Communicado

PDC Day 2

2009-11-19T22:26:13Z

Excellent keynote from Steven Sinofsky opened the morning – how we built Windows 7, what a great story to tell to a room full of developers. Steven showed off a whole pile of new hardware from netbooks to ultra-thin notebooks, server strength workstations and consumer touch screens.

He also demonstrated a special new Acer touch screen laptop and then went on to announce they were available to PDC attendees…for free! Cue rapturous applause and something of a standing ovation.

Steven gave a sneak preview of some of the IE9 features that might just get people excited about the browser again. Fully standards compliant, hardware-accelerated rendering and much more.

Next up was Scott Guthrie who announced the beta of Silverlight 4 and a host of new features that drew warm appreciation from the crowd.

Scott really is a hero developer, king of the geeks, the PDC audience love him and he delivered a bucket load of features that people have been waiting for.

As an aside this was my favourite quip from his talk - while showing a silverlight site featuring both a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and a sports portal the crowd goes whoooo, his response “must be a lot of sports fans in the room…”

Kurt DelBene then covered Sharepoint and Office 2010 as a development platform. Basically Sharepoint as a first-class development citizen, with all the features and capability you’d expect as a traditional .NET developer. This is really important – stats show that .NET developers are far less likely to leverage existing apps and services, preferring to build it from scratch. This makes the cost of a .NET development project higher on average than other platforms where developers tend to take a number of components and glue them together. Hopefully this mentality will start to change as Sharepoint, Dynamics CRM and other platforms become more .NET-ified.

Favourite session yesterday was Gary Flake’s tour through Microsoft Pivot. Building on the DeepZoom work he deconstructed how we view and interpret information and showed how Pivot can help us make sense of massive amounts of information - “using the forest to see the trees” is the main concept.

He demoed this with a Pivot view of Wikipedia where top level articles have been “pre-processed” allowing you to view the context of the information. The example he used was searching on Albert Einstein. Typically we move in a linear fashion between pages, with Pivot you can see every page that links to or from the one you're on and the relevance or frequency of those links. So, for instance the highest relevant links for Einstein were for his work in theoretical physics, at number 10 or so on the list were links related to him being a Jewish German physicist – quite different pieces of information but allowing the user to “swim” through the data rather than step through a piece at a time.

This was Gary’s kinda flow diagram approach to information engineering:

Data –> Information –> Knowledge –> Wisdom

All up a really good day with Microsoft delivering on the promises made across a number of platforms.

PDC Day 1

2009-11-18T07:32:54Z

A beautiful late autumn day in LA and thousands of developers descend once again on PDC. You may have heard something about cloud computing over the last year or so – well, there’s no escaping the next computing application model here at PDC, on day one anyway.

Ray Ozzie kicked off the keynote with the expected announcement about Windows Azure general availability (in brief: selected customers live from today, CTP continues until 31st December 2009, commercial launch 1st Jan 2010, billing starts February 2010). Last year was about whipping the covers off and showing the brand new baby that was Windows Azure, while this year Ray and Bob Muglia both took a more pragmatic approach – making the case for cloud computing and taking attendees on a tour through the ever increasing set of technologies that live behind and support Azure. Bob in particular covered the platforms, services and tools – the componentry – that constitute Azure, and may well have a place in your enterprise.

BTW in case you’re wondering what the cloud looks like here is one small piece of it (one of the Azure Data Centre “containers”):

Unplugged – Places Filling Fast

2009-11-16T03:14:52Z

December Unplugged – It’s Big!

We’ve seen enormous demand for our December Unplugged tour over the last week, so I’d encourage you to register for your free place as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

PDC Starts This Week!

2009-11-16T03:10:47Z

Arrived in LA today and ready for a full on PDC week. Stay tuned for updates throughout the week…

December Unplugged – It’s Big!

2009-11-08T23:38:58Z

We have a big line up planned for our December Unplugged tour through New Zealand. It’s post-PDC (MS Professional Developers Conference) so of course we’ll be focusing on Windows Azure along with what’s coming in Visual Studio 2010.

On the TechNet side Nathan will take you through the process of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 – plus an end of year extravaganza highlighting a pile of things like the Web Platform Installer, Sysinternals Disk2VHD, what’s new in Office 2010 client beta, Microsoft Online Services including Business Productivity Online Suite, Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation…and a whole lot more

More details and registration are here.

Tue 1 Dec WELLINGTON Intercontinental Wellington

Wed 2 Dec CHRISTCHURCH Hotel Grand Chancellor

Thu 3 Dec DUNEDIN Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Tue 8 Dec TAURANGA Sebel Trinity Wharf

Wed 9 Dec AUCKLAND Heritage Hotel

Professional Developers Conference – LA 17-19th November

2009-10-29T10:44:56Z

I’m looking forward to PDC again this year. Last year was the first time I have had the opportunity to attend and it was a real experience. We unleashed Windows Azure on the world and laid out the Microsoft cloud story, previewed the Office Web Apps plus a whole heap of other things – it was good to be there, to be part of it.

This year is we see the maturation of the vision with the commercial release of Windows Azure and SQL Azure – the services have really benefited from the year long Community Technology Preview (CTP) which has seen a load of developers kicking the tyres, telling us what they like, don’t like and really need. This user contribution has made for a much better product set, better suited to our customers needs.

PDC will also focus on Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 .0 Beta 2 and of course Windows 7.

You can still register for a $300 discount until 30th October (that’s 31st in NZ) – I would recommend the experience.

Channel 9 Learning Centre – Free Training

2009-10-21T22:41:27Z

Did you know there’s a whole lot of resources available to help you get up to speed on our latest technologies – and it’s all free! It consists of a set of courses with each course including a set of videos, hands-on labs, and source code samples to get you up-to-speed quickly.

