Perfect Sense: Microsoft Silverlight on Microsoft Mobile
With all of the success of the iPhone and the hype of the Android, Microsoft is still figuring out what to do in the mobile space. Something worthwhile, that is.
If there’s one thing everyone can learn from the iPhone, it’s the applications that make it great. The iPhone went from initially being just a really cool phone (Apple is great at making cool things) to being a very functional, useful, and practical device. Just ask any iPhone user and they’ll tell you what their favorite application is, and rarely is it an application that has anything to do with a phone or playing music.
So where does it leave Microsoft? In a recent article on ChannelWeb, it’s now rumored that Silverlight will run on Windows Mobile devices. Specifically, Windows Mobile 7, or whatever it is they decide to name it.
Why is this a good thing? Because it will open the floodgates to allow millions of .NET programmers to create applications for Windows Mobile.
Silverlight, much like Flash, will allow people to share code across multiple devices. This is powerful, so much so, that Apple does not allow Flash to run on the iPhone.
Silverlight is so much better that Flash (from a development standpoint), that people have been saying that Silverlight is a Flash killer for a while now. I’m not sure if that’s happened yet, and Adobe may very well kill Flash on their own without anyone’s help.
It’s the applications that make hardware wonderful, and the ease at which those applications can be developed that makes them widely available. Microsoft has all the right cards here, as their Visual Studio Development tools are second to none. There’s already plenty of .NET developers out there, and along with that, Silverlight developers.
So, you take a .NET developer with some Silverlight experience, and almost overnight you could have yourself a new Windows Mobile Developer. With Silverlight becoming more integrated with SharePoint, you would have a developer who program your website, SharePoint site, and mobile site all in the same day.
It’s anyone’s guess how the iPhone will play out in Corporate America. Apple makes you deploy all of your applications through their App Store, or buy their special server to allow for deployments internally in a corporation with more than 500 users. Either way the licensing doesn’t give you all the freedom that corporations currently have to deploy whatever they want on a desktop PC.
So along comes Windows Mobile 7, finally, with a nice development platform that allows companies to deploy internal applications whenever they want on whatever phones they want.
Microsoft may be on to something here.
Happy Holidays – Let’s Look Forward to 2010!
Happy Holidays!
2010 looks to be a very fruitful year. We’re seeing alot more interest in mobile apps, web development, and SharePoint demand is still very strong. Everyone is shaking off the dust from 2009 and getting back into the swing of things.
Here at Inalign we have many new activities in the works-including an updated customer portal, and the start of bi-weekly webinars for all of our clients.
We’re very excited about the webinars-it gives us another way to connect with our clients, and will we use these to continue to educate about our technologies and software development.
iPhone Apps are Taking Over the Web
Remember years ago when companies were just getting into the ‘internet’ and they started to put their URL into every ad? Print ads, TV ads, whatever, their URL would show up.
Now, the change is to promote the iPhone app. Just another indicator that the iPhone is taking over the world.
For example, Pizza Hut now has an ad on TV that promotes ordering pizza via their iPhone app. The ad doesn’t even talk about pizza or why their’s is better-it just promotes a new convienent way to order. (As a side note, some of Apple’s iPhone TV ads show the Pizza Hut app as an option on the iPhone).
Ease of ordering is still king!
With big companies like Target, BestBuy, eBay, and Amazon all having iPhone apps, you have to start to wonder how much traffic is going to move from the traditional desktop browser to a mobile app.
Another strategy for mobile that seems to be gaining steam is the concept of the mobile-web application. Unlike an iPhone app, which is written specifically for the iPhone and downloaded from Apple’s app store, a mobile-web application runs in a browser on a phone.
The Safari browser comes installed on the iPhone, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car has a wonder mobile-web application than looks very nice in Safari and lets you, among other things, rent a car.
The added benefit of the mobile-web approach is that the same app could run on the Android or some other mobile device, and you don’t have to worry about developing code for one particular device.
