Rob Tiffany

Books and Taxes

Rob Tiffany — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:55:29 +0000

Wow! Just opened a 1099 tax document for 2011 from Apress. People must still be buying my old books on eMbedded Visual Basic, the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, and SQL Server Compact 2.0. The Pocket PC and Windows Mobile live on!

A separate 1099 for Hood Canal Press tells me that my SQL Server Merge Replication books are still killing it! Our world of disconnected devices require efficient data sync now more than ever. Despite a variety of sync technologies out there, Merge is still the best!

HTML5 on Windows Phone: A Simple Boilerplate

Rob Tiffany — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:55:03 +0000

Internet Explorer 9 running on Windows Phone 7.5 has seriously raised the mobile web profile of Microsoft’s latest phone operating system. Up until recently, it’s been all about the apps written in Silverlight. With hardware-accelerated video, text rendering, canvas drawing, and the high-speed “Chakra” JavaScript engine, IE9 compiled for ARM processors means business. But diving into HTML5 without considering the differences in characteristics of mobile web browsers is a mistake. Therefore, I’m going to show you some HTML and CSS that you can use as a starting point for your mobile web apps.

Below, you can see the simplified DOCTYPE, html, charset, and stylesheet tags that are the hallmark of HTML5. In order to be accomodate small screens on Windows Phones, I’ve added the viewport, mobile optimized, and handheld friendly tags to keep the browser from trying to render a desktop web site.

DOCTYPE html>

<head>

<title>Mobile Web Titletitle>

head>

<body>

<h3>Mobile Webh3>

<script>script>

body>

html>

You probably also noticed that I placed the script tags just before the closing body tag instead of inside the head tags. This ensures that the mobile page fully renders in the browser before the JavaScript parsing begins.

Along with this simple HTML goes an equally simple stylesheet that provides a basic, Windows Phone Metro look and feel:

@media screen and (max-width:480px) {

body {

font-family: “Segoe WP”,Tahoma,Geneva,Verdana;

background-color: #000000;

color: #ffffff;

padding: 18px;

}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {

font-family:“Segoe WP Semibold”;

margin-bottom:7px;

}

h1 {

font-size: 48pt;

}

h2 {

font-size: 40pt;

}

h3 {

font-size:32pt;

}

h4 {

font-size:24pt;

}

h5 {

font-size:20pt;

}

h6 {

font-size:18pt;

}

p {

font-size: 14pt;

}

input, select, button {

color: #ffffff;

background-color: #000000;

border: 2px solid white;

vertical-align: baseline;

font-size: 17pt;

min-width: 40px;

min-height: 40px;

}

label {

vertical-align:baseline;

font-size:17pt;

}

input.hasfocus {

background-color:white;

color:black

}

fieldset, legend {

font-family:“Segoe UI Semibold”;

font-size:12pt;

}

fieldset {

padding:12pt;

border: 1px solid white;

}

I’ve included a simple media query in the CSS to only apply the style to devices with a maximum width of 480 pixels. Additionally, this will definitely give you the Segoe fonts, black background, and white borders that you’re accustomed to in Windows Phone Silverlight apps. You’ll also notice that I set minimum heights and widths for some of the UI elements to give mobile users a larger hit target.

Good luck with your next HTML5 mobile web site!

-Rob

Submarine Warriors comes to The Dauntless Bookstore

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:26:36 +0000

Hey all you Submarine Warriors on the Kitsap Peninsula! This Saturday from 1:00 – 3:00 PM I’ll be doing a book signing at The Dauntless Bookstore in Port Gamble.

I’ll be signing, reading from, and talking about my new novel, ’Submarine Warriors > The Enemy Beneath.’ This book takes place and belongs to Kitsap County and our Navy and Submarine families. This undersea adventure for Young Adults begins when the fathers of twelve year-old Caroline Connery, Nick Wyatt, and their friends mysteriously disappear during a top-secret submarine mission. Not long after, Caroline receives a secret text message revealing the government’s story that their fathers died in an accident was actually a cover-up. The two kids enlist the help of Caroline’s grandfather – a retired Navy Admiral – and their friends to rescue all of the dads. A daring submarine theft results in the entire Pacific fleet chasing down the children with orders to sink them on sight. Upon finding their fathers, Caroline and Nick are confronted by an even greater terror when they come face to face with the Underworlders, a previously unknown species living beneath the ocean floor that are bent on the complete annihilation of mankind.

