The BUILD conference is coming and lots of cool new revolutionary things about Windows 8 will be unveiled. I, on the other hand, want to ask for a simple mundane change from Windows 7 and earlier versions – move the damn spellchecker from Office [team] to core Windows [team]!

I write in 3 languages on a daily basis – English, Lithuanian and Russian. I have spellchecking for all 3 of them in Office apps.

I only have an English spellchecker in Windows Live Writer. That’s why there are a lot of stylistic mistakes in my blog posts, but not many spelling mistakes ;). But if I blog (say) in Russian, I don’t have a luxury of my PC looking out for me. So I have to either not suck at spelling (impossible when the last time I had to spell correctly in Russian was 18 years ago) or simply subject my readers to crappy texts riddled with spelling mistakes.

What’s worse is that in Internet Explorer 9 there’s no spellchecking at all. I know that there are 3rd party spellchecking add-ons, but they made the browser unstable in some circumstances. I honestly tried to use IE9 as my primary browser for a month or two but eventually gave up. There are other reasons why I use Chrome and not IE9, but absence of spellchecker is definitely my number 1 issue with IE.

The fact that all of the above mentioned products are made by Microsoft and that I have spellcheckers for all 3 languages installed on my machine is ridiculous. There’s no excuse for this except for some organizational issues inside Microsoft and I shouldn’t be exposed to them as a user.

I’m totally looking forward to all the cool things in Windows 8, but, please Microsoft, end this idiocy with spellchecking. There’s no excuse for not having a system-wide spellchecking engine with an API for 3rd party apps in 2012.

Thank you to everyone who signed the International Windows Phone 7 App Marketplace Petition and/or spread the word! As I’m writing this more than 1000 people have already signed the petition. And that without any help from mainstream media (as far as I know). Not bad!

Thanks to WMPoweruser, wpcentral, Mobility Digest, René Schulte, Justin Angel, David Petrla and everyone else who helped us achieve this milestone. Sure this number means nothing if Microsoft doesn’t react but it should be hard to ignore by now.

The feedback has been mostly positive but there were some recurring misunderstandings I became tired dispelling in comments and on Twitter. So I decided to address these in this post one by one.

Disclaimer: I don’t pretend that everything I write below is 100% accurate but I’m trying to be as accurate as I can

There are some legal, tax, currency and similar issues

First I must admit I’m not a lawyer. And I’m not denying that there might be some issues in this area in some countries. That said my favorite example to dismiss this argument is Belgium and The Netherlands.

These are 2 neighboring European Union countries and are part of Benelux. They have the same currency (Euro) and all EU countries have aligned trade laws so once you can sell in one of the EU countries you can sell in all of them. So why is Belgium is on the list of supported countries and The Netherlands isn’t? The answer is fairly simple once you know that one of the official languages in Belgium is French and there already is a French WP7 app marketplace for a big market in France.

International trade seems to be a boogeyman for most people in USA and they seem to imagine it as something that takes years to overcome. But you know what? I work for and co-own a small company here in Lithuania. We’ve been selling our software electronically worldwide since 2003 and it took us only a few hours to set this up. Sure, we do it through a 3rd party service but Microsoft uses (used?) the parent company (Digital River) of the company we use for their own Windows Marketplace (now Microsoft Store). And guess what, there’s a European Union (English) Microsoft Store.

Anyway I’ve heard that in some countries banks charge credit card owners for international transactions and things like that. This is a valid reason to hold out roll out to these countries, but for many countries and European Union for sure, the English (International) App marketplace is literally no further than one decision and one UPDATE query away. In my humble opinion, for course.

Xbox Live is not global, so what do you want from WP7 marketplace?

Xbox Live is a great addition to Xbox experience, but it’s still an addition to the offline gaming experience. You can go into a store worldwide and buy a game you can enjoy on your Xbox. But guess what’s the only way to get apps onto your shiny WP7 device? Right.

Zune is not global, so what do you want from WP7 marketplace?

Again, you can load your own music and videos obtained elsewhere to your WP7. But guess what’s the only way to get apps onto the phone?

We understand that not everything is in Microsoft’s hands when it comes to music and video. Regional restrictions on music are still lame but it’s a totally different issue and that’s why it was explicitly excluded from the petition:

We are not talking about Music & Video where we understand that not everything is in your hands. We are talking about your own app marketplace.

Additionally Zune is available in some form in countries where WP7 app marketplace isn’t (like Norway and Sweden). This says that these marketplaces aren’t directly related.

Many countries have access to iOS App Store in iTunes but not music and video. These are 2 different stories.

Microsoft wants to localize the marketplace properly before opening it in new countries

Great. So why exactly phones without localization are sold officially in all those “other” countries? If someone bought a phone without localized UI and didn’t return it, would they mind non-localized Marketplace? I wouldn’t.

