I want Microsoft to succeed in the mobile space. As a consumer, I want more choice than Apple and Google. A successful Microsoft in this space will only increase the innovation and drive down price. I held out against the iPhone and Android until my Windows Mobile phone literally fell apart. (It was held together with tape for 3 months when I was in denial.) A few months ago when I walked into the store here in Hong Kong there simply were no good Microsoft options if you wanted touch, music, maps, facebook, etc. So I ordered a Nexus One.

I was excited by the Windows 7 phone when I first saw it. That said, I will not buy the new Windows phone unless two things happen.

• First, I will not, under any circumstances, buy the phone from a carrier. Carriers are pure evil and lock the phone, install their own crap on it, and remove native features. If Microsoft wants to change the nature of the industry, they have to create a phone that everyone wants and make it real simple to get one. Apple started the revolution by making a phone that everyone wanted, did not allow the carrier to install their own crap, but did force you into a deal with AT&T (in the USA) and will not unlock the phone. Google continued the revolution by selling the phone on the Web unlocked, but only in 4 countries. If Microsoft makes us buy the phone from carriers, game over-that is a step backwards. Microsoft should continue the revolution and make the phone cheap and not sign any deals with any carriers. They should go direct to the consumers and sell the phone world wide for $300 at electronics retail shops such as Best Buy. It will nothing but revolutionize the way we buy mobile phones in the USA.
• Second I won’t buy a phone that has the word “Windows” on it. Change the name to something cool. “iPhone” and “Nexus One”, even “Android” are just cool. Windows is old and stale and makes me think of laptops and such. Microsoft has a tendency to over brand “Windows.” They have done a great job at that. The problem is that the consumer market Microsoft is targeting doesn’t care about the Windows brand. They like the XBox and even the Zune brand. Go with that. Microsoft keeps talking about how “we have changed our game” with the “Windows 7 Phone Series.” I’m sorry but that sounds a lot like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals Edition.

Last week I was out with some friends and we were trying to google for something. After someone was painfully slow on their Blackberry, I whipped out my Nexus One. Immediately, they all said “wow, is that the Nexus One?” Before I knew it, I was doing a product demo. I had five people standing around me playing with the phone. Microsoft, please don’t embarrass me when I pull out my “Windows Phone 7 Series.” That is just a lame name. Give it a cool name and make it available everywhere for cheap. Let me buy my “XZune” Phone at Best Buy. Soon.

Someone sent me this link that was posted on MSDN a month or two ago. I am interviewed about my charity work in Nepal, Telerik, Entrepreneurship, and SQL & Windows Azure. Fun stuff.

GoDaddy.com, the top Internet domain name registration company, announced this week that , the company had been hacked "due to a lack of enforcement against criminal activities by the Chinese government." In addition, the Chinese government has been forcing all domain registrars to get photos, business ID and signatures for anyone registering a .cn domain. Speaking before the US Congress this week, Christine Jones, GoDaddy’s lawyer, said “We decided we didn’t want to become an agent of the Chinese government” and has ended its operations selling .cn domain names.

Google and now GoDaddy have both stood up to China. Who is next?

Last week Telerik released a new LINQ implementation that is simple to use and produces domain models very fast. Built on top of the enterprise grade OpenAccess ORM, you can connect to any database that OpenAccess can connect to such as: SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Azure, VistaDB, etc. Today I will show you how to build a domain model using MySQL as your back end.

To get started, you have to download MySQL 5.x and the MySQL Workbench and also, as my colleague Alexander Filipov at Telerik reminded me, make sure you install the MySQL .NET Connector, which is available here.  I like to use Northwind, ok it gives me the warm and fuzzies, so I ran a script to produce Northwind on my MySQL server. There are many ways you can get Northwind on your MySQL database, here is a helpful blog to get your started. I also manipulated the first record to indicate that I am in MySQL and gave a look via the MySQL Workbench.

Ok, time to build our model! Start up the Domain Model wizard by right clicking on the project in Visual Studio (I have a Web project) and select Add|New Item and choose “Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model” from the new item list.

When the wizard comes up, choose MySQL as your back end and enter in the name of your saved MySQL connection.

If you don’t have a saved MySQL connection set up in Visual Studio, click on “New Connection” and enter in the proper connection information. *Note, this is where you need to have the MySQL .NET connector installed.

After you set your connection to the MySQL database server, you have to choose which tables to include in your model. Just for fun, I will choose all of them.

Give your model a name, like “NorthwindEntities” and click finish. That is it.

Now let’s consume the model with ASP .net. I created a simple page that also has a GridView on it. On my page load I wrote this code, by now it should look very familiar, a simple LINQ query filtering customers by country (Germany) and binding the results to the grid. 

