or – who cares… they do the job.

But my point is, if I do want something different, I’m free to change those tyres. Perhaps I’ll read that Pirelli tyres are better than my Goodyears, and I’ll change them. Just as I can change my browser, any time I want to. And I don’t need the EC to make that happen for me because Microsoft haven’t prevented me from using Firefox, or any other browser, for that matter. And that’s the point: this is about education. Those who know enough to understand why they might want another browser, and can make a comparative choice, are completely free to do so, and (if I do say so myself) it is ridiculously easy to swap to an alternative.

I can’t say the same about the tyres on my car though (the ones I’ll have to pay a hefty cost to change). Thankfully, swapping my browser is free and easy. And that’s another reason why these confusing rules make me, well, confused.

It’s all down hill from here…

Now, when Windows 7 ships in Europe, what on earth will the majority of consumers do? What will Microsoft do, in order to help users make the choice that’s right for them? Will consumers see a choice of browsers pop up on their screen? How will they choose? Why should they have to choose? Does Mr And Mrs Average really care? Please comment!

#CompetitionCommissionFail?

“Splendid,” I thought. I’ve wanted to try Writer out, and I needed to write a new blog post as I haven’t been as faithful to my blog the past month as I’d have liked to have been. Also, as much as I like the web-based revolution, I don’t particularly find WordPress.com’s online article editor very good for much else other than writing plain-text. Inserting and uploading media is a bit of a chore, but as I found out, Writer makes that rather easy.

Without further ado, I’ll run you through the setup process here, and comment on my experiences as I go. For added authenticity, I’ll actually be writing this blog post using Live Writer. So, fingers crossed – the proof (should be) in the pudding.

Installation

Installation is straightforward, simple and easy. The Windows Live downloader includes the option to include other products within the Live suite too, including Windows Live Messenger and Movie Maker Beta.

Setup

When you run the program for the firs time, you’re asked which blogging service you use:

You then need to fill out a few other details:

And, that really is about all you need to do. Once you’ve done this, Live Writer connects to your blog, configures itself (correctly) and even downloads your blog’s CSS styles and gives you a live preview as you type.  So far, so good.

The Editor

As soon as you startup after configuring your blog account, you’ll see the new editor window. It’s blank, waiting for you to write your next masterpiece:

Of particular interest here are the “Insert” links on the right-hand side of the screen:

I’ve always found the WordPress.com web editor a bit, well, clumsy. It’s clear (for sure), it’s just fiddly if you want to do anything that write text. Uploading pictures is a bit of a pain. Using Writer, I’ve simply been taking screenshots and pasting directly in to the editor window.

Rich Media Integration

Writer boasts the ability to publish your videos directly to the MSN Soapbox service, or to YouTube and then embed those videos directly into your blog. This is a really nice feature, and to test if it works, I’m going to insert a sample video here:

EDIT: As you can see, WordPress.com doesn’t seem to like the player code generated via Windows Live Writer. I’ll write to them, and ask why – and if I get a response, I’ll post it here. Shame!

Clicking on the “Video” link under “Insert” menu:

I chose “Soapbox” (as this is a service I have never used). Thankfully, there’s no registration forms to fill out. I just enter my Windows Live ID and create a ‘nickname’ for my Soapbox account:

… And that’s it. You’re then returned to the Live Writer editor and you can see your video uploading right in-place on your blog. Quite handy actually, because it meant I could carry on writing my article while the upload took place in the background.

After about 15 minutes, my video had uploaded and Soapbox had finished processing my video. The “uploading video” screen above is now replaced with:

Absolutely fantastic, so far then. So, let’s recap:

• I’ve uploaded a video to a service I’ve never used
• I didn’t have to prepare my video, I just found one and selected it
• I could carry on writing my article while uploading in the background, with the video placeholder in-line
• The video was uploaded and transcoded in around 15 minutes.

Very impressive. All I need now is some hyperlinks.

Hyperlinking

Ok, I’ve been building web pages since I was about 12. Hyperlinks are easy, right? Of course they are. But tell that to the WordPress.com editor. Linking to my previous posts has always been a pain because it doesn’t let me browse through them and pick them when creating a new link. I have to get my previous article URL and then cut and paste (somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong here – I really hope I’ve just missed this feature). Live Writer, though, does a great job:

Choosing “Previous post” then pops up the following:

Another awesome little helper-feature. Job done. Hyperlinks inserted. And I’m still in my nice WYSIWYG editor.

Summary

So, to finish up then, how would I summarise my experience using Windows Live Writer?

In a word, “brilliant”. In four words: “you should use it”.

It’s free, it’s very well built (as you’d expect), and it has a very polished interface. Microsoft have done a fantastic job here.