Leo's Rantings : PDC2008

introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite

lblanco — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:55:00 GMT

At the 2008 PDC, Kam Vedbrat and I introduced two brand new DirectX APIs, to be included in Windows 7: Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct2D is geared towards high-quality vector and bitmap graphics, with the performance characteristics of hardware-acceleration as you'd expect from a DirectX API, whereas DirectWrite is a text processing stack that can be used with any rendering technology, most notably, of course, Direct2D. We believe these two APIs will do for native code developers what WPF did for managed code developers, from the point of view of enabling visually stunning interfaces and readability rivaling the printed page.

For more details, check out the video of our PDC presentation, available at Channel 9.

C# for dynamic programming!

lblanco — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:10:00 GMT

Anders Hejlsberg demonstrated the dynamic programming features of C# 4.0. Very cool was C# calling JavaScript code without extra casts, calls to Invoke, and the like -- just straight function calls in C# that happen to be implemented in JavaScript. Even cooler was porting the JavaScript code to C#, which is nearly trivial because of the new support for late-bound types.

However, what really got the audience going was the demo of C# futures. This is stuff that isn't shipping soon, but the C# team is working on it and obviously felt good enough about the direction to show an early demo. The main feature was the exposure of the compiler as a reusable, inspectable object. To demonstrate this, Anders showed a run-time expression evaluator, and built a very, very simple but very cool C# shell with it. What's cool is that the evaluator can be stateful, so he could type an expression that defined a function, and then later type a different expression that referenced that function. Good stuff is coming from the C# team. :-)

Windows Azure

lblanco — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:36:00 GMT

PDC 2008 day 1: Ray Ozzie unveiled "Windows Azure", our operating system for the cloud. After years of thinking of "operating system" as something that runs a computer, it's weird to think about the meaning of the term with respect to a large set of computers. It's not the collection of OSs for each individual computer, but a set of services that enable development, deployment and operations of web services. Very cool stuff, actually, though as a graphics guy I have to step quite a bit outside of my safe zone to get excited about the potential.

at the PDC again

lblanco — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:08:00 GMT

I'm back in Los Angeles for this year's PDC. It was a long shot, given that the group I happen to be on is sending a smaller percentage of people to the PDC than the WPF team did back in '05, but thankfully I have an opportunity to present, which means I have an opportunity to attend. BTW, if you are at the PDC then check out PC18, Wednesday at 1:15pm, something about Windows 7 -- come by to find out what :-).