So far I am expriencing PDC09 much differently than any other conference I’ve ever participated.

First, Thanks to Glenn Block I have a role to play, yesterday I hanged out with Glenn at the speakers lounge meeting people I’ve reading theire blogs for so long time, people such as Nikhil Kothari, Matthew Podwysocki and many more.

Second, Last PDC my laptop had died 2 days before flying over. This year I feel I am blogging and twittering for every second breath. Feel Free to follow me (twitter.com/ArielBH).

Third I’ve met with some great people today, Ian and Mike from the WPF team, Paul from the VS team, Marc from the DPE team, all this guys are Microsofties (I can also add Glenn to this excellent list). We had great conversations, and ideas, I’ve learned stuff on the internals of WPF and VS through funny stories that you can get expose too through happy conversation.

So content wise, nothing new under the sun at PDC, but for me, I am enjoying every minute of it.

Ariel

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL11

In this presentation, a WPF Facebook like application was presented. Unfortunately the application has issues. during the session we have walked some classic scenarios and some are a bit far fetched (at least from my experience).

If you are a WPF developer, see the video, this session should go through video really good, because you will be able to see all the small mouse gestures the presenters are doing  with each application they have used to analyze the problem.

To get things in order, the session dealt with those issues:

1. Memory usage : In this app scenario images being used and not released because some stupid reference. Not really wpf related, but the excuse was that usually designers are oblivious such as this, and might provide you styles containing many elements and unnecessary resources.
2. Cold Start : locate heavy IO pulling during application, notice for rough assemblies loading up that you don’t really need.
3. Warm Start : Look for complicated layouts being rendered, maybe can you can render a few items at the time especially if they are shown in the UI.
4. Rendering : Check out for unnecessary rendering being done through resizing and animations.

When the session slide deck would be published I’ll update here with specific tools names you can use.

Ariel

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/VTL30

Bottom line, I recommend you watching this session on Video when it would be available probably tomorrow.

Why?

1. Cool Demos. All demos are visual and interesting, it’s really hard to exite most people with a clustering algorithm, but give them a DeepZoom app and sea how everybody starts to the enjoy the smooth experience.
2. Interesting tips on driving innovation on your team.

I also liked UI tips being discuessed some are a bit trivial like never life work on you UI thread, push everything to a background thread, to a more subtle illusions. For example while zooming inside a tiled a pyramid, only the centered tile is downloaded first base. the surrounding tiles will get downloaded only after. The human eye concentrate on the center tile, and until our peripheral vision understands what it is seeing, all the tiles have finished downloading. Also there is an animation for each mouse transition you have feeling that there is a time the layouts is used inside a shock absorber, the time the animation give SeaDragon an extra time to download more stuff. Really cool.

Bill also talks about ways to increase involvements of team members and driving them for innovation. Bill speaks about once a quarter doing an “Out of the Box” week which each team member can work on anything he wants too.

Ariel

So this is kind of a live blogging from the PDC09’s keynote.

Bottom line, as I’ve suspected no big announcements in today’ss keynote. But… it might be for the best, Microsoft focuses on maturing many projects that were discussed on last year PDC. Windows Azure starts to gain momentum with customers using it and driving feedbacks to the team, and as with this timing Azure is about to get into production state, some projects are already starting on getting online for production versions, projects such as WordPress, KBB, and many more important vendors.

Microsoft made an emphasis on widening there support for Azure, making sure tools are supportive and every aspect of Azure application development. A field which really shines is the data layer, SQL Azure interact beautifully with SQL management studio, and wizards let developers rapidly but there stuff on the cloud.

As many of my colleagues have covered the keynote, I will add that while might not be suitable for PDC materials, Microsoft has not rushed out another technology firing blindly, or at competitors that are ahead in the game, but invests in bringing the audience together. Microsoft are long time being crtizied as running quickly ahead while the customer are still struggling, it might be the case with Silverlight/WPF issues that a major share of customer still uses Win32 and Winforms.

Ariel

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL09

Live blogging.

Reasons for VS to use WPF:

1. You better lead by example, if you want people to use WPF, you must use it in house, intresting that it was the 1st point.
2. WPF strong patterns of separation of concerns between UI an logic.
3. Maturity of WPF.
4. Plenty of rich UIs that VS needs that is much more easy to accomplish with WPF rendering engines. I guess that 3d driven designers and VS features are around the corner.
5. Drive WPF into the area of building really complicated composites UI, and mature WPF even more with features that VS needed.

VS uses WPF by using xaml as it’s declarative UI and uses extensive Data Binding scenarios for example native data models., lots of legacy support, new Text rendering.

VS changed itself to WPF in a staged approach, first defining the data models VS needs (managed and native), second they replaced the Shell of VS that made them clear a path for real interop between unmanaged parts of existing VS and the managed Shell. Replacing key pieces of functionality like Command Bar and Window Manager (it was possible to run the old code and new together and switch in and out).

Most important aspect is Testing of UI. The team has underestimated how must cost was to rewrite the VS testing and consolidating old tests frameworks to a unified one.

Challenges were the interop obviously, mixing WPF controls and Win32 & WinForms HWND based controls. Handlings messages between unmanaged and managed components with OS. Keeping old APIs working to not break old extensions, but also making new extensions taking advantage of WPF.

Another concern was to keep other teams at Microsoft working while doing the change.

Performance was a real concern, when you work on mixed technologies you often suffer from the worse of them and the interop between them.

Many WPF features were added in regard of Focus stealing controls (you gotta make sure the Copy&Paste works in VS, mmm disabling it would have prevented Copy&Paste inheritance though :)).

Another important aspect was WPF Text clarity, a new TextRending logic make a tremendous change to text clarity.

A bit rushed out section of this session was performance, a list of tools were in use to monitor Visual Studio careful, but no demos.

I need to investigate it on my own.

A part that I was missing in this session was a bit of a Prism flavor. How composite application was built, how communication is done between components and such concerns.

Ariel

Today was our 3rd day at LA. From a personal perspective, I’ve kept myself busy preparing my sample app for Glenn’s session which he kindly enough invited me to preset with him that Sample app. http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT24

One on one with Glenn, paring to refactor the sample code, the framework it is using, It is extremely valuable for me to learn from a guy such as Glenn who knows the insides and outsides of MEF. Really cool.

Sela’s presence in the conference is really impressive, a swarm of people, wearing almost an identical uniforms, a booth, which in turn will start tomorrow receiving the newest bits, and we will report on it, and of course will be there to tell you all about it, in Sela developer conference.

I will keep on working and entertaining my self, oh I need to rest as well, just get back from an awesome party held by again, Sela.

I will keep you posted on tomorrow’s sessions.

Ariel

Hi all, next week Microsoft is holding it’s biggest developer conference in LA.

Thousands of developers around the world are participating and amongst them around 25-30 Israelis

So, what’s in it for you? We will be keeping you updated using our blogs through live updates, and daily summaries.

Some like myself will be twittering in earnest (you are invited to follow my tweets : arielbh).

We will be using #PDC09 tag so you can set your RSS reader or twitter search to it. I hope that we will also concentrate those posts on a visible place on the bloggers homepage or even better Microsofts’ page, but it yet to be certain.

If you have any request or advice please leave a comment.

Ariel