“Win7 requires a clean install, which mean I will lost 2 days to back to full productivity. I have to reinstall my applications one by one, and set setting, and restore my data.”

If you agree with above claim. This post is for you. Read along.

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1 Introduction

MyApps is a suite of technologies which allow users easily manage and distribute all their Windows applications in most convenient way than before. MyAapps is the name.

2 Problem

Have you ever hesitated rebuilding your dev machine to clean up an instability issue after looking at installed about 200 programs?

Have you ever help new members in your team setup and configure his development environment per strict team-acorss guidelines?

Have you ever had to exit setup dialog to install bunch of prerequisites?

Do you have to remember a long list of license key or file?

…

You may notice that existing processes that maintain applications and their settings in users’ computer are painful and time-consuming. The explosive growth of applications makes users be tired of finding software, waiting for download, playing with options, accepting defaults, inputting license key or file, clicking through and waiting reboot, especially when they are forced to repeat similar steps again and again. MyApps are technologies which change the way people distribute, access and manage various applications in their computer.

3 Solution

3.1 Unique Values

The unique values MyApps offer can be expressed as followings.

• Easy installation – Users can install any application with one click.
• App bag support – App list is a list of applications with customized options. Rebuild becomes never easier. You can kick off the installation of hundreds of applications within minutes, and go away to have a cup of coffee.
• App bag sharing – You can share your application list to your team member or friends, and they can easily repro your environment.
• Automatic dependency management – MyApps is aware of app dependency and will install all dependent apps for users automatically.
• License management – do not need save license key/file locally any more. MyApps does that for users.

3.2 Core Scenarios

Key scenarios that MyApps addresses include:

• One-stop install – Frank needs building his dev machine containing about 120 various apps as the first dev of team COOL5. He logs onto MyApps site and set his preferences (e.g., install all apps onto D:\frankapps\) as the first time visitor. He browses/search the software and put them into MyCart of MyApps site. Finally, he accepts all EULAs and clicks Install, and then goes away for half-day training. When he returns, he finds that his computer is installed with latest software and ready to go.
• Dependency awareness and license handling – .NET 3.5 is required by one of Frank’s selected app – SpeedLaunch, and is installed automatically along with SpeedLaunch. MyApps is also smart enough to handle license at the background for Frank.
• Share app bag – Frank starts customizing his apps. Frank points a debugging tool to an internal team testing DB. The setting is uploaded to public section in CuteInstall site. Frank sets font size to 12 in his VS2008 and uploads this to the private section. Finally Frank published his current app bag as “COOL5_dev_bag” in the MyApps site.
• No need re-invent the wheel – Joanne, the second dev of COOl5 team, install all apps same with Frank by clicking the link in his onboard email:

http://MyApps/install.aspx?bid=COOL5_dev_bag

Joanne also finds out that the debugging tool points to the team testing DB.

• Easy repro – Months later, Frank has to rebuild his computer to clean out certain instability issues although he is facing tight schedule. Frank logs onto CuteInstall site and with his account and clicks “Restore to latest” button before he leaves office. The second day, Frank gets a fresh working machine with all his favorite private settings (e.g., font is 12 in VS2008) and continue working for his deadline without any delay.
• Software shopping – Sara, a regular computer user, logs onto a MyApps technology enabled online software shop with her Live ID. She decides to buy Office2007 and pays the bill using PayPal. After clicking “Install”, Office2007 is delivered/installed/Configured to her computer through a CDN network within 1/2 hour. She is very happy because she no long needs wait for DVD delivered by UPS again.

3.3 Value Proposition

For customers, the value propostion is pretty obvious if you look at the above scenarios carefully. It save man hours in every application installation and migration, increase productivity and improve across-team capabilities to meet business goals.

For Microsoft, it is also a “must have”. MyApps makes Windows platform more accessible and easy to manage. MyApps technologies bright customers’ unique values by leveraging our Windows platform leadership and global presence of Live platform. It also provides special value to our S+S strategy. More and more people turn to web app mostly because web app is:

1. Easy available
2. No download(s) and installation(s) required
3. Your settings always go with you

MyApps technologies solve above 3 problems altogether. Software installation and maintenance are no longer headache for users. As a result, this ensures the success of Microsoft S+S strategy and strengthens our long term value. It is beneficial to the whole industry and any and every software users.

4 Logical Architecture

The diagram below shows the logical architecture of MyApps platform.

Arch of MyApps

Two innovative concepts MyApps introduces are as follows:

• Split of static and dynamic bits of apps which will be stored in App bits DB and App settings/bags DB respectively
• App release description script

To achieve these goals, MyApps technology contains a suite of software component and standard.

