Jim O'Neil's Blog : PDC

Azure IT PAC Tour

joneil — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:16:05 GMT

One of the more popular exhibits on the Big Room floor at PDC 09 was the Azure IT PAC (Pre-assembled Container). The IT PAC is the unit of deployment within Azure Data Centers, such as those in San Antonio and Chicago now, and those planning to open in 2010 in Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong. The specific unit at PDC was an outdoor, Generation 4 model (as opposed to the older indoor units currently deployed in Chicago and San Antonio).

Check out the short video of the IT PAC I shot at PDC, after a quick tour from some of the Microsoft guys behind their deployment.

Adjacent to the IT PAC at PDC was a short, professional-quality video playing that showed how the unit is put together from the ground up. I’m told that video should appear shortly at Microsoft Showcase, joining the concept video available there now, so check back within the next week or so for that.

Lastly, Ina Fried has a great series of photos at the CNET site of the same container at PDC (clearly I need to upgrade from my Sony NSC-GC1!). Also check out her recent coverage of the Chicago data center.

PDC: Pretty Darn Cool!

joneil — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:18:00 GMT

I got back from PDC yesterday and have managed to (mostly) make up for my sleep deficit. Undoubtedly you’ve heard by now some of the major announcements at the conference (including the free multi-touch laptop that all the paying attendees received!):

Silverlight 4

Windows Azure availability

“Dallas”

Office 2010 Beta

If you haven’t already, be sure to listen to the two keynotes (Day 1 and Day 2) to see how far things have come since PDC 08 (as well as where we’re headed). The sessions are also available on demand, so you can experience all of the content from the comfort of your own living room as well!

On the Fence? PDC Offer Good Until Friday!

joneil — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:30:00 GMT

Microsoft PDC is just a few weeks away, and you’ve probably already heard some of the buzz. Windows Azure will go live, and of course, we’ve just released Windows 7 and Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 (by the way, not 4.0 as the marketing folks have told me).

It’s obviously an investment, both in time and in money, but as the premiere conference for developers and architects, where and when else are you going to have the opportunity to get the technical details and future strategy of the platform straight from the Microsoft product experts? And where else and when else will you have the chance to network with so many of your colleagues from around the world in one place? You’ll have conversations that will guide your professional efforts far beyond the few days you’ll spend in LA, and besides, I hear there’s great parties too (you can leave that part out when you ask your boss to go!).

If you act before Friday, October 30th, you can get $300 off of the conference pass, and you can take advantage of the FREE Windows 7 Boot Camp on Monday, Nov. 16th, even if you can’t join us for the rest of the conference.

Back to School… Back To PDC

joneil — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:34:00 GMT

School’s back in session (finally) up here in Massachusetts, and with that it’s time to turn attention to your own training! It’s September, and Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) isn’t that far off – November 17 – 19th, in Los Angeles.

It’s no secret that we’re set to announce the commercial availability of Azure at PDC, but there’s a host of other cool developments and technologies (can you say .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, Oslo, …) coming as well. That’s what being at PDC is all about: ‘finding out what’s next.’

Just today we’ve announced 25 new sessions – from Azure to WCF to SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight - to add to the tracks posted at the PDC site. Keep in mind too, that if you register by September 15th, you’ll save $500 on your conference pass.

I’ll be there, I hope you’ll be able to make it too.

Come to MDC and See Why Azure is Red-Hot

joneil — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:56:25 GMT

Admit it. You're just a wee bit envious of all those who went to PDC to hear first-hand about the next-generation of computing on the Microsoft platform, namely Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform, as well as updates to the .NET Framework, Windows 7, and a host of other goodies. While there's plenty of material to review - keynotes, Channel 9 videos, whitepapers, and blogs - nothing beats hearing it first hand, experiencing the buzz live, and discussing the technology and its impact with your fellow developers.

Well, we're in luck here in the Northeast. Boston is one of eleven US cities to host the MSDN Developer Conference, a one-day conference consisting of 12-sessions across three tracks.

Cloud Services

Lap Around Cloud Services
Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services
A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
Developing Applications Using Data Services

Client and Presentation

Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) Roadmap
Developing Data-centric Applications Using the WPF DataGrid and Ribbon Controls
Building Business Focused Applications using Silverlight 2
ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Tools, Languages and Framework

The Future of Managed Languages: F#, C#, and Visual Basic
A Lap Around "Oslo"
"Rosario": A Sprint with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers

With MDC, we're bringing the best of the PDC experience straight to you! The Boston event will be held on January 22, 2009, at the Sheraton Boston, 39 Dalton Street. Make sure you reserve a spot and register now (cost is only $99!).

Hello Windows 7 - PDC Day 2 Keynote Recap

joneil — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:09:14 GMT

Wow! Lots of really cool stuff from the PDC today focusing on Windows 7, Visual Studio, .NET Framework 4.0, and Office Web Applications. It's going to be impossible to do this justice, so I'd really recommend checking out the replay of the keynote. It ran 2 1/2 hours today, but is so chock full of demos and coolness covering the spectrum from web, to desktop, to mobile, that you don't really notice the time. There were five main sections to the keynote, and I'll do my best to summarize those here:

Windows 7 (user-focused)

This session was introduced by Steven Sinofsky, but Julie Larson-Green did most of the demos. Plenty of eye candy and productivity enhancements are in store including:

combined start bar, taskbar, and quick launch
live thumbnails on the task bar
"jump list" - a very cool MRU-like task list available right from the task bar
"homegroup" enabling automatic detection of devices and peripherals in your home network and providing a division between home and office resources
"Libraries" (one step above folders) - coalescing information and resources from disparate devices in your network
"Device Stage" - a control panel-ish interface providing one place to manage each device, access vendor documentation, etc.
more options for desktop customization, placement of gadgets, and what's in system tray
touch screen - Word 2007 just 'works' (because of hooking into mouse events), other applications like Explorer and Paint have been retooled to be touch-aware.

