The PDC Is Over; Here Comes the SDP

A few hours ago the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 was adjourned. What a conference it was! Lots of interesting sessions, our own Ariel Ben Horesh presenting together with Glenn Block, the free Acer multitouch tablet, lots of great food – an amazing week at the session halls, the Sela booth at the Partner Expo, and in Los Angeles in general.

Now that the PDC is over, it’s time to start preparing for the SDP – Sela Developer Practice. We’re going to bring the information back to Israel so that Israeli developers can learn about all the latest advances in Silverlight, Visual Studio 2010, concurrency, garbage collection and other topics.

At the SDP, Eran Stiller and I are going to talk about Parallel Programming with Visual Studio 2010 and about WCF 4.0, WF 4.0 and Workflow Services.

Here’s a list of my blog posts summarizing the sessions I attended (excluding the keynotes) along with brief highlights:

• Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic: Rewriting the compilers in managed languages, considering first-class parallelism and opening up the compiler.
• Concurrency Fuzzing and Data Races: Automatic tools from Microsoft Research for fuzzing and detecting race conditions in parallel programs.
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel Changes: A great many changes in the kernel of Windows, also see Channel 9 recording.
• Data-Intensive Computing on Windows HPC Server with the DryadLINQ Framework: Another major leap – LINQ to become distributed in a computation cluster.
• Code Contracts and Pex: Power Charge Your Assertions and Unit Tests: Code contracts are a powerful mechanism that can be used for generating tests and constraint proving.
• Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming: Concurrency, modeling, small-and-large scale programming are all significant interests for Microsoft.
• Future of Garbage Collection: Fully parallel (real-time) garbage collection, server background collection and other research.
• The State of Parallel Programming: Parallelism must move to invariant-based, functional programming – the conceptual differences are too vast.
• Developing with the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework: A new release of the Code Pack with many features and bug fixes.
• Lighting Up Windows Server 2008 R2 Using ConcRT on UMS: ConcRT internally uses UMS if possible, lots of optimization tricks with regard to task scheduling and efficiently handling small work items.
• Developing Applications for Scale-Up Servers Running Windows Server 2008 R2: UMS internals, how to write your own UMS scheduler, >64 LP support.
• DirectCompute: Capturing the Teraflop: It’s about time to start using the GPU for general-purpose computation.
• New Developer Tools in Windows Embedded Standard 2011: It will be easier than ever to create a fully customized Windows Embedded image for deployment.
• Power Tools for Debugging: Microsoft Research projects for automatically finding bug root causes and advising the actions to take.

So again, it was a great PDC. If you were there, I’d love to hear what you think, and if you’re going to attend the SDP, come forward and say hi!