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Alex Turner's story about how he took $202 from Anders Hejlsberg is very amusing. And true!
I remember that week before PDC 2005. There was a lot going on, including a last-minute name change. We had to change all of the PDC materials from "Clarity" to "LINQ". Sometimes a name change before an event isn't a big deal, but this one was since we had assembled a ton of different materials -- presentations, samples, walkthroughs, a CTP, and on and on.
I had fun reading some of the other material on the Microspotting site as well. Who knew that riding a Segway was so dangerous!
--Scott
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Gabriele Renzi has a good post on the future of JavaScript: "ECMAScript 4, the fourth system syndrome". The concept of a "fourth system syndrome" is a good one, particularly so for programming languages. For mature programming languages, thoughtful evolution is the rule. A revolution is best done with an entirely new language, as this serves two very important purposes: (1) supporting existing users, many of whom presumably like the existing language, by evolving it in parallel, and (2) freeing the new language from the constraints of the old one.
This leads to a kind of punctuated equilibrium, where there are significant periods of steady evolution in existing languages, punctuated by more rapid but discontinuous change driven by new languages. The latter doesn't happen very often, and it is interesting to look at history and consider the conditions or circumstances that favor the creation of new languages.
The ES4 proposal is publicly available. Our JScript team is one of the participants in the ECMA working group, and is very interested in feedback from JavaScript developers on the future of the language.
--Scott
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Soma blogged earlier announcing our intent to productize F#, and we are seeing some press coverage of this:
--Scott
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There was an interesting session at OOPSLA yesterday called "Second Life: The World's Biggest Programming Environment" by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner, that covered two main topics.
The first part of the talk was mainly about the popularity of LSL (15% of Second Life users write scripts!), and the effort to move LSL to .NET and Mono, and also to enable other .NET languages like C# to be used to build Second Life scripts. This is very cool!
The second part covered how the LSL team uses Second Life as a communication and collaboration tool for their own software development. Since I had just blogged a few days earlier musing about unified communication for developers, this definitely caught my interest. Linden Lab folks have made what we at MS would call a dogfooding commitment -- all meetings are done in Second Life. The LSL folks use an interesting combination of tools for their collaborative development work, including Second Life features:
- a meeting place
- presence -- you can and hear see what your co-workers are doing
- white board for shared task list
- 3D audio so you can hear what your co-workers are doing, both in meeting settings and less formal collaboration. E.g., you might overhear two teammates doing a code review on an are of code you know a lot about and decide to join them
and others:
- Screen sharing
- Twitter
- Etc.
As an example, code reviews are done using a combination of Second Life (e.g., audio) and non-SL tools (e.g., screen sharing).
Software development is a social endeavor, and I expect more and more experimentation with social tools and environments like Second Life as part of developers' toolkits.
--Scott
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I've been traveling for the last week or so, first to Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and then to OOPSLA in Montreal.
We have top-notch languages researchers in MSR Cambridge, and this was a good trip to build a deeper relationship with them. Our Redmond contingent consisted of me, Anders Hejlsberg (C#), Mads Torgersen (C#), Paul Vick (VB) and Jim Hugunin (IronPython and Dynamic Language Runtime or DLR). I won't try to list all of the MSR folks we worked with, but suffice to say it was mainly people from the Programming Principles and Tools, and Machine Learning and Perception groups.
We have had some good success in technology transfer from research to product development, including the work that Don Syme (bio ) and Andrew Kennedy did on generics. They did early design and prototyping work for C# and .NET as a research project and continued to be deeply involved after we transitioned this work to product development. .NET chose a "deep" to generics, in which generic types are represented in the runtime type system. This has been critical for later work, including the LINQ work we will release soon as part of VS 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5. Don and Andrew deserve credit for helping us make a good choice on this for .NET 2.0. I expect we will continue to deliver a lot of value on this foundation, value that would be difficult or impossible to deliver with a shallower approach to generics.