Thanks to all the support from Macaroni Kid Kitsap, The Kitsap Sun, and the Kitsap Peninsula Visitor and Convention Bureau for helping to get the word out!

See you in Port Gamble!

-Rob

Prediction: 2012 Will be the Year of Windows Phone

Rob Tiffany — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:01:26 +0000

Windows Phone 7.5 is running fast out of the gate for 2012. The stunning mobile operating system from Microsoft was the talk of CES in Las Vegas this year. The accolades streaming in from the world’s most influential newspapers, magazines, reviewers, and tech bloggers are unprecedented.

The Nokia Lumia 900 won the Best of CES award in the Smartphone category and it’s no surprise. Before listing off the impressive specs, just look at this gorgeous piece of hardware. Looks matter…trust me. Windows Phone is already the most elegant mobile operating system. Breathtaking industrial design is the other half of the equation. When paired with iconic hardware, it’s like pairing your favorite Walla Walla Cabernet with your favorite steak.

I can’t count the number of reviews and comments stating that Windows Phone on the Lumia 900 has surpassed the iPhone. If you follow the U.S. wireless market, then you know that things like 4G LTE network speeds, large screens, front-facing cameras, and dual-core processors are the current drivers of smartphone sales. The Lumia 900 addresses three of those drivers with support for AT&T’s 4G LTE network, a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display, and a front-facing camera for video calls. It’s powered by a single 1.4 GHz processor and if you’ve paid attention to all the reviews in the press, you’ve heard that Windows Phone runs circles around its dual-core competitors. Better software design, better engineering, more efficient algorithms, and optimized coding techniques means you can do more with less. Last but not least, the Lumia 900 comes with an amazing 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics.

The HTC Titan II came to the CES party guns-blazing with a monster of a smartphone. It tics all the required boxes needed for sales by delivering a massive 4.7 inch screen, support for AT&T’s 4G LTE network, and a front-facing camera. The 1.5Ghz Snapdragon 2 processor gives this superphone all the horsepower it needs.

Joining the camera arms-race with the Lumia 900, the Titan II comes equipped with a whopping 16 megapixel camera that can capture 720p video. If you’re looking for a giant phone that can go head-to-head with the Galaxy Nexus, this is your device.

2012 is already shaping up to be a great year with compelling hardware matched-up with Windows Phone 7.5, but what else does this platform need to make my prediction come true? Oh yeah, apps. Do you remember back in the 80′s when DOS-based PCs from IBM and Compaq gave Apple IIs and Macs more than they could handle? It might not have been eye-catching, but DOS had more apps that allowed consumers and companies to be successful. In the 90′s, Windows ran away with the computing market with the Mac, Linux, NeXT, and OS/2 unable to compete in the app department. Why do you think this was the case? I know a big reason was because Borland and Microsoft made better and easier-to-use development tools for Windows.

With 50,000+ apps in the Marketplace, Windows Phone is surging forward and now sits in third-place behind the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Aside from developers betting on the success of a platform, they need development tools, emulators, and programming languages that make it easy for them to be productive. When I look at the velocity at which new apps are being added to the Windows Phone Marketplace, it tells me that Visual Studio is making a big difference.

In my job, I have to work with the development tools for all the major smartphone platforms and I can tell you without drinking any Kool-Aid that the competition isn’t even close. Most iPhone developers I know find that learning Objective-C from the NeXT operating system to be a daunting task compared to modern, high-level languages like C# and VB. While the world is full of Java developers, the complexity of cobbling the necessary tools together needed to build for Android apps is a real productivity killer. Just running Eclipse on JDK 1.6 sucks the life and performance out of my fast Windows 7 laptop. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone is free and the emulator + SDKs all download and install together making the whole process fast and simple. Apps get access to all phone sensors, a local database (SQL Server Compact), and Metro design.

Better productivity means faster time-to-market which means more apps for Windows Phone.