Either way, what we’re seeing is more sales channels. Companies are giving consumers even more ways to order their products and services.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Email Router Info
These are some random but usefull links for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that I find myself going back to quite a bit.
Setting up the Email Router is fairly easy, once you’ve done it a few times. You have to download and install the following two programs (the Exchange MAPI may be required if not already installed).
You can then add users to the Email Router and allow them to use the Email Router to send emails out of CRM (as opposed to using Outlook). The nice thing about this is that if you have CRM Workflows that send emails, they will go out immediately after the workflow fires them off. If you are using Outlook, the email will not get sent until the next time Outlook syncs with CRM and picks up the email.
Also worth noting is that this is the inherent danger with CRM-it can send emails out on behalf of people through workflow. You may or may not want CRM to have that kind of power without manual human intervention.
Also, Exchange needs to be configured to relay emails if you’re sending emails to addresse outside of your domain.
CRM Email Router Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e1358499-3fdb-45b8-adf0-7585f758277e&displaylang=en#filelist
Exchange MAPI: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E17E7F31-079A-43A9-BFF2-0A110307611E&displaylang=en
Google Verification Process Changes Ever So Slightly
Recently a website I maintain was no longer verified by Google Webmaster tools. Odd, since it had been working for some time using the HTML method.
I downloaded the HTML file from Goole Webmaster, and uploaded it once again to the site. I noticed that the previous version was zero length file, and the new file from Google has some text in it (a google-site-verification property). I don’t remember this from before, but either way, it works now.
We have to all remember that these Google tools are free, and they will change them whenever they want. There was a helpful post from Google’s Webmaster Blog about changes around October 1, 2009.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/changes-to-website-verification-in.html
Not exactly my issue, but close enough to it.
Tracking Mobile Apps with Google Analytics
Now that the world is moving towards PDAs and the iPhone has made technology fun again, it made me wonder how Google was going to track all of the iPhone activity.
Try out the ESPN app. You can track scores, get all sorts of data through the web, but not necessarily through a browser. iPhone apps can phone home over the internet and connect to web services.
There’s nothing saying that Google can tell when I’m sliding from the MLB page to the NASCAR page. There’s a bigger discussion here about what happens when the iPhone becomes the device for connecting to the internet, in an app-friendly yet browser-free world.
Now, ESPN, and everyone else, can still send this click information to Google, via the Google Analytics for Mobile apps. Right here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/mobileAppsTracking.html
Doesn’t look to hard, but definitely a bit more coding than just throwing the Google javascript tags in the footer of a .NET master apge.
Three Google Freebies That Everyone Should Have
Here’s three freebies from Google that everyone should have on their website-almost no excuse! It’s not completely free in the sense that it’ll take some time to implement, but not much time.
1. Get Google Analytics – it will tell you how many visitors went to your site, and from what search engine, and where they went once they got there. Also-you can look at the reports yourself – you don’t need a techie to explain them to you. Check out the ‘overlay’ feature that shows you an overlay of statistics on top of your website.
2. Get Google Webmaster Tools – Web master tools let’s you know for sure that Google is crawling your site properly. If it’s not being crawled properly, Google will tell you why. You get some quick tips like you should have unique Title tags. It will also tell you if other sites are linking to broken links on your site.
3. Get on Google Maps – Google Maps puts a nice icon on their map right where your office is. There’s a quick registration process and they’ll snail-mail you a postcard to prove that you’re there. You then type in a code off the card onto their site, and you’re done.
iPhone Links
Nothing special, just some links relating to the iPhone:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/welcome/
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/mobileAppsTracking.html
Adding Custom 404 Page in IIS for ASP.NET Websites
Additions you make in the web.config file, such as redirecting 404’s, will work for all files that go through the .NET engine, but not for other files like htm, html, and directory requests. For these, you have to modify IIS in the ‘Custom Errors’ tab under Properities of a website. You can set the ‘404′ entry to the .NET page that is receiving 404 errors (should be the same one you set in your web.config).
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