In a related note, we recently announced our intention to productize the F# project that Don leads, and this was obviously one of many topics that we covered during our trip.
I'm excited about our collaboration with MSR. Languages affect not just the way we tell our computers what to do, but also how we think about problems and communicate with our fellow developers. Working with MSR on languages is one of the things we do to help us deliver a great portfolio of languages, both now and for future versions.
--Scott
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In sync with the release of unified communications products, Bill Gates published a well-written piece today on Software-Powered Communications. The primary focus of this software is Information Workers, it is also interesting to think about the trends and software as they potentially apply to developers as well. In some sense, developers are information workers, just of a highly specialized variety. What developer doesn't manage an analogous flood of email, IM, voicemail, bugs, feature request, suggestions, and on and on?
Should the IDE be the hub of all of this communication, or is it better for developers to use all of the standard information worker tools as an adjunct to their use of an IDE, or is it better to have some hybrid where some subset of the unified communication tools are integrated into the IDE?
--Scott
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I recently switched from managing a large group (VB, VC#, VC++, and Phoenix product units) to working in a staff role for Jason Zander, who is managing a larger group that includes the product units I previously mentioned plus a number of others that Jason mentions in his post. In my new role, I am working on planning for the next version (and beyond!) for VS Pro and below, which is essentially our traditional dev tools product, which consists of an IDE and a variety of languages, tools, and platform-specific tools.
We are very interested in getting your input for these future versions. It's our aspiration to build software that developers love, and to do that we need your input. Many of you have already done so by entering bugs and suggestions on Connect, and these are a great resource for us. We will be combing through these as part of our planning. An advantage of posting bugs and suggestions via Connect is that it is easier for us to follow up with you, and for you to check status. But if blog comments or email work better for you, feel free to do that as well. The important thing is that we hear from you so that we can build the best product possible.
--Scott
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I got a nice email on Friday from Tudor Vlad, who was very happy to receive a copy of C# Programming Language signed by both Anders and me. Check out his post on the same topic, including a picture of the title page!
We have signed a lot of copies of C# Programming Language. Every now and then, I come into my office and find a big stack (or sometimes a whole cartful) of books to sign. This summer, we signed copies for all the interns in the Server and Tools Business, which includes Developer Division and most of Microsoft's server workloads. I got a lot of positive feedback on this; we'll definitely do this again next summer.
Tudor, I hope you enjoy the book and programming in C#!
--Scott
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Bill Gates is featured in a new Channel9 video. He talks about compatibility, Atlas, Mix, Office 12, his personal Interet usage, philanthropy, future change and more.
--Scott
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Rusty Miller, C# Test Manager, has a really good post on test tools and techniques that we used during the development of VS 2005. Enjoy! If this kind of work excites you, you may also be interested in his information about job opportunities on the team.
--Scott
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Check out the Visual Studio servicing information that we recently posted. Servicing -- including service packs and other product updates -- is an important part of our product development work. I hope this addresses questions that customers have related to our servicing model and plans. If it doesn't, let us know and we will refine it!
--Scott
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Today has been a big day, with the official launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.
We've seen some questions today in blogs and forums about our servicing plans for VS 2003 and VS 2005, and I thought it would be a good idea to communicate them here. We use "hot fixes" to address time-critical issues, and periodically release service packs that have multiple fixes. By having the combination of these methods, we hope to provide timely fixes for critical issues and also make it easy for customers to deploy fixes broadly.
We have plans for two service pack releases for the first part of 2006:
- VS 2003 SP1 is scheduled for April 2006. We have done much of the work for this release already, and are anxious to get it to you.
- VS 2005 SP1 is scheduled for the first half of 2006. We will be more specific about the date in a few months, once we have more customer data.
--Scott
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The day we shipped VS 2005 and .NET, we had a big party for the whole product development team. I've posted some pictures of a handful of C# team members, including me as Clippy and Anders Hejlsberg as Austin Powers. Enjoy!
--Scott
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