   1:  protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

   2:  {

   3:      if (!IsPostBack)

   4:      {

   5:          //a reference to the data context

   6:          NorthwindEntities dat = new NorthwindEntities();

   7:          //LINQ Statement

   8:          var result = from c in dat.Customers

   9:                       where c.Country == "Germany"

  10:                       select c;

  11:          //Databinding to the Gridview

  12:          GridView1.DataSource = result;

  13:          GridView1.DataBind();

  14:      }

  15:  }

F5 produces the following.

Tomorrow I’ll show how to take the same model and create an Astoria/OData data feed.

I started my career on Wall Street in a non-technical role. After I gained the confidence to make the move from hobby to profession, the company that I was working for did not let me be a programmer, so I quit my job to start my own one man shop. My first customers were Wall Street firms. Because of this background, I understand bonds, options, swaps, and other complex financial transactions. My guilty pleasure is reading about massive financial blowups, books like: When Genius Failed, Liar’s Poker, and House of Cards.

Michael Lewis, the bestselling writer of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball, just released a new book called The Big Short. It is a book about the bond and real estate derivative markets and the short selling people did the year before the massive crash of 2008.

I wanted to read this book and headed to Amazon.com to buy it for my Kindle. I noticed that it was the #1 selling book on Amazon, so I did not even have to search for it, it was right there on the home page.  That is when I realized that there is no Kindle version! I have a rule, no more “real” books, if it is not on the Kindle it doesn't exist to me. This is my preference and it exists for a variety of reasons: love of my Kindle, tons of crap to bring when I travel, too many books laying around the house, me temporary living in Hong Kong and don’t want to transport books 8,000 miles are on the top of the list. (If you don’t own a Kindle and think I am blowing hot air, ask yourself when the last time you bought a physical CD was, fancy iPod owner.)

If you remember back in January, I made a prediction on the blog that the content providers will fight back against Netflix and Amazon: and fight back they did. Once Macmillan forced Amazon’s hand back in late January, the rules changed. If you remember MacMillian, threatened to withhold their entire collection of books, print and digital, unless Amazon raised their prices for the Kindle. Amazon challenged, but lost and had to capitulate.

Now it appears that the publisher of The Big Short, W. W. Norton & Company, is doing something more evil, they are withholding the Kindle version until the paperback comes out. This is to boost the hardcover sales.

What a bad idea. The publisher is living in the pre-digital book era. Someone who owns an eReader is not going to buy a hardcover book ever again. The market has changed. W W Norton doesn’t realize it.

I heard about the book and was willing to spend $9.99 as an impulse buy. I would even pay $12 or $13 for the Kindle version, only a few dollars less than the list price. Now I have to wait at least 6-8 months and may forget or the book may lose its spot on my priority list.

The publisher is also assuming that I will still want to read this book a year from now, that the financial crisis will still be deep in my mind and I will want to rush to buy it. They are also assuming that I won’t illegally download this book as well. (Something they are forcing me to consider.)

The publisher is making a big mistake. They are pushing me to defer my purchase, a purchase I may never make. They would have made a sale today, but choose not to sell it to me. They are trading guaranteed profits today for potential profits later.

Postscript:

The reviews of The Big Short on Amazon are interesting.

There are more negative reviews (1 star) than positive (5 + 4 star). Most of the reviews are people like me complaining that there is no Kindle version! The author is being punished for the decisions of his publisher. Several bloggers came out to defend Lewis and bash Amazon. I am not one of them.

An author like Lewis has clout and could have put his foot down. He also could have chosen to self publish, sell it on Amazon and B&N only in e-format for $7.99 and kept all the profits. So while it sucks that his book is getting negative reviews, I don’t feel sorry for him. Besides it is still the #1 bestseller on Amazon as of now.

I’ll leave you with a great quote promoting the Kindle:

"The coolest thing, by far, is that you think of a book you'd like to read, someone tells you about a book you'd like to read, and in 30 seconds, it's on your screen, all of it."

--Michael Lewis, 2007.

Today Google announced on its corporate blog that as of today all Google traffic in China will be redirected to Google’s site here in Hong Kong. I use the Hong Kong Google site daily and it has no censorship since Hong Kong is an autonomous self-governing region of China. The Chinese government said that Google is "totally wrong" and accused it of breaking a promise made when it launched its service in China.

I suspect that China will soon block google.com.hk or Google’s mainland China users will stop using Google since the Hong Kong site has excellent search results that have local relevance for Hong Kong but not for mainland China. Either way, the end is near for Google in China. It is interesting that Google has decided to burn a bridge in China.

My question is, does Google’s great “moral” stand matter? Can a company like Google effect the politics of a nation? Should they even try to?

