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For the SQLBits 7 conference last weekend I wanted to show spatial data and built an app that displayed data on a Windows Phone. I wanted to investigate the mobile side of the ‘three screens and a cloud’ mantra and succeeded by building an application deployed to an actual Windows Phone that queried data stored in a SQL Azure database via a WCF service hosted on Azure. The app I built doesn’t do much and Mike Ormond managed to record all of it’s functionality in a 4 minute video that you can watch over here. This post reflects some of my thoughts on the platform.

Will it succeed?

The reason why I, as a developer, am looking at Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is because it is compelling to take existing .NET oriented skills and bring them to the mobile world without having to learn a whole new stack. The current WP7 market penetration is 0% and it has an uphill struggle against Apple and the Android ahead. I’ll leave the speculation about the likelihood of success to other punters but will offer the following observations.

• There is general agreement that the applications available greatly influence the adoption of the device. Provided Microsoft can get the developer experience and story right, there are a lot of .NET developers out there that can take their skills to the platform quickly (as opposed to the Cocoa/Objective C experience of iOS). This means that potentially good quality applications can come out quickly.
• Churn on mobile handsets is high, people change their handset every year or two, so market share can change quickly.
• While, as technologists, we may be picky about the OS of our device, most consumers are less so – if it is cool, easy and has a Facebook app then they are happy.

The Enterprise Market

Microsoft’s strength is in the enterprise market, which they are currently not addressing on the WP7 (there is no way to deploy apps that are not available in the app store). If Microsoft gains some traction in the consumer market then they should be able to turn their attention to the enterprise market and WP7 could become the de facto standard for enterprise mobile applications. If you think that is not enough to gain market share, consider that Blackberry/RIM gained market share on the back of enterprise friendly email (which everyone has these days). As a consultant to enterprises I imagine that my personal involvement will be more in this area than building, say, the best farting app. Some parts of the enterprise story are compelling:

• Use of existing development skills: Many businesses are starting to build internal applications using Silverlight and although you wouldn’t directly port the entire app across, code and skills can be re-used.
• Use of existing .NET services: Referencing a WCF service from WP7 is pretty much the same as with any other .NET client environment – this means that services developed for internal applications should be able to be (mostly) re-used on WP7.
• Using of existing security: If Microsoft can get the patterns right and the interop working with tokens, federated identity, active directory, certificates and a whole stack of technologies working with the existing enterprise infrastructure then they have an attractive platform. This is a very big ‘if’ – Microsoft has not been able to build a VPN client in Windows 7 and don’t have VPN support in WP7 so they may not be able to work well with existing enterprise non Microsoft  (e.g. Cisco) security infrastructure.
• Office and Sharepoint: As much as we want to build cool apps, most enterprises run large chunks of their business in Excel so the ability to access work documents while mobile is a big requirement. User experience aside, Microsoft owns the entire office stack and should be able to turn that ownership into a compelling proposition.

Every Silverlight developer is a windows phone developer

In spreading the message to developers, Microsoft has emphasised that if you know how to build Silverlight apps, then you know how to build WP7 apps. My brief experience building an app for WP7 shows this to be true and there is very little to add. Apart from small differences (WP7 is a superset of Silverlight 3), there are some common Silverlight practices that are not available in WP7 Silverlight.

Because of the deployment model of having apps submitted to the app store, fetching new .xap files using something like MEF is not available, so existing dynamic loading practices will have to change. Related is the inability to dynamically load assemblies at runtime, less reflection in the runtime mean that dependency injection with frameworks like PRISM go out the window – it is not that dependency injection (from a TDD perspective) isn’t possible, it is just that Silverlight developers will have to rethink it a bit. There is a page on MSDN that lists the differences and the reflection section is the longest. Also, ninject seems to have something available, so search for it and see what the latest status is.