The first two courses available are Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4 and Windows 7

Welcoming Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

2009-10-21T21:13:20Z

We’ve just launched a beta wave – Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 2.

Darryl has written a great blog post on the new VS 2010 SKUs, but here’s the skinny:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for software teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN: a complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN: the essential tool for professional development tasks to assist developers in implementing their ideas easily. (Note: Visual Studio 2010 Professional will also be available without MSDN subscription)

Windows 7 – Coming this month!

2009-10-05T02:04:56Z

You might have heard that Microsoft is releasing the next version of Windows this month? If you haven’t then you must be living in an alternative universe!

Did you know there has been 50,000 downloads of pre-release Windows 7 in New Zealand? That’s a lot of people testing the product and giving feedback.

Look out for cool stuff happening on October 22nd.

We’re also launching Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 - so October is a very big month, and the start of a huge wave of product launches over the next twelve months.

The Next Best Thing to attending Tech.Ed NZ 2009 - Tech.Ed Online

2009-10-05T01:44:44Z

Tech.Ed NZ 2009 was a great event, the turnout (equivalent to last year) was a big vote of confidence from our industry, especially as many companies faced difficult times and reduced training budgets.

But the event lives on…

This year we’re making Tech.Ed content available to more people. You can start with the large selection of Technical Breakout Sessions, Rock Star Interviews, Roaming Interviews, PowerPoint Decks, Blog Posts, Flickr Photo Stream, Tweets…all freely available to anyone.

We also have Tech.Ed Online Premium Content (which usually costs USD $250 for 12 months subscription) available for FREE for Tech.Ed NZ 2009 delegates.

All at http://www.microsoft.co.nz/teched

Here’s some pointers to get started:

Microsoft Tech.Ed New Zealand 2009 Keynote – Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell with new innovations from Microsoft including demos on Windows 7, Unified Communications, Office Web Apps, Azure, Silverlight 3!
The TechFest Party – The biggest party in the IT industry with more than 1500 guests, with lineup of kiwi talent including Oscar Kightly, Ben Hurley, Katchafire, Elemenop...after me “ain’t no party like an IT party!”
The Marketplace – with a great line up of NZ IT vendors and partners offering solutions and services.
Tech Girls Dinner – An exclusive evening celebrating women in technology. Line up included Julia Raue, CIO of Air New Zealand who provided an inspiring and insightful perspective into her career at Air New Zealand.

Imagine Cup 2010 – Calling All Students

2009-10-02T00:48:25Z

Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition. The first round is now open for all students! Simply come up with an idea that uses technology to solve the world’s toughest issue. And get the chance to win 1 of 3 Prezzy Cards worth $1,000 each. Register and submit your idea today! Imagine Cup NZ competition terms and conditions apply.

Tech.Ed 2009 – Day One Done

2009-09-15T03:07:29Z

A huge day yesterday as we kicked off Tech.Ed 2009 in Auckland. The keynote featured an intro from ICT Minister Steven Joyce, the worldwide Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell spoke on the global economic situation and the part technology and innovation will play in the future – with some great demos from Microsoft NZ’ers Nigel Parker, Paul Dolley and Adam Hall…and of course yours truly.

Sessions, breakouts, hands-on-labs throughout the day with all sorts of other events going on: Tech Girls Dinner, Geekzone meet-up…phew!

Will post an event wrap up after Wednesday.

Our Very Own Nigel Parker – Speaking at TEDx!!

2009-09-10T02:30:26Z

I’m a big fan of TED – it’s proof that the internet can be a force for good, inspiring us and improving our lives. TEDx is an independently organised TED event held around the world – and Nigel has earned himself a slot! Details here.

INAUGURAL NORTH SHORE USERGROUP

2009-09-10T02:14:18Z

VS2010 and TFS2010 – What’s New?

Presented by Adam Cogan, Microsoft Regional Director and MVP

Date: Thursday 17^th September 2009
Gather at 5:45pm, starting at 6:00pm
Catering: Pizza & Drinks
Door Charge: Free!
Venue: Quadrangle B; Seminar Room 3(QB3), Massey University, Massey Albany, Auckland (find a map here); Map of Room Location

Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 – What’s new? Adam will take you through some of the new features of both these products. Some of the features Adam will look to cover include, branch visualisation, build automation, hierarchical work items, SharePoint dashboards, and others. If you are at all looking at TFS 2010 as a release to adopt, this session is a must to understand the value you'll be getting.

Adam Cogan

SSW Chief Architect, Microsoft Regional Director and MVP (TFS + VSTS), SSW

Adam Cogan is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in custom .NET, SharePoint and Business Intelligence solutions. At SSW, Adam is also a Team System MVP and Microsoft Regional Director.

Tech.Ed – What It Means To You?

2009-09-09T05:51:56Z

I have the great privilege of opening Tech.Ed again this year and I’m really keen to get some of your ideas and thoughts to use in my intro.

Comment below, Twitter @TheGasMan, or email me – here’s some starters:

What does Tech.Ed mean to you?
What’s it mean to your organisation?
What’s the best part?
How many have you been to?
What technology do you want to see more of?
What’s your most memorable Tech.Ed experience?
How far do you travel to Tech.Ed?
How many Tech.Ed bags do you own?
Do you remember the excellent support band from 2006?
What’s your ideal location for Tech.Ed?
Do developers rock more than IT Pros?
…whatever else comes to mind

Tue 1 Dec	WELLINGTON	Intercontinental Wellington
Wed 2 Dec	CHRISTCHURCH	Hotel Grand Chancellor
Thu 3 Dec	DUNEDIN	Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Tue 8 Dec	TAURANGA	Sebel Trinity Wharf
Wed 9 Dec	AUCKLAND	Heritage Hotel