Normally I would say no, a company should not try to change the politics of a nation it is doing business in. If it disagrees with the policies of a nation, it should not do business there. Would Google have done business in Nazi Germany? The Soviet Union?

The world rushes to do business with China, but sweeps under the rug the fact that it is not a free society. (I am reminded of this every day when I read the newspaper in Hong Kong and there is a story about some restriction on the mainland.) The question is, will Google’s actions make other companies think twice about China?

Tomorrow I will be presenting a “What's new for SQL Server 2008 R2” session at the IT Efficiency Event in Hong Kong put on by Microsoft. Even thought it is an overview session, I’ll be doing a few extensive demos. The demos are on:

• New TSQL constructs and other goodies like that
• BING map integration (if I get internet access in the session room!)
• Data-Tier Applications (fun for both developers and DBAs)
• PowerPivot

I will be the only English speaking speaker, should be fun. :)

Ever since the “new” SQL Azure went to beta, I have craved an automated way to set up an OData (Astoria) Service from my SQL Azure database. My perfect world would have been to have a checkbox next to each table in my database in the developer portal asking to “Restify” this table as a service. It always seemed kind of silly to have to build a web project, create an Entity Framework model of my SQL Azure database, build a WCF Data Services (OData) service on top of that, and then deploy it to a web host or Windows Azure. (This service seems overkill for Windows Azure.) In addition to all of that extra work, in theory it would not be the most efficient solution since I am introducing a new server to the mix.

At Mix this week and also on the OData team blog, there is an announcement as how to do this very easily. You can go to the SQL Azure labs page and then click on the “OData Service for SQL Azure” tab and enter in your SQL Azure credentials and assign your security and you will be able to access your OData service via this method: https://odata.sqlazurelabs.com/OData.svc/v0.1/<serverName>/<databaseName>

I went in and gave it a try. In about 15 seconds I had a working OData feed, no need to build a new web site, build an EDM, build an OData svc, and deploy, it just made it for me automatically. Saved me a lot of time and the hassle (and cost) of deploying a new web site somewhere. Also, since this is all Azure, I would argue that it is more efficient to run this from Microsoft’s server’s than mine: less hops to the SQL Azure database. (At least that is my theory.)

To really give this a test drive, I opened up Excel 2010 and used SQL Server PowerPivot. I choose to import from “Data Feeds” and entered in the address for my service. I then imported the Customers, Orders, and Order Details tables and built a simple Pivot Table.

This is a great new feature!

If you are doing any work with Data Services and SQL Azure today, you need to investigate this new feature. Enjoy!

If you would have asked me 5 years ago which company, Apple or Microsoft,  would have released a mobile phone that was super popular and got most of its success from a great developer ecosystem of 3rd party applications, I would have said Microsoft in a heartbeat. The reason is that traditionally Apple has been pretty “closed” and Microsoft always relied on 3rd party software developers, like myself, to build compelling applications for its platforms.

The Mac was a “superior” operating system than the early versions of Windows, however, Windows won the battle for supremacy (and still is winning with well over 90% market share). The reason why is that Apple was outright hostile to 3rd party software developers and Microsoft courted them. Building a developer ecosystem is in Microsoft’s DNA and clearly not in Apple’s.

When the iPhone SDK shipped, the tables were turned. Apple is now depending on 3rd party developers for continued success of its iPhone (and iPad). With the most applications, the iPhone is well ahead of the pack. Google’s Android market, with 30,000 apps, is far behind in second and Microsoft Windows Mobile is an also ran.

This week at the Mix conference, Microsoft announced the development platform for Windows Phone 7. Building apps for the new Windows Mobile 7 phone is super easy: Silverlight + Visual Studio is the primary way to do so. Last time I googled, there were about 5 million .NET developers worldwide, so Microsoft gained 5 million developers in the mobile phone wars.

So the question is: Can Microsoft out Microsoft Apple? Being a Microsoft watcher, I know that this is in Microsoft’s DNA and that Apple is a recent convert, so I would say that Microsoft does have a good shot. I would much rather code in Silverlight than Objective-C, the (painful to use) development platform for the iPhone. Let’s take a look:

Pros for Apple:

• Best selling Smartphone on the planet
• Apple “coolness”

Cons for Apple:

• Developer outreach is new to Apple
• Objective-C is not a developer friendly platform

Pros for Microsoft:

• Developer Outreach is in their DNA for 30 years
• Silverlight is an easy to use, modern developer platform that is already popular with 5 million developers

Cons for Microsoft:

• New to the “cool” Smartphone game
• Lack of “cool” credibility with consumers

Where will this all go? Apple certainly has a *huge* head start. Microsoft has its work cut out for it, however, over the last 15 years I have watched Microsoft be counted out before and succeed-they work best when they have their backs against the wall. Let the battle begin!