SharePoint on SharePoint – Under the Hood

The SharePoint Team Blog just announced they’ve launched the www.microsoft.com/sharepoint site on SharePoint itself with a large sprinkling of Silverlight. The post mentions the use of the publishing feature and SEO optimisation so I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find any really cool, secret WCM optimisations. I’m disappointed and can’t suggest modelling your own internet-facing MOSS site on this site :-(

• Looking at the site URL alone I can tell this is a MOSS site: /pages/default.aspx. I was hoping to see the /pages directory magically vamoosed from the URL and I’d hardly say Default.aspx is SEO-friendly.
• The total page weight, according to YSlow, is 538.5KB, which translates into a load time of 13.81s from Western Australia and a grade of F (despite waiting for the Silverlight banner to load the page load time didn’t feel too bad but reloading with an unprimed browser cache was sluggish but I have little doubt they’re running off a CDN)
• The JavaScript and CSS aren’t minified and both init.js and core.css are loaded in their entirety.
• The number of resources requested by the page is significant and there’s been no apparent effort to merge CSS and JS files
• The page viewstate equates to 62KB of the overall page weight while another 68KB pertains to inline Silverlight load script stuff

The single neat-o thing about this site (let’s say apart from its content and this is a technical blog) is the way hitting the Login link or trying to hit /_layouts/settings.aspx redirect to the Live login form. It would be interesting to know if they’re actually using Passport authentication on this site.

SharePoint Abstraction

There seems to be a seismic change afoot in the SharePoint development world as those of us working on the ground with SharePoint move forward with the platform. In my mind this is the SharePoint community growing forward from our dark history as we move beyond the pains of dealing with pure SharePoint and begin to view it as just another component of the applications we build. Instead of building into SharePoint we’re building on top of it.

WTF? I’m talking about wrapping domain abstractions around the SharePoint API so developers can work more intuitively with the domain model and for the obvious performance and unit testing benefits. In essence, it’s a return to good up-front design and worshipping the gods of encapsulation.

When I first started out in the real world everyone was building frameworks. In the object-oriented world, design often starts with the problem domain and a class hierarchy is constructed to model or reflect the relevant entities. The framework becomes the programmatic representation of both the problem and solution. You would never force the developers using that API to, for example, deal with a list of Objects that (these were the days before generics) that would have to be cast to a specific type; your list would derive from an existing list class or one of its parent classes and close the gates to a subset of types and strongly-typed operations. Database access and whatnot would be similarly bubble-wrapped with a common, isolated, and tested mechanism to open a database connection, manipulate a specific object, and clean up.

The last few years of dealing with the minutiae of the SharePoint API has led us astray on the back of the SDK and correct and incorrect code samples available online. Instead of taking these snippets at face value—as samples to be adapted to meet our needs, they’ve been viewed as the code to make SharePoint work at its most basic level. WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 bugs aside, it’s been difficult bridging the gap from managed to unmanaged code for those of us raised in the cuddly worlds of Java and .NET. Simply put, the SharePoint API is large, comes complete with legacy baggage, and doesn’t always do things the way .NET developers expect. Fair enough, it’s a big application (er, platform) with a history of its own and a wealth of functionality… and it’s not .NET! The end result, however, is we’ve been too busy dealing with a steep learning curve to bother with the application of good design practices and hide away things those aspects that are hard to do well.

The first inkling in my mind of a return to abstraction came from reading Eric Shupps’ post on test driven development with SharePoint. I’m neither a TDD user nor am I a fan but after seeing it in action at Jeremy Thake’s Perth User Group presentation last week, I now understand not having to mock the SharePoint API by abstracting countless objects make building unit tests a lot easier. But wait a minute—encapsulating access to SharePoint and refactoring an application to match the problem domain sounds familiar! Oh yeah, that’s because we used to do it all the time!!!

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices gang have been busy putting together the long awaited SharePoint Guidance bits. It’s interesting to note the sample application they’ve built makes welcome use of abstractions based on common design patterns—all of which are clearly documented. Microsoft obviously has a lot of interaction with customers and the community, apart from product knowledge of both SharePoint and .NET, so the SPG will most likely prove to be an invaluable resource as we expand our understanding of SharePoint and real best practices become apparent.

