PDC 2008

Variance: A Different Take on PDC

Ted Neward posted this blog entry on his thoughts after PDC 2008. Specifically, Ted said: The language world was a bit abuzz at the barely-concealed C# 4.0 features, mostly centering around the new "dynamic" keyword and the C# REPL loop capabilities, but noticeably absent was any similar kind of talk or buzz around VB 10. Even C++ got more attention than VB did, with a presentation clearly intending to call out a direct reference to Visual C++'s heyday, "Visual C++: Why 10 is the new 6". Conversations ...
Posted On Wednesday, November 05, 2008 2:30 PM | Comments (0)

Favorite Quote of the Week

At the C#/VB MVP dinner on Monday night, Billy Hollis offered a toast to “the language leads, who reflect the beauty and elegance of their respective languages.” 'Nuff said
Posted On Thursday, October 30, 2008 3:22 PM | Comments (0)

Great Party Last Night!

I’ve gotta give props to Warren Wilbee and the ISV guys for putting on a terrific party last night. Called “Devs After Dark,” it really was a great time – they organizers really understood what we needed at a conference party. It wasn’t heavily advertised; essentially, it was a word of mouth deal. There were several XBox stations, lots of bars without waits, some fairly small rooms for chats. We could hear each other talk, have interesting conversations. And, without being elitist, it was more or ...
Posted On Thursday, October 30, 2008 3:22 PM | Comments (0)

Dave Brubeck Quartet

(been meaning to post this for a while) The concert Sunday night was great, as you might expect from someone who has been recording music for close to sixty years. The Disney Hall had pretty good acoustics and, by sheer chance, I had a seat where I could watch Dave Brubeck’s hands as he played. For those of you who know of Dave Brubeck, he really needs no introduction. Nor, frankly, could anything I say add to his much-deserved reputation. For those who don’t know who Dave Brubeck in, he’s a jazz ...
Posted On Wednesday, October 29, 2008 2:59 PM | Comments (1)

PDC 2008 Keynote 3: Rick Rashid

MSR has about 850 PhD researchers world-wide, working in a variety of areas. That’s a larger faculty than all of Carnegie-Mellon, or the equivalent of building a Berkley faculty every year for the last 17 years. The fundamental concepts in computer science date back to Turing and Church, and are the results of heavy, long-term investments by corporations and governments. 1990: MSR was created in an environment where other companies were scaling back on R&D funding… even though Microsoft was a ...
Posted On Wednesday, October 29, 2008 2:58 PM | Comments (0)

VB Futures: Paul Vick and Lucian Wischik

(Yay!! Finally, some VB!!) Where is Visual Basic headed? Let’s look at where it’s been and what role it plays at Microsoft. It’s been the primary way that the platform has been made easy to use for all programmers. Seventeen years ago, Visual Basic (VB1-VB3) played a key role in making Windows the premier platform. From VB4 to VB6, the focua was on making COM programming possible for normal, mortal human beings. VB7 was the first .NET release, helping establish the CLR as the premier runtime. VB8 ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 11:14 PM | Comments (2)

PDC 2008: Project “Velocity”

Online data caching service Web scenarios: distributed/global object cache (low latency, high scale); cache for reference and activity data; scale IIS/ASP applications Enterprise/HPC scenarios: LINQ enabled cache; co-locate data and computation; persistence; heterogeneous client support Software + Services: application cache for cloud storage (integration with SSDS, Azure); more data services; REST and SOA access Partitioned Caching is an option; each partition is put on a separate cache, with a ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:06 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote: Dave Thompson; “Online and the Power of Choice”

Some companies don’t have the core IT staff to manage their infrastructure without it being a disproportionate burden. Yet, these customers needed to stay up to date, with a high security and high availability environment. Microsoft Online is enterprise-class software, hosted by Microsoft. In the future, all enterprise software will have the option to be delivered online. The value proposition is high security, high reliability, ease of updates and deployment. However, there are choices required. ...
Posted On Monday, October 27, 2008 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

Essential Cloud Services

Blob Namespace http://<account>.blob... can be used as a hierarchical namespace can be up to 50GB each accessed via REST PUT/GET interface includes continuation on upload scenario: blobs are broken up into blocks; if large file upload fails, it can resume without retrying successful blocks; PutBlockList commits the upload under the covers, each blob consists of several immutable blocks (up to 4 Mb each) if multiple blocks with the same ID are ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 7:35 PM | Comments (0)

