Steven Sinofsky (President, Windows Division), Scott Guthrie (VP, Microsoft Developer Division) and Kurt DelBene (Sr. VP, Office Business Productivity Group) were the top speakers and headliners for today’s (day# 2) keynote at PDC2009 in Los Angeles, CA today. The PDC is historically quite important for announcements, this year was no different.

· Biggest applause of the day# 2  comes from Sinofsky when he mentioned about a partnership project with Acer where it puts its own team through the process of actually building a laptop computer, just to see how one is built - what laptop engineers actually go through. In learning the system that Acer goes through, Microsoft built its own limited editions for PDC'09 laptops. They (i.e. Acer machine with Microsoft’s preferred software image, resistive multi-touch, accelerometer) will be giveaways to all PDC attendees!!

· In terms of pure wow factor from the announcements, Silverlight 4.0 steals the show!  The big news today is Silverlight, specifically the beta of version 4.0. Silverlight continues its march towards providing more and more of the functionality of .net, almost full WPF and Windows. Silverlight 4.0 is incredible, that’s what you’ll hear from anyone that watched the day 2 keynote and demos.

(Background, Silverlight 3 released just over a year ago and here we are with yet another release full of features that our developer community has been asking for. This beta release is a developer release.)

 

Background from PDC2009 Day # 1

· Everything is about 3 screens (desktop, phone and tv) and the cloud.

  • Day 1 focus – Backend i.e. Azure and cloud based services
  • Day 2 focus – Office, IE, Silverlight & Windows

· Emphasis on IE + Silverlight for all 3 screens – desktop, phone and TV.

There was quite a bit of developer emphasis with Silverlight in contrast to Windows 7.  Windows 7 is great but the difference between Silverlight and Windows is continuing to shrink.  Silverlight 4.0 also even supports multi-touch as well as lots more direct hardware access.

Announcements from Keynotes

· Public beta will include all features demonstrated  today, tooling support for VS 2010. Available for download now at http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/.

  • Final release of Silverlight 4 shipped first half of next year.

· Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 public betas go live today.

· Office Mobile Clients for Windows Mobile 6.5 betas available today in Windows Mobile Marketplace.

· Outlook Social Connector -- . Get social networking in Outlook with people info, history, activities; SharePoint 2010 Provider, Windows Live Provider and a plug-in involving partners such as LinkedIn. Hence, enabling information from individuals' social organizations and networks to be displayed in a meaningful context in Outlook. This is “SDK based approach/ ability to make providers” implying that developers will be expected to integrate and deploy it.

· Promise of discussion on Windows Mobile at MIX’10 – March 15-17, 2010 in Las Vegas.

· The announcement that got faded due to other announcements was XRM for Microsoft Dynamics. It is one of the more silent  but promising pieces of Microsoft’s cloud technology.

  • oXRM is Microsoft’s only fully multitenant application platform as a service technology that runs on and off premises.

· Other betas released today are

 

 

Details

Silverlight

· Silverlight now on 45% of the world’s internet-connected devices (up from 33% in the summer)

· Silverlight 4.0 under trial by Bloomberg, National Instruments, Siemens (medical diagnostic imaging)

· Silverlight will be used this Winter for Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and Winter

· Silverlight 4.0 key focus – Media, Business Applications, Beyond the Browser

· Silverlight 4.0 offers Webcam & Microphone support on the machine (including raw access), multi-cast streaming and offline DRM support

· Silverlight 4.0 introduces support for printing, rich text, clipboard access, rights click, mouse wheel, implicit styles, drag and drop, html hosting (including content as brush)

· Silverlight 4.0 includes compile REST protocol enhancements; improved WCF support (such as TCP channel support) and RIA

· Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight support - WYSIWYG Design Surface for XAML

· Better intelli-sense, Improvements for Data Binding, Layout and Styles, Services Integration

· Silverlight 4.0 offline capabilities includes Windowing APIs, Notification pop-ups, HTML hosting and Drop Target

· Silverlight 4.0 offline ‘elevated’ model includes: Custom Windows Chrome, Local File System, Cross-Site Network, Keyboard in Full Screen Mode, Hardware Device Access, COM Automation of local objects (using the dynamic keyword in C#) and location APIs.

  • Ability to build trusted applications that run outside the sandbox on Windows and the Mac, the key is that user consent dialog is provided automatically.
  • For example:
  • Office 2010 calendar can be queried, Pivot-Charts brought up from Excel
  • Multi-touch features with basic features, zoom in, zoom out.

· Silverlight 4.0 - Twice as fast, 30% faster startup and offers new profiling support; Transfer data 600% faster using internal transfer protocols instead of HTTP.

· Silverlight 4.0 is supported on Google Chrome.

· Silverlight 4.0 is still under 5MB to install.