• MRT (MyApps Releasing Toolkit) – software vendors use this tool to write installer code. MRT is based on WSI.
• MP (MyApps Portal) – it is centralized place which stores all configurable settings of all apps. And it is also responsible for managing software installation, licensing and user configurations.
• MC (MyApps Client) – MC will be running on software users side to manage installation and settings.

Next we will discuss components one by one.

4.1 MyApps Releasing Toolkit

Every software release should provide a XML file like below.

This file makes sure that (1) the app gets globally unique name with Name and Version, (2) Dependency is clearly defined, (3) InstallSteps will reuse certain tasks pre-defined by MRT. The tasks sample provided by MRT will be to create folder, register COM component, start certain services, copy files, etc. MRT will read this file and generate releasing package.

4.2 MyApps Portal

MyApps Portal is the only place where users browse, search, install, configure, manage and share their apps across all their computers.

4.3 MyApps Client

MyApps will be running in software users as ActiveX IE plugin. Every app defines its config DB as following:

We can use lightweight DB component(e.g., SQLite, or SQL Express) to achieve that.

5 Go TO Market Strategy

Business model would be software licensing.

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MyApps is not just for resintalling the whole software stack. It actually allows users to maintain streamlined application and settings across the computer overtime. I will probably to start a project in CodePlex for this.

Acknowledgment: MyApps is inspired by Maven for Java, RubyGems for Ruby, CAPN for Perl, YUM for Linux, etc. I am actually surprised that Windows don’t have this till today. Ninite is likely, but far from solving the problem entirely.

我如此真切地为这家公司感到骄傲，这是第一次。微软并非是perfect，nothing to improve。也有些产品真的是很囧。Win7真是个了不起的产品。如此说话，可能有王婆卖瓜之嫌。诚然，我也是Vista的用户，但仅仅是一小时。用了一小时就被我卸了。我喜欢快的系统，不要启动一下也老慢；我喜欢用大内存的机器，但喜欢用内存小的程序，一起来就用掉差不多1G，这可不行。以前曾经用过16G的内存，但也会为32M的内存而斤斤计较好久，也许就是那时候留下的心理障碍。

用Win7真的有点爱不释手的感觉。每个人喜欢一样东西可能都有不同的理由。我的理由如下：

(1) 安装方便。整个安装过程，大约只有不到10个画面，历时大约30分钟，一个干净的系统就装好了。一个小细节就是，安装过程中分为明显的三个步骤。做什么事情的时候，安安静静，不会出来一大堆信息出来让你不知所措。你正在拷贝/AFAFDASD_folder/ERTART#$%_文件/到一个路径，用户安装的时候会关心吗？给我装好就行了，把细节隐藏起来。

(2) 占内存小。这点我超喜欢。崭新安装好后，系统大约占用700M内存。

(3) 搜索。程序装了大一堆后，不需要在program中找了，记住程序名，搜索就行了。比如word，windows key -> word -> 回车，5个键，word就打开了。当然搜索文档，肯定也可以啦。

(4) 半屏显示。拖动一个窗口，到左边或右边的屏幕边缘，它就会占用半个屏幕，dock在那里。参考资料，写东西的时候很方便，不用ALT + tab来回切换了。你可以试试看，拖住一个窗口，然后晃动，看看发生什么：）

(5) theme。可以到官方theme网站download很多好看的桌面背景。现在我的桌面上一个图标都没有了，不舍得放啊。

Amazon.cn上家庭普通版399大元。看看上面留言，话题还是离不开正版与盗版。现在问我用正版还是用D版，显然没意义。但客观地来说，要回答这个问题，还真是有些费思量。要说399贵吗？看看win7提供的这么多东西，真是觉得很值。用过的都知道。另开一文专门讨论盗版的问题。

(send from my Win7)

11/6/2009 update

很多人不太清楚win7几个版本之间的区别，其实我也不太懂。在微软商店找到个链接，大家可以一起扫扫盲，区别还是不小的。

http://store.microsoft.com/Windows7/Compare

PPT can be found @

Let me know what you think of it.

Update

This article was originally posted @ http://blogs.msdn.com/bali_msft/archive/2009/06/02/my-pm-talk-in-sjtu.aspx

Entities

First of all, let us keep in mind that tasks are actually what IWs really care about. They are much happier if they can complete assigned task without touching emails. Right? Completion of tasks is what they are trying to achieve. Second, when they have to communicate, they care about distilled information they are expecting while writing/reading emails. You will not get any additional credit through presenting your idea by writing a poem. Senders and recipients come last. Without them, communication can’t happen. These two entities get lower priorities because if distilled information can be gained by other means, say search engine or anonymous DL, who cares them?