One final note: my previous tech lead (who now works on SharePoint v14) is a beautiful Japanese fellow with no time for big, unwieldy frameworks and sprawling code. I would label him very much a follower of the minimalist style—an approach not invaluable to IT as a whole (I believe we like building complex solutions because the challenge makes us feel good). So where does the argument for abstraction fit with simple, clean design principles? I believe the two go together hand in glove for the simple reason abstraction leads to centralisation and therefore consistency, meeting the minimalist designer’s goal of less code. Instead of every developer handling list access in a different way with ten lines of code wrapped in three using statements, a developer calls a method in one line of code. But this is perhaps another discussion ;-)

Additional Reading

• Chris O'Brien: Simple Data Access Pattern for SharePoint Lists

Pinstripes don't go with pinstripes

Hey dudes--I'm not sure what sort of misguided, fading star of a metro sexual dreamt this one up but a vast number of you are committing a huge fashion faux pas. I'm no fashionista, actually I'm a computer geek, but I know a problem when I see a problem and this one's right up there with pink men's shirts. Let's admit it, if we don't get this sorted out internally, the women will sort it for us and that's rarely helpful. 

So, pinstripes: two simple rules apply. 

Rule # 1 is simple: pinstripe suits (or pants and jackets) are for sales dicks and aspirational middle managers. Only. Don't wear pinstripes unless you want the world to know you're a wanker.

Rule # 2 is a bit tougher to grasp but it's the most important of the two rules: never, ever (ever!!!) wear pinstriped pants and a pinstriped shirt, it just doesn't work unless you're going for the clown look. 

Now let's say you've recognised the error of your ways re. rule # 1 but you unknowingly invested in a wardrobe of pinstriped pants and suits and whatnot; men aren't women--there's no point in throwing away good clothes so you'll need to wind down slowly and rebuild. That's perfectly okay but in this case it becomes all the more important to heed rule # 2. Go for your life with the pinstripes in the jacket and pants department but ease back with the shirt pinstripes--don't go for the striped shirt at all, actually. Solid, bright colours on top are your only option--even pink is preferable. If you're still feeling a bit lost, go for the french cuffs and a good tie (with stripes, even). Sales dicks, you're okay in pinstripes but the same applies as far as rule # 2 goes.

By the way, in addition to the ladies, you've also really got to watch mothers and epileptics with this one. The root of the problem lies in the repetition and balance of it all. Stripes with unmatched stripes (or checks or a stripey weave--think herringbone) are too busy. Varying stripe width or direction is no excuse. And no, this is not about matching--think more about contrast when it comes to textures.

I'm hoping this is an isolated Perth thing and the men of this city somehow mixed up jacket vs shirt concepts. Either way, let's get you guys sorted out and move on.

---

Custom-Built Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Branded Sites and Webpart Development - info@mediawole.com

Potluck 'Round the Hearth

While discussing the issues of public space for resources in Peopleware, the authors quote from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language:

"Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each [working group] a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event."

The authors go on to highlight the relationship between shared space in broader societal terms (the home, in particular) and the office workspace.

As so many of us spend a great deal of time and a large portion of our lives at work, I believe strongly in extending my definition of "family" to include the people I work with. This fits naturally with the hierarchical structure found so often in work places: my immediate circle of co-workers becomes my brothers and sisters; my managers becomes parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts; other colleagues in the organisation become cousins and second cousins.

From this mindset (and, admittedly from a mindset that includes fun and enjoyment!), I introduced my team to the potluck lunch about a year and a half ago. The potluck concept was not my idea: I attended a party held outside work by a colleague from my previous employer and the party was themed around the potluck; the people and layout of the workspace of my new employer simply allowed me to suggest we bring the team together on a regular basis and everyone bring a single dish of food.

Although we don't measure many things at Tourism--let alone productivity increases, the potluck lunch concept has proven successful in general. At the very least, it's a great opportunity to sit back with my work family, indulge in new and interesting food, and have a chat... a scheduled group downtime. It's also been an interesting way to introduce new team members to others in the office and give them a sense of how we work and what it feels like to be a part of our team.


We aim for a monthly potluck lunch and usually go in for some kind of theme. When our first potluck was held, we had a very diverse team and everyone brought food representative of their home culture. We'll also hold a goodbye potluck when someone leaves the team.