In addition proper localization is almost impossible. Here’s one comment from a Belgian who signed the petition:

I live in Lithuania and most of the content sites over here are in Lithuanian exclusively. The nearby Latvia has a larger Russian-speaking population and almost all of the sites over there have both Latvian and Russian versions. You get the picture.

It’s a global world so there’s quite a lot of people living around the world and not speaking (or at least not preferring) the language of the country they live in. There’s a need to be able to switch languages in any region and basically in all of them there should be an option to switch to English. So why not launch English marketplace right now and work on extra languages later?

Conclusion

That’s all I can think of right now. I still don’t see any reasonable explanations to the situation around Windows Phone 7 App Marketplace. A few critics of the petition all rehashed the same things I’ve tried to disprove above and Microsoft keeps it’s silence for now.

We’ll see what happens next.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not a fan of petitions, “calling your representative” and things like that. Yet I can’t understand the current state of Windows Phone 7 experience around the World. The more or less full experience (minus differences in access to Music & Video) is available in 17 countries. At the same time phones are sold in way more than those 17 countries.

Last time I raised this issue the phones weren’t officially available over here in Lithuania. Now I can go into official stores of 2 cell operators in Lithuania and walk out with one of the 2 available HTC models.

At the same time when I launch Zune Software on my Windows 7 with current location set to Lithuania here’s what I see:

Notice that the Marketplace tab is missing. It takes switching location to United States (or other supported region)

to see that tab

Unfortunately even after this we can only access the free apps and trials because it wouldn’t accept our credit cards.

Some might say we are lucky that we can see free apps in the marketplace on our phones (I’m still not sure if this is the case without any tricks but it could be). People in other countries can’t do even that:

The worst part of all of this is that there’s no official information on the problems Microsoft is facing with allowing access to the marketplace in countries other than those 17 lucky ones. And unfortunately for Microsoft not many people can come up with a reasonable guess as to what these problems might be.

I’ve heard (and thought of) only 2 reasons:

Guess #1. Localization. Microsoft wants to localize the marketplace into local languages before launching it in new markets.

Here’s why this doesn’t make much sense: There’s no Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, etc. UI in the Windows Phone 7 OS itself, yet the phones are available in Lithuania, Norway, Poland, etc. So absence of localization doesn’t stop them from selling the phones, but stops from providing access to the marketplace? Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Guess #2. Taxes. Apparently Microsoft needs to deal with tax differences and similar stuff.

I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure that once you’ve dealt with taxes in one European Union country you can cover all of the EU from there without any substantial overhead. We have 8 EU countries covered by the marketplace (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom). Where are the other 19? And I’m not talking about new members. Where’s Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden, etc.? Looking at the list it seems obvious that selection was made by language rather than anything else. But we’ve covered that above.

Any other guesses? And why do we have to guess? Why is it difficult for Microsoft to come up with an explanation and a roadmap? What’s the point in silence in this case?

Who wins here? Consumers can’t access the marketplace – bad. Developers and Microsoft can’t sell apps to these consumers – bad. And the worst part that there are no explainable obstacles responsible for that. I’m not saying there aren’t any for sure, I’m just asking to let us know if there are.

A week ago I’ve shown my LG Optimus 7 to a non-technical friend. He asked me if I can recommend him buying a WP7 phone. And honestly, being a Windows Phone fan myself, I couldn’t. I don’t want my friend to be mad at me for having to go through hoops just to get some apps on his smartphone. I will recommend the phone once this is resolved, I will highlight it’s great novel UI and try to justify some deficiencies in order to convince my peers, but I can’t do that right now.

So when I saw another desperate cry of frustration with this situation on Twitter, I’ve snapped and decided to create a petition. Here it is:

International Windows Phone 7 App Marketplace Petition

If you agree with what’s written there and in this blog post, please, take a few seconds to sign the petition and spread the word. Maybe this way Microsoft will hear us and shine some light on the situation or better yet just flip the switch.

Disclaimer: By no means I pretend to have all the knowledge needed to make this work and all the challenges Microsoft is facing in this area. This is just my stream of consciousness on the subject.

What’s the biggest worry for Microsoft on the subject off people sideloading apps? The answer to this question is hard to guess wrong. They don’t want alternative marketplaces to appear and compete with the official marketplace undercutting developer earnings, trust, etc. and in turn Microsoft’s earnings and market share.

I’d leave piracy alone since it’s not something you can fight without punishing legitimate users along the way. The phones will be hacked anyway and pirates will do their thing. I don’t have any doubts about it.