Again – email for IWs is all about tasks, not messages. This is the most fundamental philosophy differentiating Pmail’s design from others.

Problems – an abused tool in workplace

By nature, current email systems allow one sends anything to any number of persons at anytime anywhere. Gradually it turns out true that something that can be anything can do nothing actually. Theoretically any email should be of your interest; otherwise sender will not send it to you. Realistically it is so easy to be over-used:

• Email overload. You might probably find everyone around you is complaining about too many emails. Doubt? Open you email clients, see how many unread mails you have. NY Times reports, E-MAIL has become the bane of some people’s professional lives. This occurs likely because of complicated job nature, but I’d say often it is actually because of poor email prioritization. Can you easily tell which email is much more important than others? Or emails tell its priority to you?
• Hard to map emails to one’s day-to-day jobs. How many times you have to search your emails to dig certain messages out because you need something?
• Mail thread discussions often go wild. Do you find you are in trouble figuring out what is going on when suddenly looped in a thread?

At a glance

Pmail’s primary design goal is to help team get jobs done efficiently – under right timing, priorities, order and resources. Everyone would have a clear picture about how his work contributes to team success.

Pmail would also aim to minimize communications as much as possible. Leave users alone please. In task-centered email design, all emails will fall into one of below four categories:

Persona/User scenarios

Key scenarios that Pmail addresses include:

• Know big picture for better prioritization – Steven, who is a developer in a software development team, came to his office in a morning. He opens bird view of pmail to check how his tasks (or WBS in more general term) fits into the entire team progress. He notices one of his tasks, task8, is in critical path according to updated plan(never expect plan is really locked after lock-down). This task is automatically prioritized to p0(highest priority) by Pmail. It is about implementing a feature according to design specification by feature PM.
• Maintain dependencies – Steven goes ahead to open task8 and find this task depends on two resources, 1) one LHS virtual machine, which has been completed by task7. VM address and credential are also attached. Nice! 2) PM spec. It is also claimed completed.
• Main email threads around tasks –Steven opened the spec document in team Sharepoint server, and he finds several points are not clear for him. Then Steven starts a mail conversation with relative PM, Joanne, against this task. The mail thread is linked to task8 and its status is open.
• Drive team work flow – Joanne received a catch-the-ball mail from Steven about p0 task8, so it is a shadow p0 task for her as well. Joanne can check task details in the Pmail. She quickly comes up with answers regarding Steven’s questions and writes back a here-you-go email to Steven. Steven receives the email and get unblocked. Steven closed the email thread by several sentences. This mail thread is traceable in task8 and can’t be replied any more as it is closed. Several hours later, Steven completes task8 and closes it in Pmail. When Steven re-visits the bird view page of Pmail, he finds task8’s color turns green due to status change. Steven then picks up another one unblocked taks, task9.
• Maintain team discussion – Task9 is about designing a new feature F9. Deliverable is reviewable dev design spec. Steven has two options about solving a technical problem, but not sure which way to go. He then sends a collective-effort discussion mail to the whole team. Since this is not a catch-the-ball mail, team mates will treat it with best efforts, but Steven still gets several great feedbacks. When he feels the problem is solved, he summarizes the thread with several sentences and closes the thread.
• Check history – One year later, Steven transfers to another team and his replacement, Eric, would like to better understand why F9 is designed this way. He opened Task9 in Pmail, check the mail thread and better understand original design decision.

Demo/UI Mock-up

Bird view will look like above diagram. In following task view, you can see all mail threads about one task are at your finger tips.

Mail view will also a bit different. Every mail has a TaskID field to help you get the whole context conveniently.

Key features in Pmail

In addition to biggest differences we covered before, you might also get excited when seeing below features.

• Sometimes feature-rich is not a good thing. It is so easy to reach this point when email system is designed for multiple purposes after several releases, say home usage included. But in any event, Pmail will provide a button to show/hide features(say, increase/decrease indent) which I don’t use in last month. Get me a simple world.
• Mouse hover will show abstract of email(user could assign, or automatically select) before deciding to read it
• Send me SMS notification when a selected critical thread gets new replies. No special carrier service needed, input my cell phone and go
• For discussion mails, send brainstorming results or decision made, and then close the thread by marking it as un-reply-able
• Enforce sequential replies, for example fill in a excel table
• Automatically memorize folder or url of files you are editing, and go to Pmail, it can be attached to the email by a hot key, say “ctrl+shift+v”
• mailURL(say, steven-task9-show-me-money-88; don’t use GUID, please) which can be shared across the clients. Don’t to forward again
• Automatically send out ping for dead catch-the-ball emails after pre-configured interval times out
• Play video/audio right inside the mail client
• Mail web client also provides web API like Facebook. OWA kills programmability.
• Tag everywhere – one mail thread might relate to more than one task. It is not a good idea to put a mail in one folder exclusively.
• Don’t allow send active documents to team for review, put it on shared place(say, Sharepoint) and send a link

I am interested in your thoughs on it. Let me know. Thank you.

