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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...
The last session at the PDC that I’m attending is about incubation tools for debugging, from Microsoft Research. Debugging is hard and the process of finding the root cause is manual and therefore tedious and long. The formal debugging process – ask an expert, check the bug database, check the version history, reproduce the bug, trace in a debugger. [Some existing tools that help along the way are Visual Studio Test Impact analysis, Visual Studio Test Elements and Visual Studio Intellitrace (new...
Existing Windows Embedded offerings: Windows Embedded Compact runs on consumer devices such as GPS, Windows Embedded Standard runs on microscopes, projectors, and Windows Embedded POSReady runs on point-of-sale devices. Windows Embedded Standard 2011 is a way to build devices with a custom Windows 7-based OS, with only the features you need. It supports standard Windows applications, 64-bit and 32-bit drivers, Windows servicing tools, and additional features. The Developer Toolkit has a Wizard experience...
About an hour ago, the Silverlight 4 application that Alex wrote for the Sela booth at the PDC was used to draw one lucky winner who took home an HP TouchSmart IQ846 – an all-in-one PC with a 25.5” dual-touch display that can be used as a great media-center. Its tech specs are really neat, and in fact back home I have a slightly older model of the same machine. Other than the TouchSmart, we also gave away two 8MP Polaroid cameras. Thanks to everyone who came to the booth in aisle 400, and we look...
Chas Boyd’s session on DirectX11 DirectCompute is going to focus on bringing the power of the GPU for general-purpose computing (and not necessarily graphics applications). A modern CPU would have 4 cores, run at 3GHz, 4 float-wide SIMDs, peak theoretical performance of 48-96GFlops, 2x hyperthreaded capability, 64KB L1 cache, a memory interface of about 20GB/s, and take about 200W out of the wall at a cost of about $200. A GPU is usually constructed from 32 cores, each 32-float wide, at 1GHz, giving...
Pedro Teixeira is going to talk about processes and threads in systems with more than 64 logical processors as well as user-mode scheduling. Surprisingly for some people, NUMA is not an esoteric hardware architecture. Even high-end gaming rigs today are NUMA; Pedro is going to use a loaned machine by HP that has 256 processors with 1TB of physical memory. Processor Groups Adding support for more than 64 logical processors required a breaking app compat change, because CPU masks were represented in...
Dana Groff, Senior Program Manager on the ConcRT team is going to talk about the new Concurrency Runtime – an abstraction on top of the underlying operating system, supported from Windows XP through Windows Server 2008 R2. The ConcRT Resource Manager is an abstraction over the hardware that allows vendors like Microsoft and Intel (OpenMP, TBB) to program at a higher layer and compose these platforms, as well as coming up with one set of concepts for providing parallel code such as tasks, task groups...
Yochay , a good friend and co-author of “Introducing Windows 7 for Developers” and of the “Windows 7 Taskbar APIs” MSDN Magazine article , is delivering a presentation on the Windows API Code Pack . (Which is a library of managed APIs to interact with Vista and Windows 7 features that are otherwise accessible only from native code through COM and Win32 APIs.) This library replaces many of the sample managed integration libraries that our team at Sela developed for the Windows 7 Metro Training, such...
Burton Smith ’s session on the state of parallel programming was standing-room only – I’m sitting on the floor with some chairs blocking my view of the presentation :-) Generally, Burton Smith lays out a theory of parallel programming that I tried to cover in the notes below. Imperative languages prefer putting values in parameters, and they are prone to data races which are rather hard to detect considering the amount of possible paths. Pure functional languages avoid variables – they compute new...
As I wrote a few hours ago, every PDC attendee got himself a nice little Acer Aspire 1420P laptop (by the way, kudos to the conference organizers – I went to pick up the laptop during the 30-minute break at 12:30PM, and the queue was very long but also very quick – in less than 10 minutes I was holding the laptop in my hands). This laptop comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition, Office 2010 Beta, Windows Live Essentials and Virtual PC (XP Mode) for Windows 7, and the Windows 7 Touch...
Patrick Dussud described the variants of garbage collection that exist in the world today – specifically, reference counting and tracing GC. GCs are measured by the speed of the allocator, the GC time overhead, the pause time (latency), the working set, and multi-core scaling. Patrick described the general architecture of the GC, and said that he wants to focus on GC policies and mechanisms and not on the actual implementation of root scanning, thread suspension, virtual memory management and similar...
An impressive array of speakers is sitting on the podium in front of us, taking live questions from the audience using Twitter. Here are some of the interesting thoughts provoked by these questions: Worried About Some of the things that the speakers are “worried about”: Concurrency, dependability (taking dependencies we don’t understand), developing rich applications easily, providing simple programming solutions and still give experts the opportunity to “complicate”, how do we make database access...
[Also see part 1 – keynote by Steven Sinofsky ; and part 2 – keynote by Scott Guthrie .] The final part of the keynote was delivered by Kurt DelBene, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corp. He talked about Office and SharePoint 2010. A Technical Preview of Office 2010 was released several months ago (in fact, I’m using it on two of my computers already and very happy with it, including the x64 version). As of the last two minutes, Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta are available for download...
[Also see the first part – the keynote by Steven Sinofsky .] The second part of the keynote was delivered by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, Developer Division, Microsoft Corp. Scott started talking about Silverlight 3 and its new features that shipped several months. Specifically, Scott discussed the SketchFlow tool for quick UI prototyping. He also mentioned the success of Silverlight – it’s being used on more and more sites around the world, as well as in demanding enterprise environments...
The second keynote started with Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, Microsoft Corp. Steven is talking about the development process of Windows 7 and what it means to develop for Windows 7. He’s also going to say a few words about what we’re going to see going forward. In the Windows 7 engineering process, Steven emphasized the new innovative features and said that they’ve learned that they need to balance the new features with fundamental improvements to the system, exactly...
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