The rules of potluck are few and simple:

1. Each person only brings enough food to feed one to two people (or a single dish);
2. Each person tries their utmost to make something at home the night before--food purchased the day of the potluck is usually a rush job and tends to be deep-fried;
3. Alcohol is a suitable food substitute (but this works at Tourism).

We don't usually plan who's bringing what--it usually just works out. As we do have a few vegetarians about we try to cater for them and generally try to arrive at a balance of savoury vs sweet (dessert is always nice!).

ebay Retailers That Suck

My wife bought an MP3 player a few weeks ago and after deciding she wanted an arband for it we hunted around and finally found a workable version on ebay from Accstation (www.accstation.com). We won the auction at $0.99 and after adding a few dollars shipping and handling, it looked like yet another successfull online transaction. Then came the payment part.

Accstation uses a third-party company to process credit card payments (they also offer payment via PayPal). I opted to use the credit card payment method, completed the online forms, and clicked the submit button: transaction failed. Okay... I thought, probably just a temporary problem with their servers or a network issue, let's try again. Same error. Well, I thought, since I'm seeing this error, the transaction surely can't be reaching the payment gateway; let's start again from the beginning and double-check all my details. Transaction failed. Okay, I'm fed up now... one last time for the fun of it and I'll call my credit card company. Transaction failed.

At this point I give MasterCard a buzz to ensure my card hasn't been blocked and I have sufficient funds to pay the lousy $0.99 + S/H. The representative tells me everything is fine with the card and my account BUT four transactions just went through for the same amount. They haven't been approved yet but there are my four failed transactions. Blow gasket now.

I email the seller directly, I send the seller a note via ebay, I email the credit card processing company. Accstation's autoresponder autoresponds with a useless email message and the credit card processing company refuses to take any responsibility for this fiasco, despite their involvement in processing my payment four times over. A day passes while I wait for a response from Accstation and then another day and another day. I browse their web site and email their accounts department, their sales department, their customer service department, and their auctions department. MasterCard tells me they can't do anything until the transactions are approved.

Someone finally replies and asks me to email them back with my credit card number, expiry date, amount, etc and they'll get back to me within three to five days. There's no way I'm going to send a mysterious bot my credit card details via email and they shouldn't require that information anyway. I never hear back from "Tammy."

In the end, ebay notifies me I won the auction and must pay up before the week is out or I'll be stricken down by the Internet gods. The four payments finally disappear from my MasterCard account and I log in to Accstation's payment system to pay my $0.99 bill, this time via PayPal. The planets align and this time everything works... a week later and my wife has her arm band.

$0.99 plus shipping and handling works out to very little profit for Accstation but I did not hesitate to leave a negative feedback rating on ebay and there's no way I'll ever buy anything from this company again. For the minimal effort it takes to reply to an email from an upset customer, the end result could have been a win-win situation.

Creative Zen Neeon 2 (2GB)

My wife bought the Creative Zen Neeon 2 (2GB) on Saturday for a mere $99 (AUD) from MYER. Shopbot and MyShopping were listing the same player from $179 to $226 at various online retailers so it all seems like a great deal from a big department store! 2GB is by no means huge but for the price you can't go wrong.

The sound quality on this device using the supplied earbuds is quite good with a nice range. We had the bass boost turned on initially and had to turn it off because some songs were distorting slightly. Bass response was still great.

The user interface isn't bad once you get used to it (my wife isn't a technophile and she cottoned on in no time) and the thumb wheel works quite well. I don't have huge hands but my hand did start getting tired after playing with the thing for a while. The unit has volume controls and a record button one side and a play/pause/power button on the other side with the thumb wheel. Neither of us have used the iPod wheel before so I guess we don't know what we're missing out on--and don't care!

The Zen plays MP3, WMA, and WAV formats. It also plays video but the video has to be transcoded using the supplied software. Images are viewable as JPGs. The radio reception was a little iffy and was coming in quite fuzzy while the FM radio on my mobile phone had crystal clear reception right beside the Zen. I haven't tried the line-in function yet. The display was nice and bright and the shiny black surface of the case didn't show too many fingerprints.

Without installing the software suite, we connected up to a USB 2.0 port off a Windows XP computer and were able to start copying files immediately. Transfer time wasn't exactly fast but nothing to complain about. The internal folder structure on the device is extremely logical and you could probably copy other files onto the player for moving to and fro. We also connected the device to a Windows Vista computer using slower USB 1.0 ports but the player wasn't recognised and we didn't persevere.

