With the year almost coming to an end, I was looking back at some of the remarkable events this past year. One of the fondest memories I have of this year, although with mixed feelings, is Bill Gate’s keynote and luncheon at TechEd. This keynote marked Bill’s last public speech before he made the switch to focus more on his foundation. I found it to be a very appropriate venue for him to finish on as he took a step back from the day to day Microsoft business. He spoke to the audience that Microsoft was first created for – Developers. As I have blogged about in the past, the luncheon that he hosted with a few community leaders that day was also very powerful in its messaging about the potential impact of technology and individuals partnering together to make an impact in advance of natural or other disasters.
The mixed feelings come from the fact that I feel like I was a part of history here, but I am also saddened to witness a close to a great era. I am, of course, honored to continue the legacy of commitment to innovate and support the great work of the developer community and agree with Bill’s message that it is an exciting time to be a developer and there are many great things that lay ahead.
When I look at everything else that happened this year, I know that while Bill has moved on to new things, his presence and guidance are still felt as we move forward into the future.
As I walk down memory lane, here are some of the key things that stood out in my mind.
Heroes Happen Here: In February we had a huge launch for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. These products were received amazingly well and it is great to see customers build amazing applications with these products.
Silverlight Powered the Olympics: To enable the Olympic Games to reach millions of people and enable hundreds of thousands to concurrently watch live events such as Michael’s swimming, NBC created an amazing site that was powered by Silverlight 2 Beta 2. In the first four days of the Olympic Games, there were 13.5 million video streams, 16.9 million unique users, and 291.1 million page views. To provide some context, in the entire Athens Olympic Games four years ago, there were only 2.2 million video streams launched. Subsequent to the Olympics launch, we also shipped Silverlight 2 and Expression 2, the tooling for designers to support Silverlight and WPF applications.
DreamSpark and BizSpark: We announced Microsoft DreamSpark, a program which makes professional-level developer and design tools available to students around the world at no charge, to support and advance their learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science and engineering activities. This program equips tomorrow’s leaders with the professional tools to inspire and create today. We also announced another program to help jumpstart startup businesses – Microsoft BizSpark. These companies will get fast and easy access to current Microsoft full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses of server products that can be used for immediate use in developing and bringing to market their products with no upfront costs and minimal requirements. Startups will also get access to the community technology preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. They will receive professional technical support from Microsoft and community support from BizSpark Network Partners around the world.
Windows Azure: At the PDC, we announced Windows Azure Services Platform as Microsoft’s new cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft’s data centers. We have a great set of tools with Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, and we want developers to be able to use them to build cloud applications. We did a preview of some of these tools available at PDC.
Foray into Parallel Computing: We established the Parallel Computing Initiative in 2007 which encompasses the vision, strategy, and innovative technologies for delivering natural and immersive personal computing experiences that harness the computing power of manycore architectures. This year, we announced our first big steps to deliver Parallel Computing technologies in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. This will include programming models for concisely expressing concurrency, including new .NET Framework libraries such as the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ as well as the Parallel Pattern Library and Concurrency Runtime for developing native applications with C++ that execute efficiently on parallel hardware and parallel profiling and debugging experiences. This is all a part of the Emerging Trends pillar of Visual Studio 2010.
There are many interesting things I haven’t mentioned including the revealing of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 pillars, launch of the DevLabs website, the combining of Team Dev and Team Data, Application Guidance, Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, and much more.
Have a happy holiday season and I wish you all a very happy new year!
Namaste!
PingBack from http://www.codedstyle.com/reminiscing-2008/
It has been an awesome year. As a developer I'm personally very happy that multi core has happened. Sometimes it's good to have a disruptive force come in and shake things up. The business of software just got interesting again and as a developer I've been introduced by the likes of Brian Beckman et al to many wonderful technologies, patterns and methods that I would never otherwise have come across in my "single threaded, clock speed doubling, comfort zone". I'm looking forward to seeing how Microsoft tools up and educates around this. A tip of the hat to you and in particular Channel 9 for all your efforts in educating on the parallel issue. More of the same please. Bring on 2009, .NET 4, Windows 7 and VS 2KA!
I'm really loving the direction Microsoft has been going in. The express editions, the openness ... it's all so sexy. Thanks for all of your hard work, and keep it up!
I've you linked from my blog and will definitely be keeping an eye on upcoming posts.
Thanks Soma!
Christian S
Subrift Software
http://dujenwook.blogspot.com/
Frankly, it has been a terrible year for MS since 2006. And it shows, because 3.5 footprint is not reduced, it is not kicking off and 2.0 bits are simply ignored.
For Heaven's Sake: fix the JITer to be more efficient, and GDI+ should be fully hardware accelerated and page-fault-less by now.
Why not fix problems? And why keep creating new ones?
The entire Windows footprint has to match that of thin Linux bits and it is not, not in cloud space, not in desktop space, not in HPC, not anywhere helping the complexity MS created for itself.
Regards,
Engineering and fixing things first and foremost..
Soma, it was some year all right.
