November 2009 - Posts
Ariel Ben Horesh – Live in PDC
Our own Sela Ariel Ben Horesh just gave a live demo on MEF in PRISM during Glenn Block session on Building Extensible Rich Internet Applications with the Managed Extensibility Framework in PDC09.
Kudos to Ariel
PDC09 – Day 2 – Keynotes – Live blogging
Last yesterday we are sitting in amazing place 8 row just in front of the stage creating a homorganic row of blue shirts (There is a power in numbers).
Even that this happened after an hour of the keynotes I need to put this first :
FREE LAPTOP !!!
Steven just Announced that we all going to get a FRESH NEW LAPTOP from Acer to all. The crowed just jumped out of their chairs for that. When we first come to the PDC we asked our self what will be the “Gift” this year, last year it was a external HD but this year MS come out and surprise us all.
And now back to the keynotes
Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft just come on stage and starting talking about development for Windows7.
Microsoft learned a lot from development of Windows7 :
- Solving the existing problems and add-on Innovation
- “Engineering 7” developers blog that was full with on going problems that the developers team encounter and very active dialog with the developers community from around the world.
- Ecosystem readiness – Vista was pre-mature for the market, the HW wasn’t ready (Drivers and Performance)
- Software Quality And Windows Error Reporting – Online reporting from problems during the Beta and RC, Helped the development and the readiness of the Eco-Systems – Note – I wish we could do something like that but I guess you need to be large enough to make people opt-in to this type of telemetry collecting.
As part of the learning progress Microsoft learned that most people don’t hold the latest and greatest computer hardware and all of the demos are shown in a variety of computers
Internet Explorer 9
as part of the commitment of MS to make sure that IE won’t set a standard (like IE6 did) but to comply with the world wide web standards a new release of IE9 comes :
- Standards – HTML 5, ACID3
- Performance – JavaScript improvements – IE9 is as fast as any other browser beta out in the field.
- Round corners boarders for IE
- Hardware assist rendering without change in the Website (Direct2D / Direct Write) this is amazing change that allow the web browser to take advantage of the hardware abilities that it runs on. The main change is again that NO CHANGES were done on the website.
Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight, All of Silverlight 3 that was released 4 months ago with Expression Blend3 and Sketchflow.
Some demos displayed with sporting websites with DVR support and instendt slow motions. 
Victoria Secret Fashion show is going to broadcast in Silverlight3 and so on the little sport event that called Winter Olympic.
When Silverlight3 was aannounced on July 2009 Silverlight 
had an Install base of
Today less than 5 months after Silverlight got
Tons of new features in Silverlight4
Accessing camera and microphone supporting your local hardware.
New pixelshader built in the engine
new IIS Smooth Streaming – making sure that the amount of data streamed from the server to the browser is based on the real time state of the network and the client application.
Silverlight media experience on CodePlex.com
This is already supports iPhone and any other non natively supported browsers and devices. just changing a single checkbox on the IIS admin applet.
Live Demo – Crash, Stott tried to display the new feature on iPhone and had to switch 4 devices before it worked (“please, please said Scott”)
Other Amazing New Feature and some of them are way overdue :
- Printing !!!
- Rich Text
- Clipboard Access, Selecting text from Data grid can work to Excel
- Right Click
- Mouse Wheel
- Implicit Styles
- Drag/Drop
- Bidi & RTL
- HTML hosting – Use the HTML content as brush to paint any Silverlight control
- Commanding MVVM
- New Controls
- Share Assemblies Across SL and .Net4
- UDP Multicast support
- REST Enhancements
- WCF Improvements – TCP Channel Support
- WCF RIS Services
Scott replace Scott and started showing off a live demo of the new RIA services and some off the new features of Silverlight4
Back to Scott
Scott Gu come back to stage and showed off some new feature like :
- Trusted Application – Running outside of the sandbox
- Accessing Windows API
- Microsoft Office interoperability
- Performance - Twice as fast, 30% faster startup and New profiling support
- Still 10 second install process
Schedule
Beta – Now Available – silverlight.net
Release – before Q2 2010
Conclusion
Today keynotes gave us a better feeling than yesterday, Maybe this is just me but this happen also last year with the Windows7 annoucement.
We heading out to pick up our new Toy.
This was a Shared post by Alex G and Myself
PDC09 – Day 1 Summery
Last night I come back to the hotel from the convention center around 19:00 and waited for the Israeli delegation dinner to start at 21:00, without understanding how I woke up at 7:00 the next day and missed a hell out amazing steak dinner leaded by Guy B from Microsoft IL.
I got 3 posts waiting for final editing that I may release today on DirectX 11 Direct2D, SQL Server Spatial Data Types and .Net Micro Framework (Amazing Staff) so stay tuned.
I’m going to have a session on this topics on the on coming SDP (Sela Developers Practice)
PDC09 – Day 1 – Keynotes with Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia – Live blogging
I'm sitting on the 8th row in the center in-front of the stage with 3 other coworkers from Sela waiting for Ray Ozzie to come up and started talking about S+S and the flow of changes that come since talking about Windows Azure and Office Online / Services.