The unit came with earbuds, a USB cable, a line-in cable (1/8"), a lanyard, a DVD with a user manual and software, a printed user manual, and some stickers. The battery is built-in and presumably not user-serviceable. I'm pretty sure this thing has a 1-year warranty.

I don't think I'd pay full-price for a player of this size but at $99 the iPod and variants don't really compare.

Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to follow

I don't agree with everything here but there are some good points in there...

http://www.chrylers.com/top-ten-of-programming-advice-to-not-follow

Saturday Shopping

I don't understand what went wrong with my parent's generation. They showed so much promise with their bombs, telecommunication, and political reform but they make out as though the race to the moon was only the first stage in the race of life: hussle, bussle--they can't get there fast enough no matter the price. In contrast, I believe our generation is now responsible for putting the humanity back into a world left devoid of everything but some elusive end goal.

Saturday grocery shopping, if you do it regularly, makes the Christmas rush seem like nothing out of ordinary. The shops are busy, the shelves are empty, and no one really wants to be there. I'm a happy Saturday shopper and I use each experience to test and develop my patience. Most times I make it through.

This Saturday seemed especially busy for whatever reason. It was the first cool weekend in a long while so my guess is families were out to stock up after a month of lying around sweating. Nevermind, I thought, I'm in no rush today so I'll just have to try extra hard to be patient and polite; "after you", "go ahead", smile and say "excuse me, thank you." With the narrow isles full of the overweight, carts, and mothers with strollers for triplets, there would be, I knew, a lot of standing around waiting.

At one point, momentarily frozen int time waiting for the isle to clear before I could move past the stacks of broken eggs and on towards the vegetarian sausages, my personal space suddenly vanished as a well-dressed, dark-haired woman well into middle-age squeezed up next to me and then bolted past into the gap only to stop in front of me. "Now that's pushing it, lady," I thought to myself. No "excuse me", no smile, only an in-grained push to get there sooner, get the job done, and trample anyone in the way.

"Have a taste of your own medicine, if you're going to be that way," I shouted at her in my mind as I plowed into the melay of shopping carts and unwashed Saturday shoppers. With her cart in the mix, the gap had narrowed significantly so I pushed forward, nosing my cart into what must have been the one piece of unoccupied real-estate in the entire store. I plowed her cart out of the way and then knocked it again for good measure before continuing on my way, a dazed mother glaring at me all the while. Yes, shame on me for my childish retaliation but let that be a lesson to the pushy woman.

I shuffled on in my sandy thongs not feeling any better for my actions--on reflection, feeling worse. Nevertheless, my calm depened as I resolve to kick back against the rush and hurry imposed on me by this boom-time generation. With all the man-made pressures built into our lives I'm finally beginning to understand why so many of me friends and classmates turned to cigarettes, booze, and pot over the years.

I always think back to my drives between Montreal and Ottawa as a university student returning home for a weekend or during the holidays. The old Grand Marquis I drove (a 5.0 litre V8) handled the drive at 140km/h quite happily but as the car moved ever closer to the scrap heap, exaust fumes seeping in through the salt-rusted holes in the floor meant the trip had to be completed at 90km/h in the slow lane. At either speed, the journey always took two hours.

Metric Time

As a computer scientist, working with standard units of time can be a frustrating experience. I'm sure the existing time and calendar systems made sense when everyone followed the gods, the moon, the sun, and the seasons but I think it's safe to say most of the first world population rely on a digital watch and computer-based calendar (and for those who don't, then there's even more reason to move away from their old world equivalents). Since no sane person uses imperial measurement anymore unless they're American or my mom (are either really sane?), I, Pope Michaelus I, hereby deem it 'time' to make the move to metric time. I think we all can handle it.

Everything in glorious units of ten (except weeks—a ten day week might kill me... oh yeah, and months will be a bit weird). So I propose not quite metric time and it all hangs on the seven-day week:

1 year = 10 months

It's pretty simple and time will seem like it goes even faster but you won't get old as quickly.

