The first bits for Oslo should be available around the time of Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Oslo will be available as an add-on to Microsoft's Visual Studio development suite. It includes a new programming language, a visual modeling tool, and a repository for storing models in a database.
Model-driven software development consists of a rule-based structure and workflow to make application development and deployment more efficient. The software should also be more stable and better suited to the needs of users. Oslo includes three pieces:
- A new programming language to help architects and developers describe models.
- A visual modeling tool.
- A repository for storing different models in a database.
A modeling language is used by developers to specify the kinds of patterns and queries to be carried out by the software. Then the software itself would apply high-level queries to the model that the architect designed, simplifying and shortening the whole development process.
Oslo will (at least in CTP) be available as an add-on to Visual Studio, but with a visual modeling tool. The visual modeling tool will be helpful for comprehending complicated models. Underlying the visual modeler is a declarative programming language 'M' (formerly called 'D').
The repository is a SQL database of models and related metadata that allows developers or architects to look at models with database tools like Microsoft Access, Excel, or SQL Server Reporting Services. Likely, you'll have multiple repositories, such as for each project that would include models for business process, for security, and for other important elements of your software.
The schedule and final packaging for Oslo has not been announced.
Surface is one cool piece of technology and it's certainly one of the coolest from Microsoft. Unfortunately, since it was first announced access to the SDK has been reserved for initial launch partners like AT&T and Harrah's. Now, those attending the 2008 PDC will be among the first to gain public access to the SDK and learn about developing on the platform. And I'm pretty sure the SDK will be included on the shiny new 160GB hard drives we're giving away to every attendee. How cool is that?
If you're going, look for me at the Microsoft booth. I'm really looking forwarding to meeting tons of interesting ISVs while I'm there!
Silverlight 2 will be rolled out tomorrow. Silverlight 2 goes beyond the media-centered Web user interface that came out in the first version. Silverlight 2 includes a subset of the .NET Framework and allows ISVs to build rich Internet applications (RIA) using .NET.
Developers and designers collaborate to build .NET client Web applications. Silverlight 2 supports new programming languages like C#, Python, and Ruby. You can call Web services and Atom endpoints to support componentized Web applications.
Automatic updates are due in the next few weeks. Businesses will be able to control those updates. Silverlight will run in Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer on Windows and Mac OS. Novell is working on a version for Linux.
The technology will be available for download on Oct. 14 at www.microsoft.com/silverlight.
Microsoft estimates that one in four computers users have access to Silverlight.
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, in a statement said, “Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the pre-eminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences.”
Tools Support
The release is accompanied by development and design tools that will work with Visual Studio 2008, the free Visual Studio Web Developer Express, and Expression Blend and will include features like common controls.
Microsoft also announces funding for an open-source project to create an Eclipse plug-in for Silverlight. Microsofdt is funding Soyatec, a French based IT solutions provider. The plans are for release the project under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge and submit it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. A technical preview is available on Eclipse Tools for Silverlight.
Silverlight Control Pack
Microsoft is also releasing for free a set of programming templates called the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License. The SCP includes controls such as DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete.
XAML
The technical specification for Silverlight's Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is also being released under the Open Specification Promise.
Beyond all the scenarios I've written about so far (see my last posting for a trace back to all the previous ones), one final style app I'll discuss is the rich client with an online marketplace for its content that lives out in the cloud.
If you have an application that generates content, you might want to consider letting your high end users sell content to consumers. For example, if your "deluxe" app enabled the creation of, say, fancy page layouts, your "express" users might be highly interested in purchasing these.
It's one thing to build a web site to support this, but it's more compelling to provide a rich client interface to this backend right in situ. This model has been broadly accepted for the sale of music, and could work just as well for your apps.
We would certainly love to hear about any apps you build using this model (I know of one good one, but I don't want to steal the thunder coming from their announcement), and of course, be listening for announcments from the PDC about scenarios like this and the infrastructure to support them.
We've covered a bunch of interesting scenarios in my previous postings - now let's reach out to the broader world and tap into cloud services.
You've probably heard a bit about Microsoft's vision for Software + Services, in case you haven't, here's my nutshell digest. Software + Services is all about rich apps using online services, hosted by ISVs, Microsoft, customers, other partners, or possibly even competitors. We've gotten to a place where both software and services are sufficiently mature - it's time to start putting them together.
If you look through Microsoft's hosted services, there are quite a few which can be tapped for use within a rich client application, with many more soon to come. In addition to the base services like identity, presence, and map generation, Xbox LIVE, Zune, and HealthVault provide higher-level services that present great opportunities for rich client software to connect. These opportunities will be growing in the very near future - stayed tuned for announcements to that effect from the PDC.
If you have a great game, or an app that generates music, or an app that manages, say, health records, you could greatly enhance its functionality by enabling a means for rich desktop apps to access back end services that connect your users to each other and the world at large.
