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The last two talks I went to at BUILD… Spending all my time preparing for the Windows Azure Conference next week, where I have two sessions : one on Node.js and one on Windows Azure Mobile Services. Herb Sutter – The Future of C++ Herb has been giving this talk for a few years in a row now at major conferences, and there’s something new every time – this really tells you a lot about the excitement in the world of C++ during these years, culminating with last year’s standard, C++11. Herb shared the...
I had barely time to blink, and BUILD is almost behind us. The fourth day was shorter than the rest, but there was one session that made my morning and my day: Subramanian Ramaswamy – Deep Dive into the Kernel of the .NET Framework on Windows Phone 8 This long title was well-justified, as the .NET Framework on Windows Phone has been revamped as dramatically as the underlying Windows CE –> Windows NT kernel drop-in. This talk was divided into two parts – one about the productivity enhancements...
No keynote today, but Scott Hanselman’s 8:30AM talk was a great replacement – he himself called it an “unkeynote”. Also, before the talk Scott looped some hilarious videos, such as MacBook Wheel from The Onion. Scott Hanselman – One ASP.NET and the Cloud This was really keynote material in that Scott highlighted some of the recent developments in what the cloud means for developers. He started by showing the Azure PowerShell cmdlets, which give you provisioning of websites or virtual machines by...
Satya Nadella and others – Day 2 Keynote Day two started with Satya Nadella orchestrating an amazing keynote with Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Josh Twist, Jason Zander, and David Campbell. This amazing lineup of speakers showed multiple demos, including live coding, covering the most recent developments – mostly around the Windows Azure Platform. Satya’s point of view on the current state of Windows Azure is that it is a complementary offering to Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, in that it provides...
After nerve-wrecking last minute flight changes, I made it to BUILD on Monday and heroically spent almost 2 hours in the registration queue. After a good night’s sleep, we regrouped for the first day’s keynote. Another long line, and we were sitting in the third row! Ishai Ram, Alon Levi, Noam Kfir – 3rd row of the keynote hall. Steve Ballmer and others – Day 1 Keynote Surprisingly, Steve Ballmer himself kicked off the keynote with an incredible amount of energy. Although he didn’t jump up and down...
The BUILD conference is right behind the corner, and SELA is coming! This year we have a delegation of nine experts traveling to BUILD, some arriving earlier or staying later for additional engagements. Here’s our lineup for this conference: Noam Sheffer , a Senior Architect at SELA, loves gadgets and can talk to you on pretty much anything, ranging from C++ driver development to Windows Azure and Windows 8 best practices. Read Noam’s blog Alex Golesh , CTO of SELA Seattle, is our local representative...
Alongside all the exciting advents in Windows 8 and Metro apps, the .NET CLR is marching on. The next version of the CLR will feature several “internals” improvements, mostly in the performance area. Read on to learn about changes to the garbage collector, the JIT, and the native image generator engine in the next CLR. Background mode for Server GC Background GC is a neat feature introduced in CLR 4.0 to the Workstation GC flavor. It’s a little hard to explain without any background (pun intended...
The amount of confusion generated by the first two keynotes at BUILD was immense. The blogosphere and Twitter were brimming with bold rumors of the “.NET is dead” kin. I even heard someone discuss seriously the possibility that C# Metro apps will be compiled directly to native WinRT bindings, bypassing IL and JIT altogether, so that clr.dll won’t even be loaded. Even though I disproved these rumors two days ago, it was still great to hear Krzysztof Cwalina explain in detail how .NET remains a fully...
The WinRT type system relies strongly on WinRT components, which are COM objects implementing a specific set of interfaces and adhering to a certain ABI (Application Binary Interface). We will examine here this ABI and how C++ compiler extensions help reference that ABI without exposing the nitty-gritty details of dealing with COM interfaces and COM activation. A WinRT component implements the IInspectable interface , which derives from IUnknown (however, WinRT components do not have dual interfaces...
After experiencing it first hand, I can only say that Windows To Go feels like magic. The potential uses are truly overwhelming. Read on to learn why. Windows To Go allows you to capture a fully configured Windows environment on a USB stick and use it to boot on any host. This is not just booting Windows from USB – which was theoretically possible before – this is about specializing the image for each host you boot from it. It’s about taking your operating system on the go. Some of the enterprise...
The group of 19 experts we have here at BUILD have had some things to say about the conference. You can follow us on the Twitter list or read our blogs. Here are some highlights from the last two days: Yuval Mazor: It is time for BUILD! Elad Shaham: My Impressions from BUILD Keynote Sasha Goldshtein: Windows 8 Announcement Executive Summary Yuval Mazor: Impressions of the First Day of BUILD 2011 Sasha Goldshtein: Some Thoughts on Windows 8 Ran Wahle: Windows 8 For Developers - What's New? Shai...
The Web today is full of rumors about the demise of Silverlight, .NET, Win32, and nearly anything else that doesn’t align immediately with Metro-style apps. Indeed, it seems sometimes that we are so eager to focus on “what’s dead” that we forget to look at the new announcements and try to figure out “what’s alive”. From a brief analysis of the Windows 8 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, and whatever bits of information delivered at the conference sessions, I think I have a pretty...
The second day of the BUILD conference was dedicated mostly to breakout-style sessions on the various topics covered only in brief during the keynotes. Some of the new stuff I’ve seen today in pseudo-random order: Visual Studio 11 Productivity Power Tools (with over a million downloads)! are going to be built-in in Visual Studio 11. You can right-click a piece of code in Visual Studio and select “Find Matching Clones” for a similarity analyzer that detects copy-paste across the board. Visual Studio...
Following a day full of announcements, I’ve had some thoughts brewing inside for a while about Windows 8 and its application model. While the things we’ve seen today are immersive, cool, and even downright amazing considering the timeframe, I’d keep in the excitement until I’ve had a chance to play with the platform a little bit. The Windows Store model announced today pretty much seals the fate of cowboy free-style application development we were used to on Windows. No longer a bunch of APIs and...
Well, the first day of the BUILD conference certainly started with a blast. I just came back to the hotel after sitting through a full day of keynote presentations introducing Windows 8 – the operating system, the development platform, and the user experience. The purpose of this post is to summarize briefly the Windows 8 announcements and the way they reflect on existing and future development. This is just an executive summary – if you are looking for the nitty-gritty details, follow this space...
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