If you’re a web designer/developer, Internet Explorer 9 is alive and well on Windows Phone 7.5. This means you’re no longer held hostage to the highly-fragmented WebKit mobile browser platform. You get a hardware-accelerated, amazingly fast browser with support for more “fully-baked” HTML5 standards like Web Storage, Geolocation, Canvas, Audio and Video.

The lightning fast-Chakra JavaScript engine supports ECMAScript 5 which means your DOM interactions and Ajax web service calls will blur the lines with native apps. When you retrieve data from the cloud or your on-premise servers via Ajax, you’ll now be able to persist it offline in Web Storage. Support for CSS3 means things will be beautiful, 2D transforms will occur, and media queries will give you responsive design.

So here we stand with the best smartphone operating system, best hardware, best development tools and the best mobile web browser. I’m certain that Windows Phone with its army of app developers, OEMs and Mobile Operator partners will be marching to victory this year.

Be fearless,

Rob

I Love what Matt Damon is doing to bring Clean Water to the World

Rob Tiffany — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:17:44 +0000

You might not believe it, but while two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, only 3% of it actually is drinkable. This means that roughly 1 billion people are unable to find the clean drinking water they need to survive. When you add inadequate sanitation to the equation, the number of people put at risk more than doubles. This culminates in the heartbreaking stat that over 3 million people die yearly from water-related diseases.

I don’t know Matt Damon, but I’ve watched his films for years. I especially like his screenwriting and acting in ’Good Will Hunting.’

What really struck me has been the numerous articles I’ve read in magazines and newspapers over the last year about the work Matt and his partner Gary White have been doing to bring clean water and sanitation to the people who need it most. Their water.org has joined with many other individuals and NGOs trying to accomplish the same daunting goal.

As a Submariner who has lived in an undersea world surrounded by water, this issues really hits home for me. ‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’ goes the familiar ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ My fellow sailors in the Navy often thought of this as the saltwater that surrounded us that we didn’t dare drink. Since my submarine could turn saltwater into freshwater through desalination, I thought we had this problem licked. Obviously, I was wrong.

World Oceans

Can you imagine people that spend large parts of their day searching for clean water for their family to drink? Why should girls mortgage their future by spending their day collecting polluted water instead of learning in school?

I thought sharks only lived in the sea. Again, I was wrong. Modern-day water pirates force some people living in slums to pay between 5 and 10 times more per liter of water than the wealthy folks who live in the same community. We’re all so accustomed to having water pipes coming into our homes that the idea of buying daily rations of water from unsavory characters never occurs to us. Matt’s water.org provides micro-loans called WaterCredit to help communities take ownership of their water and sanitation needs. As always, teaching people how to fish is always more sustainable than giving them handouts.

I know these water issues may seem really far away from your current reality, but you never know when the next big drought will bring it home to you. I don’t have to look any farther than Texas to see the devastation that a sustained lack of water can bring. Perhaps we should work harder at finding ways to make the same kind of desalinization that I experienced on my submarines less exensive and more scalable in order to bring water from the oceans to the people, crops and livestock that are doing without. Can you imagine the U.S. Submarine fleet pumping freshwater from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico through a network of pipelines to drought-stricken parts of the country? Food for thought…

In the meantime, I encourage you to visit http://water.org/ to help Matt, Gary and many others make the world’s most abundant resource safer and more accessible to the billions who need it. I’ll be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you as I donate 10% of the profits of the ’Submarine Warriors’ books to water.org. When you read ‘Submarine Warriors,’ you give:

Remember, 2/3 of the Earth is covered with water. Up to 2/3 of the human body is made of water.

People are water.

-Rob

Encrypting your Credentials on Windows Phone 7.5

Rob Tiffany — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:21:00 +0000

The last time I talked to you about Windows Phone security, I showed you how to encrypt your data and save it in Isolated Storage using Silverlight’s AesManaged class to create a Key and an Initialization Vector (IV) based on a password and salt value. This gave your consumer and line-of-business apps the iron-clad AES 256 encryption they needed to secure sensitive data. While this made 3rd-party Windows Phone apps the most secure in the industry, users had to deal with the hassle of entering their credentials each time they launched their secure app.