The main topic for today keynote is cloud computing and the connection of multi platforms like Desktop/Netbook/Phone/TV to the cloud and its services. Looking for seamless multi screen experiences that is based on the web connectivity.
Ray keep dropping hints for Windows Phone (used be Windows Mobile) and what to expect in MIX2010 around April 2010.
Ray talked about MS commitment to the browsers war, Still putting alot of strenght in pushing IE as the main platform with Silverlight for all platforms including Windows Phone
Next the CEO of Seesmic come to show the new version of their application which is based on Silverlight 3.0 speaking about the time they saved as small company by developing in Silverlight and Managed environment and by that dropping Adobe AIR platform and releasing today their full Silverlight version.
Azure is maturing into production and as part of that all existing CTP programs are starting to close and would terminate by Jan-2010. Major part of this set is the introduction of the Azure Data Centers.
Data Centers
Azure data center is shifting from Beta to Release mode and currently there are 6 data center worldwide with 2 in North America, 2 In Europe and 2 the far east (Asia).
SQL Azure is now fully evolved DB that allow the developer to use it as if he had an instance running localing on the machine with connection to Excel for example.
Another new feature is the ability to mount a BLOB data file as VHD to the virtual machine and using Windows Azure BLOB support.
Automattic CEO that built the OpenSource WordPress framework come on stage to show up WordPress running under Windows Azure. Automattic transferred their backbone from Linux/PHP/Apache dedicate machines to Windows Azure environment running WordPress platform.
Fail blog owner come and showed how today they can handle a large peek in demand without the need to add new hardware to the backbone and receiving the performance just by changing the configuration file of the Azure site.
“Dallas”
Code name for data catalog with uniform discovering/exploring and using data This new codename is part of SQL Azure. This is a way for developers and companies to share and sell their data to other parties.
“Dallas” Data Explorer
Allow a developer to use and process the data without the need to understand the structure and start using it immediately. By using ADO.Net data services (a.k.a ASTORIA or now O.Data) allowing us to create a data proxy on the fly and add new data sources and export it directly to your application.
A very nice demo of accessing a public domain data from NASA, using the Mars Pathfinder 3rd pictures and creating a viewer application that digests that data with less than 15 rows of code.
Shared post by Alex G and Myself
Part 1 of first PDC Keynote…
First Day in PDC09 – My Session List
One of the things I learn last year on PDC08 is to make sure you got the list of session and backup sessions (in case the first priority is full or boring…) in advance. The LA convention center is huge complex and not preparing this in advance is a major cause of leg aches from running all over the place.
This map is not to scale …
Anyway here is a list I compiled for tomorrow, I actually still need to narrow it down as I have time slots with 3 and 4 session that looks promising…
I marked my first priority in RED
|
08:30 – 11:00 |
|
Keynotes |
|
11:00 – 12:00 |
|
Accelerated Windows Application Development with Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 |
|
11:00 – 12:00 |
|
Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer |
|
11:00 – 12:00 |
|
Microsoft Unified Communications: Developer Platform Futures |
|
12:00 – 12:30 |
|
Free |
|
12:30 – 13:15 |
|
Building Location Aware Applications with the SQL Server Spatial Library |
|
12:30 – 13:15 |
|
Windows Error Reporting |
|
13:15 – 13:30 |
|
Free |
|
13:30 – 14:30 |
|
Advanced Graphics Functionality Using DirectX |
|
13:30 – 14:30 |
|
Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler |
|
13:30 – 14:30 |
|
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel Changes |
|
14:30 – 15:00 |
|
Free |
|
15:00 – 16:00 |
|
Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Beyond |
|
15:00 – 16:00 |
|
Microsoft .NET Micro Framework and Intelligent Devices |
|
15:00 – 16:00 |
|
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel Changes (Continued from 1:30 Session) |
|
16:00 – 16:30 |
|
Free |
|
16:30 – 17:30 |
|
Code Visualization, UML, and DSLs |
|
16:30 – 17:30 |
|
Manycore and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4: A Match Made in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 |
PDC09 Here We Come
Tomorrow is the big day, PDC 2009 officially begin and we 20 people from Sela are already in the heat of things for the last couple of week.
Tomorrow morning we all going to sit in the first keynote from Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia at 8:30am PST (Which means 6:30pm for the people in Israel). This keynote is going to be stream live using IIS7 and Silverlight and based on previous experience with Microsoft the bandwidth will be enough.
So make sure you have Silverlight installed on your computer (and shame of you if it’s not installed yet) and join us the hear it live with 10,000 other geeks and see what’s the future of development holds.
טוב, אז לא ארבע ורק שלוש בבוקר אבל אני ב Los Angeles סוף סוף במלון ומתכוון ללכת לישון אחרי 25 שעות בדרכים.
אז למה 25 שעות ?, כי ביום שלישי מתחיל PDC2009 ואני ועוד כ-20 מאנשי Sela הולכים להשתתף בו.
עדכונים נוספים בהמשך…