1 month = 4 weeks

We definitely need to keep months so we can continue having cake days at work once a month. I guess they're communal birthday celebration days really but it's not like I know half the birthday boys and girls anyway. Anyway, cake day might get lost in a year without months. 4 weeks (or 28 days) is a nice compromise and even though 28 is a weird number, at least it will be static. And no leap years—time can move independent of the sun so let it. A month could, following debate, be drawn out to 5 weeks for quasi-metric support but you know what those 31-day months are like—imagine every month being 35 days long. 28 days = more cake.

1 week = 7 days

I'm working a lot of overtime at work these days—mainly weekends—and from current hands-on experience I can tell you do I don't want a 10 day work week. Without a doubt, the business analysts and project managers would jump at the idea so this one's gotta be a special case and it's got to be set in stone up front. 7 is also a lucky number.

1 day = 10 hours

This is where things start getting a bit difficult. A ten hour 'day' is miles off our current 24-hour day so there'll definitely be some adjusting to do. If you put this in context with a week and weeks in months and months in years, those units also start going a bit wonky. But fingers crossed, it'll all work out something like Mexico with lots of sunshine and siesta time. And burritos.

1 hour = 100 minutes

I'm tempted to stick with 10s on this one but seeing as how we've already shrunk down days and stuff... 100 minutes per hour makes sense anyway. Sort of like those 90-minute classes they made me get through in high school—bearable, just. I think all the clock watchers at work would blow a fuse if an hour went by in ten minutes. At any rate, 100s are still metric, so stop your complaining.

1 minute = 100 seconds

No one cares about seconds anyway so just K.I.S.S.

1 second = 1 second

No more of this milli and micro b.s. Like I said, K.I.S.S. and I can never remember which is which so just forget it. Just talk about half a second or tenths of a second or .0484822999299000123 and you'll be fine. That's the beauty of the metric system. Could even just get rid of seconds altogether and just think about bits of a minute—easy!

And of course, most importantly, there will be no daylight savings. I actually read a post out from some guy who manually hacked the Windows registry to program Western Australia Daylight Savings into his PC before Microsoft released their dodgy patch that doesn't work with Vista. I'm a west-aussie so I had to dig around, you see. Anyway, geeks being geeks, I think this guy could have put his time and talents to better use. The debate rages over here but simplicity for us programmers pretty much blows all other arguments out of the water.

By the way, metric time started about half an hour ago so someone better find that registry hacker and see if he fix up our Windows clocks to work all metric like. No doubt Outlook will be off for a while but meetings are a waste of time anyway.

Scientific Creativity

Does the term 'scientific creativity' satisfactorily define the analyst programmers?

Media Center Revisited with Vista Ultimate RTM

With the Windows Vista RTM finally available on MSDN and a spare day over the Christmas holidays it was time for a home Media Centre rebuild. What follows documents my Vista/MCE installation experience and my perspective one week in.

First, some background…

My Windows MCE experience has been generally positive since I first took on the construction of a media centre box in September 2005. At the time, standard definition digital set top boxes were reasonably new-fangled and cost a fair packet (the high-def equivalent was definitely out of my league). More importantly, hard disk recorders were not integrated and were selling around the $600 mark—and that price didn’t include a DVD player. As I also wanted a digital jukebox, Windows Media Center Edition offered a complete solution but pre-built MCE machines were selling for $4000 or more.

By late 2005 the consumer magazines were on to their second round of TV tuner card reviews and HD cards were beginning to creep into the mix. Despite reported problems receiving a consistent digital signal in some areas, hardware incompatibility, and slow channel changes I thought I’d chance building my own box. I had an unused P4 1.7 IBM desktop machine with a quiet fan, 512MB of RAM, and a DVD-ROM so I added a Hauppauge Nova-T PCI tuner card and a second-hand nVidia GeForce 4 video card with video out. I also splurged and added a secondary 250GB hard drive to the mix and purchased Microsoft’s MCE remote. Stereo audio comes from the integrated sound card but the Logitech speakers I’m using also include a sub, giving me 2.1 channel audio. My total cost was around $550 (AUD) including the speakers.