The reason users had to reenter their credentials each time is because there was no secure way to store those credentials or the key in Isolated Storage. Having the unencrypted credentials used to create the key sitting next to the encrypted data is the same as having no security at all. With the launch of Mango, all this has changed.

Windows Phone 7.5 gives us the Data Protection API (DPAPI) which makes it easy to encrypt and decrypt data. It pulls this off by generating and storing a key based on the user and phone credentials. Oh, and it gets its own decryption key, which is created the first time you run the app that’s doing the encrypting.

Using the ProtectedData class, it’s as simple as calling the Protect method to turn an unencrypted byte array into an encrypted one. On the flip side, you call the Unprotect method to convert an encrypted byte array into an unencrypted one. In cases where the data stays on the phone, this may take care of all of your encryption needs and you won’t necessarily have to jump through all the AesManaged hoops I had you jump through back before we launched Windows Phone 7. On the other hand, if you want to encrypt data on Windows Phone, send it over a network and decrypt it on a server or other endpoint, you need to stick with the stuff I taught you before.

Below is a snippet of code that shows you how to encrypt the password and salt values needed to create a key with the AesManaged class:

using System.Security.Cryptography;

//Convert Password and Salt values to byte[] arrays

byte[] PasswordByte = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Password.Text);

byte[] SaltByte = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Salt.Text);

//Encrypt Password and Salt byte[] arrays using Protect() method

byte[] ProtectedPasswordByte = ProtectedData.Protect(PasswordByte, null);

byte[] ProtectedSaltByte = ProtectedData.Protect(SaltByte, null);

//Save byte[] arrays as two files in Isolated Storage

…

//Read byte[] arrays from files

//Decrypt Password and Salt byte[] arrays using Unprotect() method

byte[] PasswordByte = ProtectedData.Unprotect(ProtectedPasswordByte, null);

byte[] SaltByte = ProtectedData.Unprotect(ProtectedSaltByte, null);

//Convert byte[] arrays to strings and display in the text boxes

Password.Text = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(PasswordByte, 0, PasswordByte.Length);

Salt.Text = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(SaltByte, 0, SaltByte.Length);

With this simple code above, you can now encrypt and decrypt your credentials so you can save them in Isolated Storage next to the portable, encrypted data created via the AesManaged class. So what does this buy you?

It means your users can enter their credentials just once, no matter how many times they launch your secure application. Hassle-free.

Stay safe out there,

Rob

What Developers in Small Companies are Using

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:01:44 +0000

Google Currents

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:43:11 +0000

If you’re a student of beautiful, usable, minimalist user interface design, download Google Currents for iOS & Android to see what’s possible.

A Quick Note on Speedy, Scalable, Available Architectures

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:23:09 +0000

Just a few thoughts on concepts needed to give mobile users of your SOA infrastructure the best, fastest User eXperience possible:

If you care about speed & scalability, your web service will always check the distributed cache before querying the database.
If you have to get your answer from your database, make sure to add the answer to your distributed cache concurrently with returning it to the user.
Don’t ever call your primary database directly. Call one of your horizontally-scaled relational or NoSQL replicas.
Use download-only replication to create as many read-only replicas as you need. Your replicas can contain complete copies of the primary database or just shards of data as appropriate.
When sending data up from the clients to your servers, never let your web services insert, update, or delete directly against the primary database or the replicas.
Have your web services drop that uploaded data in a queue and update the distributed cache while letting worker processes perform those DML operations against the primary database.
Use peer-to-peer replication to maintain more than one read/write primary database at the top of your hierarchy.
Remember to create and maintain more than one hierarchy in different geographies using the same peer-to-peer replication to provide even more availability, scalability, and performance to your mobile users all around the world.
Your mobile users will be connecting to your service via slow, intermittent, unpredictable wireless data networks so always use small, efficient wire protocols like REST and data serialization like JSON.

-Rob

Fast Attack

Rob Tiffany — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:03:23 +0000

Check out our newest, state of the art, fast attack submarine…the Virginia Class. Torpedoes, Tomahawks, and SEALs.

-Rob