But they are not the Silverlight apps that we are used to

I would suggest that few .NET developers have experience developing mobile applications and while WP7 development is familiar Silverlight, the architectures and approaches needed for mobile development are different from Silverlight for the web. I noticed vast differences in my application between the emulator and the physical device when switching to lower speed connections, walking down stairwells and so on. There are many new considerations that I haven’t been able to get my head around solutions for yet, for example:

• The tombstoning of applications (where apps are terminated when they are not active i.e. not a multitasking OS) means that state needs to be continuously saved and considered as well as the re-instantiation of the application into a good enough state when it starts up again (considering timers, events etc.)
• High speed bandwidth cannot be assumed and applications need to be a lot more miserly with how they consume data. This becomes complicated when considering the UI where we may, for example, build a more chatty service interface to get the first bits of data down the wire so that the UI is responsive sooner.
• Performance on a device with lower memory and processing power has to be considered frequently.
• Battery consumption can be high on service heavy applications, so while it may make sense to process and store data on the server as much as possible, the cost to the battery is (or may be) higher than local storage or processing.

Where are the user experience experts

While most designers and user experience people have been sporting iPhones for years, in most cases their experience is simply as a consumer and they haven’t worked in a team delivering mobile applications.

• The first obvious difference is touch (on a small device) as a UI paradigm – while the number of pixels may be high, the size of fingertips do not change and there are only so many touchable things that can be placed on the screen. Added to this are the natural and intuitive gestures (that the iPhone got right) that need to be incorporated – I would think that this is beginning to reach a point where standards are emerging and you almost have to know what most users will expect from touch.
• WP7 tries to do something different with the ‘Metro’ theme and ‘Panorama’ control and it does seem to work. I like the idea of apps having similarities and adhering to a standard, but it does mean extra work to get it right from the point of view of the application as well as the OS standard. Time will tell how this pans out but it should make for a better overall phone ecosystem.

Should we develop for WP7?

The final word on the success or failure of WP7 is still a long way out and even if successful, the nature of the mobile world means that a serious app has to run on multiple operating systems (Andriod, iOS) to have coverage so developing for WP7 may only be part of the story anyway. Also a long way out is the success within the enterprise yet if this does happen, WP7 is a compelling platform for enterprise IT and it’s .NET developers – so I reckon that .NET developers who are building applications for the enterprise should keep an eye on WP7.

The app store gold rush is mostly over and I doubt that WP7 (or Android) is going to make many lone developers into millionaires overnight. Rich mobile applications are becoming mainstream and the applications that will be developed fro it will be serious, and in many cases, quite boring. Developers (not just .NET), designers, UX architects, platform architects, BA’s and others need to embrace the world of mobile because their customers are beginning to ask for it. After all, would you launch a killer product or service with only a website, or would you demand an iPhone app as well?

It is in the context of the increasing demand in the need for mobile applications, regardless of OS, that I recommend that all developers look at building up their mobile skills. Until the chips have fallen and we know the long term prospects WP7, it does at least offer a good step across to mobile for .NET developers without having to get a Mac and learn a whole lot of new technologies.

.NET developers (not all developers, just the .NET developers) who do not know Silverlight should get to know it because it seems to have taken over where winforms left off. Silverlight developers should take their apps and see if the can get the mobile use cases of those applications working on WP7.

I suppose the answer then is yes, .NET developers should develop for WP7, but perhaps by taking the scenic route through Silverlight first.

Simon Munro

@simonmunro

Much of the resistance to cloud computing is by operational IT staff. Some of this resistance is based on real concerns; most of it is because of the fear of loss of control. IT Pros seem to fear that the moment the physical, on site datacentre disappears that they will lose their power base and jobs.

Service rather than server

The constant message from cloud computing experts is not that jobs will be lost, but jobs will change – dramatically in some cases. The biggest change is the shift to being responsible for the availability of a service, rather than a server. The subtle distinction means that skills of operational staff need to move up the stack and away from the hardware.

Application Support

IT Operations will need to understand and support more of the actual applications than just the web server and everything underneath. They will need to understand more about how the application behaves, how data is moved around various nodes, how the system handles failure scenarios and what their own role is when things go wrong. It will no longer be a case of palming of the support of the application to the vendor or application support team as there will be aspects contained within the overall cloud ecosystem that application people have no clue about.

Vendor APIs

In large enterprises it is likely that there will be many cloud computing platforms, from multi vendor private clouds to rogue applications hosted on any number of public cloud hosting platforms. Ops staff are going to have to master the nuances of how each platform behaves and understand the various APIs so that they can write their own automation scripts to perform tasks specific to the organization.