Pros and Con

Why bother to build global development team?

• New talents pool – Software development needs so many persons with similar attributes. In Microsoft Company wide, top 3 hiring criteria are smart, passion for technology and fit to company values such as openness, continual self-improvement and mutual respect, etc. From various studies, supply of talented IT staffers isn’t keeping up with demand. And it won’t change anytime soon. Even when Microsoft is cutting 5000 jobs now, we still have another 2000~3000 job openings there. What to do if enough qualified hires can be not found within US? Go outside.
• Lower cost – let us straightly go to data. Annual pay for Level “59″ is about $74,000 in US, while same level is paid about $20,000(~RMB150K equally) in China. Another slight fact – It costs about $1.5 to go most common places in Shanghai…
• Close to market – Most innovative ideas often comes out of interactions with customers. And customers’ requirements vary from country to country. So best way to serve a local market is to be in the market.
• Specific knowledge – Cross-nation acquisition for specific technologies is another reason to build global development. You can’t(or not able to) move all folks to HQ.

Like many other things, challenges always go with benefits hand in hand. You can’t take only part of it. Fair enough.

1. Distance – People who work on the same software can’t work alone, they have to exchange information and make decisions. Less than 3 minutes conversation is often enough for slight but frequently arising communication needs, for example, “Could you show me the bug in your environment?” Distance makes it impossible to stop by one’s office. Network bandwidth is another issue introduced by distance. Why it matters? Suppose one team has to copy large file sets from another remote team daily, it would be a problem. The file sets can be growing amazingly big – for example, daily SQL Server build is about 300GB.
2. Time zone – Would communication a real headache since modern technologies such as email and telephone have been there for quite a long time? But the things are no one is there when you are working due to time zone. You have to wait another day to get an email response. When you rush to office to check it, the most frustrating but concise reply could be – “What do you mean by <insert anything you assume others should understand>? How can I help you?”
3. Culture/Language – Master level of English is unbalanced in global teams. There are dozens of ways to say “A beats B” in English, but only several of them are understandable for general public; dialect is another obstacle. For example, Chinese folks often have hard time pronouncing letter “L”, as a result, words like “girl” might sound weird sometimes.
4. Junior team – In my organization, most hires right come out of college. We are raw smart, but less experienced. It is hard to deny that some key ingredients for great engineers just take time – design skills, debugging techniques, influencing capabilities. This is not a cutting-corner example.
5. Conflicts between hierarchical management and local branding – By organization hierarchy definition, many business units have existence in China. STB, Live, Online Service, etc. They functions nearly independently of each other and reports to US. But from the perspective of customers/partners/talents, it looks a bit confusing because there are so many Microsoft’s.
6. People development – folks in remote sites are not equally exposed to development resources such as face-to-face training, library, mentors, etc.
7. Governing issue – due to well known concerns, something confidential can’t be moved out of US.

How-to

There are several factors playing critical role in deciding appropriate distributed development model. At least you should consider project type, team seniority, team size, team culture, communication cost and history.

• Build trust first. No matter how adaptable a new team is, it always takes time to fit into a specific team culture. So starting with easy jobs to build team moral and credibility is the safest steps before moving forward. Beyond this, the new team can target increased ownership.
• Decide on team coupling level. From highest to lowest, the level could be: pseudo random assignment, same branch same feature/component, same branch different feature/component, different sub branch but same main branch, different main branch & clearly defined data contract. Avoid circular dependency.
• Come up with communication plan. Minimized communication is not always the best, especially for relatively junior teams. The best way to develop people is to work with senior folks on daily basis as much as possible. So you have to make tradeoffs here based on various inputs.
• Shared lab if possible. If you have to copy large files across the ocean frequently, consider doing your job on a lab down in remote team. If you have to do copying, make sure the files meet most critical quality requirements before doing so, for example, a build verification test.
• People development plan. Regular staff exchanging plan such as Marco Polo and Silk Road program, getting a mentor, record trainings, etc.
• Local brand management. Externally shown as one image; internally run by functionality as usual.