The box went together without any issues and I installed Windows Media Center Edition 2005. This version of Windows did not include a DVD decoder, which is required to watch DVDs and television, so I had to acquire a decoder before anything video-related would work. With the decoder installed, I then noticed DVD playback would flicker from dark to not-so-dark every few seconds. Since I’ve got an older television with only a coax input, I’m forced to run the composite RCA output from the media centre into my VCR, which then connects to the television (call me old fashioned—and yes, I’m aware the benefits of HD will go unnoticed on a monitor like this); to make a long story short, I determined Macrovision was most likely interfering with the signal but a Macrovision tool got around this problem. I also installed Daemon Tools to mount DVD ISOs.
I couldn’t believe it when all the free TV stations (and digital radio stations) scanned and I was finally watching live television through the computer; controlling it all from my sofa (the old television doesn’t have a remote) was a luxury! Pausing live TV when the phone rings and skipping all the loud, budget commercials made me feel like I was finally in control of my television experience. I bet my dad probably felt the same way when he bought our first VCR back in 1843.

Despite my initial enthusiasm, the Hauppauge card never seemed to like its new home too well and seven times out of ten the live television signal would stutter and skip when the box was started cold. My gigantic new hard drive wasn’t always detected either which meant no access to my media library and only limited television recording space. A reboot was the only effective work around, apart from leaving the thing on 24/7, which I refuse to do as a greenie. This box is connected to my home Windows domain and while the box (the MCE app in particular) fires up quickly when the domain controller is available, it would take a good minute or two otherwise. As reported, channel changes are slow in MCE 2005 and can take more than just a few seconds but I understand this is consistent across most tuner cards from that era. Less importantly, pressing the PC on/off switch on my MCE remote control would put the machine to sleep but waking it up always resulted in a blank screen.

I was hopeful the MCE rollup released late in 2005 would fix some of these issues but in the end it botched up the machine and I did a clean rebuild on the off chance doing so might also correct the skipping and disk issue (it didn’t). I put this down to the IBM hardware in the end.
Needless to say, my opinion is that Windows MCE 2005 was a good introduction to the media centre experience but I found myself looking forward to the Vista release almost immediately. MCE is the gateway to entertainment in my home and I have every intention of keeping it that way—despite the fact that it hasn’t intrigued friends and family as much as I hoped. The wife was actually impressed and told me as much, however, so I guess it can’t be that bad! Looking back on the experience, my only regret was not buying a dual-tuner card such as the Hauppauge Nova-T 500.

The Move to Vista

Moving to Vista was predestined since the MCE app doesn’t ship as a stand-alone product and I soon found MCE 2005 to be lacking. The questions in my mind related to how the new OS would perform with my existing hardware and what changes and improvements it would bring to the MCE experience.

I first installed one of the initial Vista builds in a virtual PC around November 2005 and although I moved through a beta or two and the first release candidate I was never sure the thing would fare much better on my antiquated P4. My first “physical” Vista experience was at TechEd ‘06 in Sydney using the Dell machines set up for the event. These were pretty decent desktops with 1GB of RAM and I’m pretty certain they were running the Aero Glass interface since they could do that fancy 3D alt-tab thing.

To play it safe, I decided to leave the existing MCE 2005 box in a semi-functional state and elected to build my Vista media centre on a spare box. I was fortunate to have another IBM desktop sitting unused in my study (or rather, it was only used as a test machine) and I deemed it Windows Media Center capable. This box is an P4 1.8 IBM desktop with 512MB RAM. I first installed the Vista RTM to see how it would fare on the minimum required RAM. I didn’t play around for long with it for long but installation was successful. Boot time was very slow (a good four plus minutes) but it seemed like it might work. A quick review of the Media Center application (which I’d seen only briefly in Sydney) showed a revised UI but not much else was evident without a proper video card and tuner.

In addition to swapping over the video card, tuner card, and the 250GB hard drive, I also filled the last empty memory slot in the new machine with a 256MB stick of RAM from the existing MCE box, giving the Vista box a total of 768MB of RAM. I would have preferred (and still would prefer) to have a full gigabyte or more of memory but the desktop case means I’m fairly limited in that sense (this is also one of the reasons I haven’t added a better sound card or a second tuner card).
Installation of the operating system proceeded with no issues and my new Vista media centre was soon booting. To my surprise, the Hauppauge Nova-T card wasn’t automatically detected during installation but I thought I’d take a chance with the XP drivers that came with the card. Although I checked the Hauppauge site for a Vista driver before starting, the site wasn’t forthcoming about whether the existing drivers were compatible or a new set of drivers would be released. The Hauppauge forums are full of reports of channel scanning issues with the dual-tuner Nova-T 500 card and Vista RC1 and I thought I might end up in the same camp. In the end, the factory drivers installed without a hitch and are working fine.