PDC 2008 Disappointment

So far, I’m a couple days intll that cloud services can, in fact, be ao PDC. The only VB code I’ve seen anywhere was code that I wrote myself. None of the presentations have been VB. There are very few labs that are VB. Having said that, I can assure you that cloud services can, in fact, be written using VB.NET. Doing the lab in C# (as it was written) would have been too easy. So, despite having no support from Microsoft, I did it in VB.NET. I’ve also been talking to a few people to make sure those ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 7:24 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote 2: Don Box and Chris Anderson

I can’t possibly cover this one… go see the keynote video once it’s released
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 4:59 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote 2: Scott Guthrie

.NET 3.5 SP1 improvements streamlined setup startup performance graphics improvements DirectX/Direct3D interop in WPF more controls Code demo for lighting up Windows 7 functionality using WPF this week, a new WPF ribbon control will ship; ties into standard WPF command infrastructure WPF has journaling and navigation built in WPF also has styling/skinning built in can declaratively add jump lists in WPF touch events added to base events cool new DX effects (ripple, etc) Release of new WPF toolkit ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 3:46 PM | Comments (0)

More release announcements

IIS Smooth Streaming jQuery intellisense WPF toolkit Silverlight toolkit Silverlight running external to the browser
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote 2: Windows 7 (Steven Sinosky)

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 share the same kernel and are in sync for release Three foci: personalized experience with user control, connectivity and information organization, and device functionality Julie Larson-Green -- Corporate VP, Windows Experience This is a highly visual demo. You need to check it out at the PDC site. I can’t possibly keep up with all the features shown. New task bar with application thumbnails. Task bar shows thumbnail icons (including tabs) and allows app management, ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:46 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote 2: Opening (Ray Ozzie)

Today’s keynote will take more of a UX perspective, focusing on client apps, OS… paradigm shift to embrace “personal computing,” but not just the PC. We’ve grown from an era when the notion of a computer on every desk was a wild aspiration. Yet, today, we are challenged to imagine not having one on every desk. We trust them with our family memories, our financial information… The Internet has impacted virtually every aspect of modern life. However, the web and the PC are still two separate things. ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 1:50 PM | Comments (0)

The Perils of PDC

Sitting waiting for the keynote on day 2 of the PDC. One of the things they’re doing is posting Twitter messages on the screens. There’s an awful lot of people running behind today. Of course, that could well be because they kept a similar schedule to mine last night. First I hit the VB/C# MVP dinner, with such notables in attendance as Paul Vick, Beth Massi, Ted Neward, Amanda Laucher (the self-acclaimed “F# Chick”), Steven “Doc List”, Alan Griver... and that was the table I was at. Scott Hanselman ...
Posted On Tuesday, October 28, 2008 1:27 PM | Comments (0)

Parallel Computing: Making the Most of Multi-Core Systems

Why is this an important problem? We are in a multi-core world, with single-thread processor performance being basically flat for the foreseeable future. We have to do more work ourselves to exploit multiple cores. However, this isn’t an easy thing to do, and Microsoft is providing libraries to help developers. VS 2010 includes many features specific to parallel programming, including concurrency analysis tools and the Task Parallel Library. Parallelism is all about performance. The cycle: Understand ...
Posted On Monday, October 27, 2008 7:39 PM | Comments (0)

PDC 2008: A Lap Around Azure Services (Manuvir Das)

Windows Azure is an “operating system for the cloud” What is the cloud? a set of connected servers on which developers can: install and run services store and retrieve data What we do today for services: Respond to hardware failures Handle increase in traffic Add storage capacity Diagnose service failures Apply OS patches Perform live upgrades Expand to new locale For the desktop, it’s not quite this bad, since we have an operating system that performs abstractions, provisioning, resource allocation. ...
Posted On Monday, October 27, 2008 4:44 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote Comment

Maybe I’m hyper-sensitive to it, being a VB MVP and all. But it sure would have been nice to see at least one line of VB in the keynote demos. The unintended message is pretty clear: Microsoft uses C# and doesn’t care about VB
Posted On Monday, October 27, 2008 3:52 PM | Comments (0)

PDC Keynote: Amitab Shrivestava (VP of Azure)

Azure is the kernel of the Microsoft cloud platform, allowing others to build killer apps Azure is a scalable solution for deploying services to the cloud, hosting by a hypervisor optimized for cloud computing. Security is key and is implemented at many levels. Azure manages the entire global infrastructure, while providing a layer of abstraction. Automated service management to upgrade services without degrading performance or taking service down. OS and service are managed separately. The core ...
Posted On Monday, October 27, 2008 3:10 PM | Comments (0)

Full PDC 2008 Archive