On the other hand there are lots of people who would love to be able to load apps to the phone for pretty legitimate reasons like:

• hobbyist making apps for themselves and friends
• people who can’t become official WP7 developers (there are more than 30 countries in the world, you know)
• companies making apps for internal use

I don’t think any of the above mentioned usages constitutes any danger to the official marketplace. So, basically, the goal is to make 3rd party marketplace apps either impossible or, more likely, too complicated for normal people to use.

So, what if people could load XAPs via Zune and these XAPs would be signed on the fly and only signed apps could run on the phone? This way it’s pretty easy for regular folks to sideload their apps, impossible for on-the-phone 3rd party marketplaces to exist and too complicated for web/PC 3rd party marketplaces to gain any mainstream traction.

It sounds too simple for me to be true, so I’m probably missing something. What do I miss?

What & Why?

On my recent trip to USA one of the biggest challenges was a constant need to evaluate all the US units and figuring what they mean to me. Miles, feet, inches, gallons, ounces, Fahrenheit… Come on, guys, it’s about time to switch to normal measurement system! ;)

Nevertheless I’ve liked it there and would definitely want to go again. So, Microsoft Lithuania contest to make an Internet Explorer 8 accelerator with trip to MIX11 as a grand prize couldn’t come handier.

When first paragraph met the second one in my head, I knew immediately what to make for this contest.

Please welcome my Automatic Unit Converter IE8 accelerator and complimentary site. You just select some text on some site, click the blue accelerator button, hover over “Convert to Metric” and get all the known units in your selection converted to metric.

Why not just use Google, Bing, etc.?

1. Not everything work automagically with Google and Bing. 60 ft 5 inch works, but 60'5" doesn’t. Often you have to tell Google what your target is. Building an engine to figure that out is one short step away from just converting the values. So I just made that step myself.
2. Multiple values in arbitrary text. When you are looking at a text containing multiple values (like in the screenshot above) you don’t want to select and convert them one by one.

What about other systems and directions?

I would probably improve US-to-Metric over time and add Imperial-to-Metric. As for converting these back from metric I’m not personally interested in it. That said I’ve created a conversion module in away to allow expansion and I’m ready to make it open source. So, if someone is up for the task, let me know and I’ll post the project online and implement selection and specific accelerators for different scenarios into the site.

Vote for me!

My accelerator is listed on the contest page as “Matų konvertavimas”. Click on “Patinka” if you like the accelerator.

I have 9 days left on my Visual Studio 2008 trial and suddenly "Upgrade..." button no longer leads to "Content not found" page. It was still "not found" a week ago or so, but now it looked promising. Unfortunately digital registration is only an option for customers in USA and Canada. So we (the rest of the world) are still out of luck.

So I assume I'll have to go the old-fashioned way and it sucks.

See also:

• Part 1: Why is it so F#...ing Difficult to Buy Visual Studio!?
• Part 2: Visual Studio Trial Upgrade: 24 days later

Apparently the most popular Bill Gates quote is "fake":

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640K bytes of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough.

... Gates has addressed the 640K quote in interviews. "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again," he told Bloomberg Business Applications in 1996.

The Quotable Bill Gates

Dang. The world will never be the same.

I wanted to wait a month before checking back on this issue but recent post by ScottGu (more on this later in this post) changed my plans.

So, it's been 24 days since that post. Thanks to DotNetKicks, Dzone and, obviously, Google that post was viewed more than 1100 times directly (not counting views through RSS, as part of the whole blog, etc.). I'm pretty confident that someone from Microsoft directly responsible for these things or at least someone who knows someone who is in some way related to this has seen it.

Today I tried to repeat the quest and failed exactly the same way as almost a month earlier. The only difference was that MSDN's header design has changed and "Content Not Found" page looks prettier now.

Now back to the a/m ScottGu's post. Only things why I wanted to upgrade to VS2008 right now were to play with Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC. Sure I'd like to use VS2008 with other things but for now I work on 2.0 projects and there's no immediate need for 2008. And from that post it appears that I can do my playing from VWD Express 2008 meaning that I can delay upgrade to VS2008 for as long as I want (if ever). This is no way a solution for the actual non-upgradeability problem but it's not my fault that Microsoft doesn't want my money.

I remember going through something like this with Visual Studio 2005 but back then I've swallowed my pride and called my local "pusher" and got the VS2005 old fashioned way. Now, 3 years later, I want to buy Visual Studio 2008. Let's see how this goes...

Note: I live outside of USA and any other "major market" for that matter

Upgrading through the Trial

I've download and installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional 90-day Trial. Now I go to Help->About and see the "Upgrade..." button. Hooray!

When I click it my browser opens a page saying  "Content not found".

How crazy is that!? This is a current product by a MAJOR corporation so how could something like this happen?