· It will ship the Silverlight 4.0 Facebook integration demo as a reference sample

· •70% of voted-for Silverlight 4 features (including 9 of top 10) included

· View the list of the new features at

o http://channel9.msdn.com/learn

· Silverlight can use client-side object model to talk to SharePoint 2010

 

Silverlight Key Demos

· Webcam application that captures live video, can do live effects with bulge, distortion. Integration with Twitter enables the result to be live-integrated into Twitter profile, so a picture just taken becomes the user's Twitter icon.

· Open-source library for barcode reading, can immediately look up the prices of any object scanned from the barcode scanner, pulls up distributors or retail sellers.

· Demo of Vancouver Olympics site with Silverlight player, with instant seek.

· Rich text control that ships in Silverlight 4.0: Arabic, Hebrew, Kanji character sets all within the text editor. Custom context menu after right-click. Can paste and insert text, pictures, and DDE-like controls into a Silverlight app, such as a Data Grid control

· from Excel. Can cut and paste from Data Grid control back into Excel.

· Text can be dragged and dropped from a browser to the application. Print Preview works, including with custom Print Preview dialogs. Silverlight 4.0 will now write directly to the printer, has a print API.

· HTML control is hosted within Silverlight app. HTML image can be converted into a brush -- the entire HTML page can be used as a brush, so that the page can be converted into, say, a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which can be juggled around the screen.

· Brian Goldfarb is demonstrated an S4 application that utilizes Facebook, but which uses its own chrome to develop a real, custom app on top of custom Facebook apps. Can also take advantage of COM automation to right-click data from Facebook, then add to the Outlook calendar. Access to the Outlook inbox, with virtual wall on the right "to contextualize who I'm talking to." Photos dragged-and-dropped from the outside can be loaded into the application live, then tagged, prior to being sent to Facebook.

 

 

Internet Explorer (IE)

· First IE9 news: Three weeks into the project, the team is focused on the following areas:

  • Standards: Acid3 and new emerging standards like HTML5
  • JavaScript performance
  • Hardware-accelerated DirectWrite/Direct2D Graphics & Text

· IE9 already on 32/100 on Acid3 test, up from 20/100 on IE8

· CSS selectors test, using CSS3.info - passed 572 out of 578 (a variation of the SlickSpeed test) for CSS selectors used in rendering.

· IE rendering engine will support rounded borders in CSS.

  • Rendering engine will use hardware-acceleration in DX9 mode (not DX10), using Direct2D. Highly resolved text with much resolved clarity.
  • Sub-pixel positioned text using DirectWrite. Zooms used to be jittery in GDI, nice and smooth as we move to Direct2D. Smooth realignments - "changes without you having to do anything different with your site."
  • Maps re-rendering will use 60 fps rather than 2 or 3, by moving to Direct2D from GDI.

· Lot of new APIs in Windows 7, and IE will take advantage of these APIs.

· Videos of demos will soon be available on Microsoft Channel 9.

 

IIS Media Capabilities

IIS media tool, new version will enable streaming of media directly to Apple iPhone. Video can be encoded once using smooth streaming, target clients using the iPhone.

 

Windows

Telemetry Data

Sinofsky mentioned about the lessons learned at Microsoft about being responsible about how to disclose information about the product. "You should expect us to have learned that lesson about responsible disclosure, and to continue as we move forward.”

The value of the "Send Feedback" button, learning from clients what drivers were loaded, whether the installation of drivers and services were successful. Software Quality Monitor is designed to be opt-in for customers, but the customers were "opted in automatically" during the preview and beta.

· Lots of telemetry data from the Windows development cycle – even stuff like number of presses on Start button and Aero Snap/Shake uses.

· The audio of the audience at the last PDC was analyzed – best reaction was to the new Windows 7 slider control for UAC levels.

There was also a silly Video about how Microsoft programmers are held directly responsible for the errors of their ways, by way of a kind of "agony chair" that shocks, stuns, or stabs the individual developers discovered using the Watson logs to have been responsible for a specific problem. Filled with entertainment-only disclaimer.

 

Windows Demos:

· Various demos of W7 new hardware-supporting features – touch, sensors, hardware-accelerated encoding, DirectX 11, etc.

· Angiulo demonstrated the differences between DirectX 11 processing power and DX10, mainly by means of offloading much of the computing power from the CPU to the GPU.

  • Demos of moving thousands of "star" objects simultaneously in a simulated galaxy formation, with gravity and physical forces between them, all in a 40+ Gflops operation running on a $400 graphics card rather than a $15,000 computer.

 

This year if you did not have the opportunity to join the Microsoft PDC event personally then I hope that these notes will help you. Also, Keynotes were streamed live both on November 17th and November 18th. If you would like to watch them on-demand they are being made available on the www.microsoftpdc.com site soon. One last thing: if you haven’t watched the keynote, take the time to watch it soon because I promise, it’s worth it. As Silverlight is one of my focus points I can recommend you to watch the Silverlight 4 part at the very least.

Also, credit to the following post where Tim has as provided a comprehensive blog on Silverlight 4.0 features:

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

 

Hope that you have enjoyed this post!

Rajan Dwivedi