If you have an app that's already doing this, we'd love to hear more about those too. I have one more scenario for you in this series, and then I'll wait to hear back from you about all the great Windows Client apps you're building or have built.
As an ISV, why should you move to SQL Server 2008?
The simplest reason ISVs need to support 2008 is that your customers will be asking for it soon if they are not already. SQL Server 2008 is a very smooth upgrade from 2005 that adds key enhancements to performance and manageability – so even if your application still supports an earlier version of SQL Server, the benefits of running on 2008 (policy-based management, data encryption/compression, improved auditing, resource governing, hot-add cpu capabilities, and overall improved performance, just to name a few) will make your customers prefer the newest version, even if you don’t write code that explicitly requires it.
And if you are willing to write code that explicitly depends on SQL Server 2008, you can take advantage of even more new features. There are new data types that make certain tasks much simpler … the FILESTREAM data type provides a simple syntax for adding and retrieving files to and from a database while actually storing the files on the file system instead of inside a table. Many ISV applications manage files or blobs of data, and the FILESTREAM data type brings a new level of flexibility and simplicity to that task. There are new geo-location data types as well that make it easy to store geographical points in a consistent way.
If your application requires support for being occasionally connected, SQL Server 2008 makes that scenario much easier to implement, too. Use SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition for your client data store and Microsoft Synchronization Services to synchronize with your back-end data. This approach allows you to focus on writing client-side code to a local database, knowing that the difficult task of synchronizing with the back-end is neatly partitioned – and that the heavy lifting is performed by SQL Server 2008 itself.
Finally, the business intelligence features in SQL Server keep getting better and better. New designers baked into SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services make it easier than ever to create and manage cubes. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services has improved performance, enhanced graphical visualization capabilities, the ability to render reports to Word, and smoother integration with MOSS. The net result for an ISV is a greater level of polish for your own application … if you are using SQL Server’s BI features, upgrading to SQL Server 2008 is like an instant upgrade for your application.
One last thing … SQL Server 2008 is the first version that is supported in a virtualized environment, and it runs very well on Hyper-V. This combination creates more flexibility for ISVs to offer complete “appliance” solutions packaged on a single physical box, even if your canonical deployment has typically required two or more servers in the past.
The ISVs I work with are very excited about SQL Server 2008. How is YOUR experience been with it so far? Email or leave a comment and let me know.
Beyond building Media Center aware apps, multi-touch aware apps, and offline content viewers, another interesting scenario for the Windows Client is the WPF enhanced native app.
Most client-side developers are aware of or would expect some degree of interoperability between WPF and existing WinForm and Win32 apps. Happily, that support's been available in WPF since it first shipped in the .NET Framework 3.0. However, we're now seeing products from ISVs (such as AutoCAD 2009) that have put this interoperability to good use.
If you're an ISV with a significant investment in a native Windows technology like WinForms or Direct 3D, you're not excluded from the world of XAML. You could consider replacing the "chrome" (not sure I'm allowed to use that word anymore :) ) around the "heavy lifting" portions of your app. That could provide a nicely enhanced UX for your app without a major rearchitecture.
If you're an ISV with an investment in a framework like CAB, this could also be a path for migrating XAMLized content into your application.
In either case, you have a whole bunch of additional possibilities to consider which are way less invasive than a complete rewrite.
Interesting post of what folks are seeing in the field with Hyper-V.
Looks like people are actually interested in saving money with their virtualization strategy. Imagine that 
Check out Andrew Connell's recent post where he chat's about virtualization and what's he's seeing in the industry.
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Great post on custom SharePoint caching with SharePoint file dependencies by Vincent Rothwell.
» SharePoint caching and CacheDependency
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There's a great article that Andrew Connell recently published that's worth a read, if you touching SharePoint currently or will be in the near future. The article, Prescriptive Guidance for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites, addresses some common things you should keep in mind in planning, architecting, designing and implementing your Publishing sites.
Here's a summary on what the article is all about:
In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft has taken the best concepts and capabilities from an earlier product, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, and added them to the SharePoint platform. These new capabilities, known as Web content management (WCM), facilitate the creation of content-centric sites on the SharePoint platform. Although they are SharePoint sites at their core, these sites have additional functionality that is facilitated by publishing features. These SharePoint features add special libraries and lists to SharePoint sites. Sites on which the publishing features are activated are known as publishing sites.
Publishing sites adhere to most, if not all, of the prescriptive guidance and generally accepted best practices for SharePoint sites. However, because of the non-collaborative nature of publishing sites and their generally larger audience, they require additional considerations and planning to be implemented successfully. This article addresses many areas that are specific to deploying successful and scalable publishing sites in the enterprise.
MSDN: Prescriptive Guidance for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites
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I read a great article on SharePoint at the Software Development Times on the Web (SDTimes) website.