Other ways

OK, let's swallow some pride again and go through the product page. Closest to the words "buy" or "purchase" is Pricing - let's go there. First link there is Worldwide Purchase Information. Hooray again. When I go there I see information about buying an MSDN Subscription but I only want a standalone VS2008 Standard or Professional. OK, there's a section:

Additional Purchasing Options

• Purchasing Visual Studio: Find information here.

[Skeptical] hooray. So now we get to this page. Looks promising. I click "Buy or upgrade now" and get to Windows Marketplace page where all of the online merchants listed ship to USA and Canada only. And I would actually prefer a simple license key (which must be an option (see below)). Dead end again.

Now I remember that there was something about upgrading from Trial on the Trial download page. Here it is:

Upgrading from Trial Editions

When you are ready to upgrade from an installed trial edition of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server (or the Workgroup Edition of Team Foundation Server), you don't have to completely uninstall and reinstall those products. For more information, see How to: Upgrade from Visual Studio Trial Edition (a Visual Studio 2005 topic, but still accurate).

The "how to" page has the following:

To obtain a product key

• Purchase a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition at a retail location. The product key is listed on the sleeve of the DVD or CD.

  —or—

  Order a Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition product key online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/. The product key is sent to you in an e-mail message.

Click on the http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/ - "Content Not Found"

Our local Microsoft website has a list of "old-school" companies who can order you a hard copy from the warehouse and you'll get it in couple of weeks or months (which was what I tried to avoid and was supposed to succeed).

I hope that someone at Microsoft reads this and at least fixes all the "not found" issues and specifies accurate information. At the very least tell me that there's no way for me to buy this online but don't make me waste half a day trying to find a correct way to navigate your website! Theoretically I wasted more time (equals money) looking for a way to make a simple transaction than the transaction is worth. Very frustrating.

My daughter is 8 (soon to be 9). She has her own PC for a couple years now. Until recently she only played the games I installed, painted with Wacom/ArtRage and played online flash games on a couple of sites. But some time ago she started "discovering the web" on her own and question that interested me theoretically for more than a year became really practical: how do I protect her (read "control") from the evil sides of the Internet?

After some research (not much actually) I came to conclusion that no one provides such an end-to-end solution like Microsoft's Windows Live Family Safety.

What is it?

Basically it's a small app you install on XP or Vista PC and a web application to control it. You can limit what sites your child can visit, approve/filter her Live Mail/Hotmail contacts, Live Messenger Contacts, etc.

It also integrates to some extent with Windows Live Spaces so your child can blog, share photos with friends, etc.

How does it work?

You need to have LiveIDs (Microsoft's accounts) for all the parents and children and add them in appropriate roles.

Then you set up what your child sees by default. In my case recommended settings (for children 0 to 10) were to block all the sites except kids friendly sites and those explicitly allowed by parents. Now when Daniela wants to visit a site that is neither known to be kids friendly nor in her allowed list she is presented with a page informing here about that and 2 options to ask parents permission. She can ask by filling a request and then you can approve or reject it in web interface or, in case you are at home, she can just call you and ask to approve the site simply by logging in with your LiveID and clicking "Approve". You can also monitor what your child browsed and what attempted to browse but was blocked.

I haven't played with contacts management yet but I assume it's done in similar manner.

What I like so far

• the system is easy to use and well integrated;
• all the main bases are covered: surfing, email, IM, social networking;
• I didn't meet any major resistance from my child (unlike expected) :)

What I didn't like so far

• there's no Russian or Lithuanian GUI (and probably not many other languages are covered, if any). It's not a major problem since there aren't many things for the child to read and it could be even good for learning English, but anyway I think the fact is worth mentioning. And, btw, when you go to download Windows Live apps it tries to play smart and detects your browser's desired language and shows you Live apps in that language only. And Family Safety is not included in the package if it's not in English. So make sure you download the English version;
• all of the features are obviously tied in Microsoft's Live services. This is not unexpected but I wish there was some open standard (or is there?) to connect such filters and web services. Anyway now my child is stuck with Windows Live Messenger and I'll have to use it too (well, I'll still use Miranda, but with one more protocol). Good move, Microsoft :)
• while FS blocks general search engines there's no kids friendly search engine by Microsoft (or I couldn't find it). There's no such thing by Google, too. Yahoo has kids.yahoo.com so this is what we'll use for now.
• I'm not sure if this is related to FS or this is just a Spaces feature, but you can't make your child's blog public at all. I understand that this is related to child's inability to understand everything about privacy issues and stuff but I think an option for pre-moderated public blog would be really nice to have. Cause now even I can't subscribe to my daughter's RSS feed.

Though the cons section looks much bigger than pros, but in reality I'm really satisfied with the solution so far and we'll see how it rolls.