Technology to enable us lead healthier lives

Meltin’ Posts » Blog Archive » Great ideas @ Microsoft Imagine Cup 2006 finals

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:19:33 GMT

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re: Technology to enable us lead healthier lives

loc — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:41:25 GMT

Hi Soma,

How's the Visual Studio Live project going so far? I'm asking now because I needed to build a tool for my PC the other day, but I didn't have Visual Studio installed. I know Visual C# Express is only 50+ MB download, but I was immediately thinking to myself "Shoot, where on earth is VS Live?"

That is the perfect scenario for VS Live! That is the reason to ship VS Live! To ENABLE users build quick and dirty applications anywhere anytime. The big picture, which relates to your subject "Technology enable us do this and that", is that VS Live will promote technology - specifically computer programming - to everyone, especially young kids.

We need VS Live now! Now! Now! Give us a beta quick. What ever you have right now, We want to use it ASAP.

(Please keep in mind that it doesn't need to be anything fancy, supporting X and Y features. Just a really simpler version of V C# Express.)

re: Technology to enable us lead healthier lives

johnmont — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 08:12:45 GMT

Hi Loc,

I'm the group program manager working on some of these scenarios. At this point there's not much I can say since there's not much we've built, but I can say that we're through the blue-sky phase and starting to develop prototypes. One of the scenarios we're looking at enabling is the rapid-installation kind of thing you're talking about. I'm not sure whether what we're planning will fit your needs in v1 and to get a C# app to run on your computer you'd still need the 20MB .NET Framework redist, but if we keep to the schedule I have been circulating, we might have a public alpha version this winter.

Oh, and don't tell Soma -- we haven't shown him the full thing yet. :-)

John

re: Technology to enable us lead healthier lives

loc — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:28:59 GMT

Hi John,

Thanks for your info. I used to check your blog quite often a few months ago. I'll try to keep an eye on your updates.

Loc

re: Technology to enable us lead healthier lives

loc — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:27:27 GMT

I'm pretty sure I can come up with an out of the box solution to that rapid-installation challenge, if I know enough about the system and the framework.

For example, since you need to write the code first, which takes a while, before running the app, the .NET framework doesn't need to be fully installed right away. Assuming that it takes 5 minutes to code, you can divide the .NET framework into small pieces, and only install the essential piece(s), which should take less than a minute or so (according to my imagination). Once the environment (Intellisense and all that) is ready for user to start writing code, you can install the rest of it in the background. Hah! Nothing is impossible.