There were some great quotes. I thought Paul Andrew from the SharePoint Product Team gave a great perspective on SharePoint, where's it's been and where it's going. It's worth a read. Here's a couple quotes I really liked:
Microsoft's Paul Andrew said the company had not anticipated SharePoint’s popularity in the development community. “When [SharePoint] first came out, things were not scaled for its growth,” he admitted. “If Microsoft is good at anything, [however,] it is coming back to try again, work harder and harder.”
The company will continue to add support and development resources to SharePoint to handle the increased growth, he said.
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Great new downloads for SharePoint developers at the MSSharePointDeveloper site.
MSSharePointDeveloper site or "introduction to SharePoint Development site" has been around for a few months now. It's a great resources for developers that are looking to get into SharePoint development.
Here's the new stuff you can find there. The VM's have been updated to Visual Studio 2008, which is awesome!
- Downloadable WSS Dev VPC Image
- Updated to Visual Studio 2008 (previously Visual Studio 2005).
- Smaller download at about 1.8Gb to download in 4 files now.
- The Virtual PC image includes:
- Windows Server 2003 (expires on 29th September 2009)
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1
- Visual Studio 2008
- Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services
- 10 Hands on Labs for learning SharePoint in C# and VB.NET
- SharePoint Developer Introductory Hands on Labs
- All updated to Visual Studio 2008.
- They are included on the VM image.
- They are also available for separate individual downloads from the site.
- SharePoint Developer Introductory Web Cast PPTs and Demos
- 10 webcast PPTs with transcripts.
- Previously 2 of the webcasts were missing transcripts.
All three of these downloads and online MSDN Virtual Labs are available at http://MSSHarePointDeveloper.com
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PDC 2008 is right around the corner.
If you've taken a look at the session list, you will be psyched to see that there are some great SharePoint sessions. Here's the list of sessions that Paul Andrew, Technical Product Manager for the SharePoint Developer Platform, posted.
There are four awesome SharePoint sessions that will be key to hit when you are there:
- SharePoint Online: Extending your Service by Troy Hopwood
- SharePoint 2007: Advanced Async Workflow Messaging
- FAST: Building Search-Driven Portals with MOSS & Silverlight (I'm very excited to check this one out)
- SharePoint 2007: Creating SharePoint Applications with VS 2008 by Chris Johnson (see his post about this session)
If you are a SharePoint guy and at PDC, then don't worry... you won't be alone! There will be a lot of SharePoint MVP's and product team members cruising around. Also, If you've ever been to a Party with Palermo you'll want to add the one at PDC to list of godo's at the conference (PDC 2008 Party with Parlermo).
Only 14 days left!
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In my last post in this series, I how discussed multi-touch apps could enhance the user experience for ISV apps. Another great scenario for the Windows Client is the offline content viewer.
When the Windows Presentation Foundation was released, one of the great apps available for it was the New York Times Reader. It enabled the downloading + viewing of articles, making great use WPF's flow document functionality (which makes text much more readable and knowledgable of how to behave properly in the presence of inline media.)
This the app itself isn't available for non-subscribers, the source code for its foundation was packaged for re-use and posted as the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit. This starter kit readily consumes information formatted as NITF (an XML standard for news articles) and embedded within RSS feeds, and thus, can be used for just about any kind of content.
With a little additional effort, you can build viewer for non NITF content, or pull in information from feeds other than RSS. You can also extend + restyle the app to suit your needs. That opens your app to a world of possibilities, and adds tremendous value to the client experience for your customers.
Several other instances of apps built on this are available in production (like the readers for the Daily Mail and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example), but these apps don't have to be limited to news sources (the starter kit app points to MSDN, for example.)
If you let your imagination run, you could envision ways in which some social networking could be engaged here as well.
As I mentioned in the last post in this series, I've been spending a lot of time of late on Windows Client technologies (Native Windows, WPF, Silveright, and IE8.) The second scenario I'll write about is building mulit-touch aware applications that are adaptable to run on desktops and more exotic devices like the surface computer.
Multi-touch computing is about more than just getting extra mouse events - it's about understanding how the gestures users make should be interpreted. In the case of the surface computer, it goes beyond this, as it's especially important to consider the social factors involved when several are gathered around a single device using the same application simultaneously. Access to the surface computer's SDK has been limited, but if the posts here and here are to be believed, folks who attend the PDC (at least) will have it by month's end. There's further conjecture that multi-touch awareness will be extended to desktop operating systems as well - the PDC will probably contain announcements on that front as well.
I mention all this because a smartly-designed multi-touch application could be a big differentiator for an ISV product in market. While understanding how the eventing systems work for multi-touch apps is essential, proper factoring can make it so a large portion of a product's codebase could be reused across a wide spectrum of devices. If you're looking to provide a next generation user experience within your products, I think it's worthy of your investigation.