IT Management

The biggest challenge will be for IT management. Without a gleaming data centre with lots of impressive blinking lights to back them up they need to find ways to pitch their value to their own (internal) customers. While cloud computing allows anyone to whip out a credit card and bypass procurement of hardware, or filling in a requisition to the corporate data centre, we know that the provisioning of solution infrastructure is more than just ordering hardware and this point needs to be communicated to business. IT Ops management need to facilitate migration to cloud computing by engaging actively with business (so that they are seen as trusted advisors) and their own staff in order to keep the business specific knowledge while migrating skills to a more service based operational model.

Service Levels

While IT may be familiar with contracts with outsourced IT, the difference with cloud computing contracts is that they will generally be on the vendors’ terms. A cloud computing provider may only have an architecture to support a specific level of service and no amount of large corporate huffing and puffing will change five nines to six. The way IT has to combine hybrid environments and effectively front various different agreements will become quite colourful, never mind the billing issues when the costs are passed on to the business.

Best Prepared

IT Ops are probably the best prepared for cloud computing because they are already familiar with working with more abstract views of technical infrastructure. IT Ops spend little or no time deep in the server room any more and juggle hundreds of servers from the comfort of their desks, similar to the way that they would manage cloud based services. However, IT Ops needs to be far more proactive, particularly in dealings with large vendors, to insist that they have the tooling and operating framework to continue to deliver to the business in a cloud computing environment. After all, just because the need for specialised local hardware doesn’t exist, it does not mean that business does not need the fuller range of services offered by enterprise IT.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list and IT Operations is where all the big cloud marketing money is

Simon Munro

@simonmunro

The ‘Who Should Know About Cloud Computing’ Series

This post is part of a series of posts for non technical roles, which you can follow from the links below

• Introduction
• Project Management
• Creatives
• Business Analysis
• Testing and QA
• User Experience
• Data Professionals
• IT Operations (this post)

At first you would think that in a world cloud computing applications would look and behave the same as any other web application – after all it is the financial model for computing that has changed, not what is served up, right? For many of the large websites that we use today that is generally true – cloud computing doesn’t change much. What does change though is that applications that would normally get developed or would remain obscure because it isn’t financially viable can now be pushed out for the entire world to see, use and interact with.

Microsites

One class of applications affected by cloud computing are microsites that are tactical and functionality because the cost of providing the infrastructure and support of extensive functionality is unwarranted. With cloud computing, providing richer functionality is a matter of development cost rather than hosting and long term bandwidth costs. The UX designer needs to think about extra functionality demands placed on applications that would normally not be considered – so we should expect registrations, sharing with friends, linking into Facebook, uploading and viewing of videos and so on.

High Load User Journeys

Due to the scalability of cloud computing, applications that would normally have a fairly small user base can now be extended to huge numbers of users. While we may have resolved the expected user journeys for more traditional high load applications, such as web retail and personal banking, the patterns have not settled for more familiar complex applications such as bookkeeping or sales automation, never mind the new ideas presenting themselves every day.

Unexpected Behaviour

Technical solutions to scalability problems such as eventual consistency, asynchronous operations, service degradation and apology based computing mean that the behaviour of applications will not be as expected and the UX specialist needs to carefully define the interactions to either hide effects or help the user understand why they are happening. The frustrations that many of us feel with shoddily built web based enterprise systems such as time recording and expenses (my colleagues are nodding an agreement right now) will not be tolerated by customers.

Complex Process Interaction

Cloud computing will lay the foundation for the ability to interact with more complex business processes and user experience specialists have their work cut out to ensure that, at least from the users’ perspective, things run smoothly. The existing patterns will need to be extended and the UX community is going to have to move towards a set of expected behaviours so that a vast number of users can easily find their way through a twenty step asynchronous process or change their own privacy settings.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list and we know how bad developers are at building UIs

Simon Munro

@simonmunro

The ‘Who Should Know About Cloud Computing’ Series

This post is part of a series of posts for non technical roles, which you can follow from the links below

• Introduction
• Project Management
• Creatives
• Business Analysis
• Testing and QA
• User Experience (this post)
• Data Professionals
• IT Ops

As cloud computing projects get under way, the demand for cloud savvy business analysts is going to outstrip demand. Cloud computing introduces more than just technical changes as it forces changes to IT processes and alters the way that the business interacts with its customers.