We saw the best development environments Microsoft ever produced, the 6.0 era, receive their end of life. The useless button bar menu system infected office. .NET bloat faster then Oprah at an all you can eat buffet. Microsoft released security updates for I.E. faster then wall street CEOS running for government bailout money. The only positive was the overwhelming rejection of Vista which was long overdue. If you call this a success I hate to see your failures. Wait I have Visual Studio.
I cringe at the thought what next year holds.
The best things from Microsoft of this year (and may be 2007) in my opinion are:
1. Silverlight 2.0/WPF improvements/Expression Blend
2. Windows 7 and Azure at PDC
3. Bizspark
4. C# 3.5 features
5. LINQ
6. VS.NET 2008
7. IE 8
8. Windows HPC Server in top 25 servers list
9. Charts in ASP.NET/Silverlight
10. VS.NET 2010 previews from blogs at msdn
Things that need work:
1. Office 2007
2. ADO.NET Entity Framework
3. Silverlight's independence from ASP.NET and its own security model for authentication/authorization
4. More free training videos for developers
5. More frequent updates to Live maps, Hotmail, Spaces, etc. (Google has amazing update frequency - Google maps adding amazing features)
Personally, with all due respect, I wish you were more frustrated with your companies development efforts over the past year(s). This would give us some indication you understand what the reality is. To date the reality of the development tools being offered has fallen considerably short of the hype and 2008 shouldn't be considered a success by any means. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done and the direction you/Microsoft seem to be taking is opposite of what the development community needs.
2008 is clearly a year to forget, Microsoft has grown into a lumbering bureaucracy that cannot react quickly to fix problems or innovate yet they make idiotic decisions with disastrous consequences.
In key arenas like win mobile and Live, microsoft is trailing their competition. If Azure gets sucked into the live preception umbrella and basically is exclusive to the windows environment I don't expect any major inroads to be made. Assuming Visual Studio and .NET are the foundation for these platforms there is an obvious problem if Microsoft can not use it's own development tools to create innovative applications consumers want.
Yeah, I also don't think that 2008 was that great a year. .NET 3.5, VS 2008, etc. seem all like to small steps, and not even in the right direction. We're left at where we were before, waiting for the next Visual Studio which is supposed to solve all our problems (Intellisense in C++? ParallelFX in .NET? WPF?).
Given the track record (VS 2002, 2003 except for the C++ Compiler, 2005, 2008), I'd rather hope that Microsoft really does magic this time, otherwise the days where I was developing mainly on Windows are counted. After all, Mono is adding nice SSE functions and easy to embed, GCC is getting C++0x quickly, LLVM is waiting around the corner, and the technology stack on Linux is getting mature instead of being rewritten every few years (MFC FP? WPF? WinForms? How many GUI Toolkits have you brought out in the last few years? Which one is going to be the one for future Windows versions? C/C++/C#, am I doomed if I start an application with C++ now, cause Windows N+1 might provide managed only APIs? On Linux, this is no question, go ahead with C/C++, same on Mac OS X)
>> am I doomed if I start an application with C++ now, cause Windows N+1 might provide managed only APIs
This is my question too.
Until 5 year ago we had almost everything we needed to develop an application appropriate for that days using MFC, but now :( We are arguing about migrating from MFC to the Qt for our new projects. Just using VC IDE and compiler.
Anyway, we aren't sure about the future of the native development in windows too.
Publicación del inglés original : Viernes, 19 de diciembre de 2008 20:34 PST por Somasegar Coincidiendo
Vanakkam
We are proud of you soma..keep doing great job
Tamil Valzha!
Agreed!
We don't use .NET in our applications either, why chain our application to winblows. A lack luster year is nothing for M$FT to be proud of!
completely disagree with you anonymous. definitely not a lack luster year. some amazing products were released in 2008: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, .net 3.5 enhancements and Silverlight 2.0
@Tom
SQL Server 2008 - Microsoft has yet to screw this product up YET and are basically leaving the core of SQL Server alone, which is a good thing! The debugger still doesn't work very well but the auditing and encryption features was a nice enhancement. (Yes I will give credit when credit is due) There is still major work to be done addressing the EDM issues with SQL Server which are more on the EDM side of things. The funny part is SQL'S indexing is based upon VFP'S rushmore technology which so many people on this blog call a legacy application! SQL Server is one of the few bright spots Microsoft has left. I do seriously really like this product.
Silverlight is Microsoft bloated version of flash, the development tools lack integration into VS and like most Microsoft technologies the data access is horrifically bad.
There is not room enough in this comment section to list all the .NET related issues. Having said that one of the biggest issues is as soon as you bring in the .BLOAT api wrappers into your application you lose cross platform development.
Calling this year and the pass couple of years for that matter "Lack Luster" is probably the nicest way to put it. If the 6.0 era was the golden age of development tools then when are obviously in the "stone age" of software development.
By the way wasn't it cool when Ballmer Microsoft's "cheerleader in chief" in Vegas basically said they are giving up on Vista. If he would have announced the same for VS and .NET then that indeed would be a great start to 2009, one can only hope!