I chose Windows Vista Ultimate, which includes a DVD decoder, so I ran a problem-free channel scan and installed a Vista-ready version of Daemon Tools before configuring the OS to automatically log on using a domain service account under the local Users group. My second MCE 2005 build had issues with live TV signal stability when using a non-admin account so I was happy to see my account configuration working as intended. I also installed the Western Australia Daylight Savings patch since the system clock was off by one hour. At this point, everything was working beautifully and even the PC on/off button worked to put the computer to sleep!

First Impressions

One week later and I’ve got a lot of good things to say about Vista and Windows Media Centre. This has been my first extended experience with Vista and while it’s been mainly over a remote desktop connection (apart from WMC), the interface feels different but intuitive. It’s taken a second to find some things and learn how to do them differently using the new UI but the concepts are generally the same as they always have been. I’m not a big fan of UAC and have to admit I’m already blindly clicking through the prompts. Boot time is also pretty lengthy—it takes this machine about two minutes to boot the OS and log in using the pre-configured credentials regardless of whether the domain controller is available (the upshot is that boot time is about the same when the DC isn’t available).

The Western Australia Daylight Savings patch didn’t work and despite being a seemingly unimportant OS issue it affects scheduled recording times in Media Center. Even after installation, Vista didn’t move the clock forward and a few days later I noticed the patch wasn’t even showing up under the Programs applet. Changing the clock manually isn’t a realistic option since it synchronises with the domain controller’s time server. In the end, I installed a registry hack from a Microsoft site which corrected the problem—the end result was that it also shifted all of my scheduled TV recordings forward one hour! I’ve also heard rumours about the DVD decoder time bombing in some of the betas/release candidate and the Vista Home edition so I’m not sure how long the decoder will hang on with Ultimate. This is a bit of a bummer really—I think any modern OS should have the capability to play something as ubiquitous as a DVD without additional software. My guess is that it will keep chugging with Ultimate.

On the hardware side, the live TV jumpiness has disappeared on the new machine and the secondary hard drive is being detected without fail. The PC on/off sleep button is back to its old ways once again, however, but I suspect that’s a video card issue.

Finally, the Vista version of Media Centre is a big improvement over previous versions—not a massive improvement but a big improvement. My favourite enhancement is how the media library caches album and picture information. I’ve got a large collection of digital music and MCE 2005 takes ages to present me with a list of music. The new version remembers not only the music it’s already scanned but it also remembers the view I was at last (i.e. sort by album or sort by artist). Channel change time is still slow and is possibly a second or two slower than it was but as I don’t generally watch live TV it’s not a big issue for me.

The menu system has been nicely refined since MCE 2005 with a lot of the individual menu items now combined and streamlined. I understand this is targeting widescreen displays but I find it quite useable on the old 4:3 TV. Despite the improvements in this area, I am finding the menus harder to read from the sofa… in fact, I’m feeling a bit old because of it!!! I know this is due to the ancient Sharp Lyntron I’m using as a display (it’s an okay size but it is fuzzy and dark). I’m navigating some of the primary functionality from memory (like view scheduled) because I can’t read the menu text. My charming wife actually decided she would try to change the font size to correct the problem and ran through the WMC setup wizard; the wizard ended up changing the resolution when the WMC window is active and killed video playback until the machine was rebooted. I got in there and tried to undo whatever resolution the wizard selected because it looked terrible and didn’t change the main OS resolution, meaning an epileptic fit-inducing bzit! whenever WMC starts or closes or I toggle back to the desktop. I ended up synchronising the WMC and OS resolution at 640x480. Despite having the media centre connected to a television display over a composite/coax connection, the only way to change the WMC resolution is to tell the wizard you’re using a DVI connection.

I would really like to see an option to play a CD in the physical drive without having to click into the Music menu. DVDs can be played directly from the TV + Movies menu so the current CD playback interface doesn’t feel natural to me. I was also really hoping to see a better shut down menu. I do prefer having the Shutdown option under the Tasks menu but I hate how the shut down option defaults to Close (as in close WMC and return to the desktop). As mentioned, I shut down my media centre box at the end of the day so it’s an extra hassle to move two buttons to the right with the remote and then shut down. Fortunately, despite being an old PC, the IBM will shut down the computer properly when I press the physical on/off button.

One of my biggest gripes is the time it takes to switch to live TV for the first time. If I’m booting from a cold state, it takes two minutes to get to the desktop, another ten or fifteen seconds to get into Windows Media Center, and another two minutes once I’ve pressed the Live TV button on the remote before a picture comes up. The situation is mildly better if I turn on the machine, walk away, and then come back to it after WMC is loaded and has sat for a few minutes. I’m not certain if additional system memory would improve this.

Despite being able to happily watch live TV and play my music I was nearly ready to report two major blockers to a future with the current Vista RTM build: manual and series recording was only succeeding intermittently and the machine was crashing hard when I wasn’t looking. As mentioned, I don’t watch much live TV and have the majority of the programs I watch on a regular basis configured as recordable series in WMC. For some reason, these programs were only recording sporadically. Kicking off a manual recording would start recording but the box would usually crash at some point and the recorded program wouldn’t appear in the recorded tv list. The event log revealed nothing interesting. I was thinking the Hauppauge XP drivers or mixed brand memory might be to blame—or perhaps WMC was simply having problems closing off the file when recording completes. I tried swapping the third stick or RAM with the left over module from the old MCE box and also shuffled the sticks around but the problem didn’t go away. I was willing to try a Vista-specific driver for the Nova-T but, as mentioned, the Hauppauge sites are pretty useless for this sort of thing. www.hauppauge.com.au leads to an online retailer site, www.hauppauge.com doesn’t list the Nova-T PCI as such (I’m not sure if it comes under a different name in the US), and www.hauppauge.co.uk isn’t any better. The Hauppauge forums reference a 43MB driver on their FTP site that might work with the Nova-T so my next step was to get that sucked down and see what happened.

In the end, a late night brainwave suggested the power settings might be shutting down the hard drive while WMC was in the process of recording. Since I do occasionally leave the box running throughout the day or over night, I tweaked the power options after the initial install to shut down the hard drive when idle and turn off the monitor, throttle the CPU power, etc… Silly me, I assumed WMC would prevent Vista from shutting down the hard drive if it was busy recording. To keep the HD from shutting down, I created a new power profile and set everything to never shutdown, never sleep, and run full blast all the time. The mysterious crash problem is gone and scheduled programs are recording perfectly. I’ll plan to incrementally scale back my power settings after I figure out how to build a Windows Image file.

All’s now pretty happy in the land of WMC. Not everything is perfect—kicking off live tv occasionally puts up a black screen but skipping back on the playback timeline starts it running happily again. Changing channels also periodically results in WMC “forgetting” its list of scanned channels and only a time-consuming re-scan will correct the problem. But we soldier on…

Looking Forward

Considering Windows 2003 runs on early Pentium hardware, I initially expected Vista would still run on a minimalist hardware platform… a minimum requirement of 512MB of memory is not (or should I say was not?) a minimalist hardware platform. I haven’t previously been critical of the so-called bloatware Microsoft produces—both XP and Vista do a lot of things quite well and take some big steps forward toward the future of computing. With the Glass interface turned off and a reasonable amount of system muscle behind it, I was surprised to find that Vista doesn’t boot any quicker than XP and takes so agonisingly long to do something like fire up live TV and switch channels. I do believe Vista was ready for release (I’m comparing the RTM with the early release I saw back in 2005) but I wonder if the supporting structures around the OS are up to scratch—I’m thinking mainly of the daylight savings patch issue.

With WMC in its fourth version now, I also expected some big changes to WMC. I’m happy with what was fixed and what was refined but I’ll be really happy when the size of the UI text is user configurable and Windows Media Player can play .m4a files out of the box. While I’m happy to soldier on with funky channel rescans, I’m my own IT support department; whether the average family is happy to do the same is questionable.

Vista has found a home in my living room for the enhancements WMC offers and so I can keep on top of Vista until the OS makes it to my desktop. It will be very interesting to see what SP1 brings and it will be revealing to watch uptake of the pending consumer release—I wonder if cheap second-hand laptops will flood eBay when people realise they’re underpowered to run the new OS? In conjunction with Longhorn Server, my guess is there will be a business case for the pair within the enterprise. As long we don’t have to wait another five years for the next Windows release, I think we’ll be travelling okay.