Compliance

The most obvious areas are in compliance, risk and security. While cloud computing may be satisfactory for many regulations and internal guidelines, those assumptions need to be checked against the particular business scenario. The myths surrounding any framework influenced by regulations, such as the offsite or offshore storage of data, need to be unpicked and understood in detail by referencing back to the original regulations and laws that may be relevant. This is no simple task and requires a high level of credibility, commitment and specialist knowledge.

Legacy ERP Out of Favour

The disassembly of centralised monolithic enterprise systems into a loosely coupled conglomeration of on and off premise solutions changes many of the underlying business processes that currently exist to enforce the quirks and whims of a particular package. Cloud computing, in it’s guise as the next stage of the largely unsuccessful SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), offers the promise that cloud computing will deliver the computing services needed by business rather than being constrained and force fed the services offered by the incumbent ERP system. While technically we may be able to describe the loose coupling easily, the business analyst has a crucial role to play in understanding how existing processes need to change and how to ensure that processes key to the success of the business do not become victims of the process cull.

Alignment of Business and Cloud Models

The scalability and operational cost models of cloud computing allows business cases to be considered that would normally be considered too expensive or risky and now these opportunities can be snapped up by smaller departments and smaller businesses. The fundamental question that the business analyst needs to ask is “If cost, availability and lead times of IT were not constraints, where are the bottlenecks and how would you do things differently?”

Vision Alignment

No amount of technical brilliance will get cloud computing solutions adopted without business analysts who understand the vision, possibilities and pitfalls of cloud computing. Cloud computing is considered by most to be over hyped and fraught with danger and a cloud computing team needs people who understand the business intimately in order to help them buy into the clodu computing vision.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list and there is a long traditional of miscommunication between developers and business analysts which needs to be upheld

Simon Munro

@simonmunro

The ‘Who Should Know About Cloud Computing’ Series

This post is part of a series of posts for non technical roles, which you can follow from the links below

• Introduction
• Project Management
• Creatives
• Business Analysis (this post)
• Testing and QA
• User Experience
• Data Professionals
• IT Ops

Whether software development or infrastructure, the manner in which cloud computing projects are delivered is different enough to require a slightly different approach to project management. So while the same elements exist on cloud computing projects as any other, the sequence that they need to be done in is a bit jumbled up, the focus is higher on some areas than usual and additional risks present themselves. The instant availability of computing resources solves some problems, such as the dependencies on procurement and provisioning of resources, but replaced with far more legal and contractual issues that need to be managed earlier on as some sticking points may get in the way.

Moving Activities Upstream

The on demand availability of resources presents interesting opportunities to move activities, which have traditionally been downstream activities, to be moved forward. Testing on a ‘production platform’, security, billing and operational handover, which should be moved forward, reflect the areas of focus on cloud computing projects that are either glossed over or taken for granted on traditional projects. Clearly security and regulatory concerns that would normally be wrapped up in the incumbent datacentres credentials will have to be dealt with in detail, both technically as well as the management of perceptions around them. The project manager will need to spend a lot of time allaying fears, proving the solution and generally providing assurance and answers where few exist.

Dealing with New Risks

With any new set of technologies and concepts new risks emerge. The biggest risks to cloud computing projects may be non technical and may result from a senior stakeholder reading a sensationalised story about data loss in the cloud and, fearing litigation or brand negativity, wants to move the new cloud computing initiative on premise. Other risks include problems that result from vendor platform and tool immaturity, availability of skills, increased engineering costs, inability to satisfy certain requirements (such as latency), compliance issues and a whole host of other problems waiting to ambush the unsuspecting project manager.

Cloud Computing Projects Will Be Different

While vendors will go to great lengths to tell us how familiar cloud computing is to their existing offerings, things are different and, in many cases, significantly different. While project managers are equipped with the general skills to manage a cloud computing project, most project managers would not have thought about cloud computing in sufficient detail to foresee what needs to be done on the project and will manage it as he or she would manage any other project until it all falls apart. There is a need and an opportunity in the cloud computing world for project managers who at least have a conceptual understanding of the issues.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list and good project managers are wary of advice from developers

Simon Munro

@simonmunro

The ‘Who Should Know About Cloud Computing’ Series

This post is part of a series of posts for non technical roles, which you can follow from the links below

• Introduction
• Project Management (this post)
• Creatives
• Business Analysis
• Testing and QA
• User Experience
• Data Professionals
• IT Ops