Check out Zack Whittaker's blog for more, and some screenshots here and here on Paul Thurott's site.

Windows 7 (developer-focused)

Sinofsky transitioned from the end-user focused features into a discussion on lessons learned from Windows Vista and an introduction of features for developers in Windows 7. I thought his explanation on why Windows 7 will not face the same challenges as Windows Vista was earnest without being too apologetic. Here, in no particular order, are some of the items he touched on in terms of advantages to developers using Windows 7 (by the way, all of the features are available to both managed (.NET) and unmanaged (Win32) developers!):

accessibility to ribbon interface (such as they showed in the new version of MS Paint; it's available now to developers in CTP form for WPF applications on Windows XP and Vista)
jump list and libraries (which are a user experience facet that developers can now take advantage of to differentiate their offering)
multi-touch, ink and speech capabilities all augment the user experience
DirectX will extend to 2d and animation becoming the new "GDI"
memory footprint of the operating system has been reduced along with disk IO (such as for registry access)
bit locker support for USB and external devices
enhanced experience for multiple monitors and support of multiple monitors in remote desktop!
UAC Setting Control Panel allowing you to control how much (or little) of the system messages you want to see

The big question is "WHEN", and Sinofsky suggested it will be on target with the "3 years from Vista" messaging we've heard before. The bits provided to PDC attendees are the M3 release, and beta is expected early next year. There is no commitment to a schedule beyond that, as the beta experience will be used to further solidify the timeline.

More reading: Mary Jo's blog, Ed Bott's blog, ActiveWin.com review, Paul Thurott's SuperSite, and Microsoft blogs: Windows 7 blog for developers (MSDN), Engineering Windows 7 blog (MSDN)

.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 10

Scott Guthrie did the honors here talking a bit about what came in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 and what's coming next:

latest release of WPF Toolkit available today, including version 1 of datepicker and data grid, and a preview of the Visual State Manager
.NET 4 will allow CLR 2 and CLR 4 in the same address space!
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) introduces a new scheme for building components and is at the foundation of the new Visual Studio UI (built using WPF, by the way). Use of the MEF and WPF should foster Microsoft and 3rd-party extensions of the Visual Studio UI as well as enable richer support for code-editing, multiple monitors, and refactoring.
jQuery Intellisense support is available now for Visual Studio 2008 (as of this writing though, I don't see it on Codeplex or jQuery's site)
investments in ASP.NET including
- MVC
- Improved traditional Web Forms (control over client id names, for example)
- Ajax enhancements (REST support, templating)
- distributed caching via Velocity
Investments in Silverlight (which is approaching installation on 100 million computers!)
- Silverlight Toolkit available now
- Next release to include H.264 support ("and others" according to Guthrie)
- Designer in Visual Studio 10 to support editable design surface (yay!) and all the goodies from the new WPF designer
- ability to run Silverlight in and out of the browser [one of the demos today did this, but I didn't catch much addtional dialog regarding the 'disconnected' Silverlight model]

More reading: Scott Guthrie's blog, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview (MSDN)

Live Services

Dave Treadwell moved the discussion toward the "web tier" introduced yesterday by Ray Ozzie in his announcement of Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform. Live Services focuses on four pillars

Identity - in which the Microsoft Services Connector and the Microsoft Federation Gateway are key components, as is the announcement of Windows Live ID becoming an OpenID provider.
Directory Services - allowing applications to leverage the 'social graph' each of us has within his e-mail contacts, IM buddies, etc.
Communication and Presence - via integration with Live Messenger, etc.
Search and Geospatial capabilities

The Live Framework (CTP announced today) provides the APIs to access these services, as Ori Amiga demonstrated in what I thought was a compelling demo that took Scott Guthrie's WPF photo-browsing application from the previous demo and 'meshified' it to sync with a mobile device.

Anthony Rose of the BBC showed another cool example (currently a proof-of-concept) for their iPlayer application demonstrating the social sharing aspects enabled by the Directory Services of Live Services and also the synchronization capabilities - he stopped playing a movie on his desktop, synced to his mobile device, and resumed viewing on his device at the point he stopped earlier!

Also announced was the open beta of Live Mesh, including limited availability for Mac and Mobile later this week.

Staying Informed

joneil — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:29:49 GMT

With PDC coming up this week, there's going to be an incredible amount of buzz and announcements surrounding .NET 4.0, the next version of Visual Studio, cloud computing, and lots more. For those of us not going, there's still plenty of avenues to keep on top of all of the announcements.

Watch the Keynotes live, 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. EST
Check out the Live Blog (beginning 11:30 EST on the 27th)
Tune in to the RSS feed

And just to get a jump on things, check out the updated .NET logo: