November 2009 - Posts
The PDC ended over a week ago with me coming back home this Wednesday after a short vacation. On this blog post, I’ll try to summarize my main thoughts and conclusions from this year’s conference and also give a quick reminder regarding the upcoming SDP.
Cloud Computing in Full Thrust
In my opinion, the main issue in this year’s PDC was Microsoft’s full thrust motion towards cloud computing with Windows Azure. Ray Ozzie’s vision of “Three Screens in a Cloud” and Bob Muglia’s approach to “Cloud: The Next Generation” right at very start of the conference, together with the profusion of sessions on Windows Azure, left no doubt that this definitely an area of interest in which Microsoft is pushing forward.
The thing I noticed the most in this area is the ease of development and deployment to the cloud versus deployment to a local server, and the level of integration into Visual-Studio, SQL Server Management Studio and other Microsoft tools. In light of this you better start thinking – Is the cloud the right solution for you?
Silverlight 4
The announcement of Silverlight 4 awed a lot of people in the crowd – this was definitely an announcement worth a PDC keynote. Silverlight 4 introduces many new features into the platform including Video Processing, improved out-of-browser application experience and many more.
The abundance of features in Silverlight 4 and the amount of investment in the platform leads me to think – What is going to become of WPF? Will Silverlight and WPF be consolidated at some stage? Silverlight now has a very impressive range of capabilities, is cross platform and lightweight, while WPF’s only advantage (as far as I can tell) is the fact that it is a true .NET platform with access to the entire .NET framework... This is definitely food for thought.
If you’re interested in leaning more on Silverlight 4, I suggest you read Alex’s blog post series on its new features (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).
Windows Server AppFabric
The announcement of Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 and the sessions on it (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) were a key area of interest for me, as the demos presented sure did impress me since AppFabric gives us a very easy way to host, configure and administer composite applications built on top of WF and WCF, integrating technologies formerly code named "Dublin" and "Velocity".
In my opinion, this is an enormous breakthrough in the development of WF applications, and I plan on deep diving into this technology in the near future.
Quick Reminder – Sela Developer Practice
As you might know, I participated in the PDC together with a large group of 17 experts from Sela – probably the largest group in the conference, and definitely the largest group from Israel. If you haven't had the chance to participate in the PDC, you might want to check-out the upcoming Sela Developer Practice (SDP), where Sela’s team of experts will bring you the latest and most up to date information on various Microsoft technologies.
At the SDP, Sasha Goldstein and I are going to talk about Parallel Programming with Visual Studio 2010 and about WCF 4.0, WF 4.0 and Workflow Services, and plenty of other sessions are also available. Go ahead and sign up!
Well, the PDC has adjourned yesterday, and what a conference it was. Windows Azure launch, SilverLight 4 announcement and the Windows Server AppFabric application server are just some of the main issues which kept me occupied me the most.
If you haven’t been to the PDC (and even if you have), be sure to check-out the Sela Developer Practice (SDP) homepage. Come join our Sela experts as we delve into the many issues which were presented at the PDC. Seventeen of us were here at the PDC, and in my opinion that’s highly impressive.
If you’d like, you can join Sasha and me at the SDP at our sessions on “Parallel Programming with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010” and “Building Workflow Services with WF 4.0 and WCF 4.0”.
To wrap things us, some of us here from Sela went to the Los-Angeles Lakers vs. Chicago Bulls NBA match yesterday, and it was a blast as we set in our own private VIP booth. Now that’s what I call closure!
In this PDC session, Nicholas Allen, Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, reviewed various extensibility points in Windows Serer AppFabric workflow hosting .
Hosting Workflows
AppFabric ships with three out-of-the-box extensible workflow hosts:
- Workflow Driven Application – A host for workflows which are used as an execution engine and which do not require WCF interaction to drive them.
- Workflow Service – A host for workflows which require WCF message interactions with the outside world.
- Scaled-Out-Service – A host which includes built-in tools for scaling out a workflow application across servers.
In addition, one can also write a custom host for his own specific purposes and requirements.
Host Extension Points Reviewed
- Persistence Participation – It is now possible to write persistence participants in order to customize the persistence process to the Instance Store.
- Application Identity Correlation – AppFabric supports storing multiple keys or names for each application instance, so that different systems can identify the same application instance by different aspects. For example, your application will identify the instance via a client ID of some sort, and an application of a shipping partner will identify the same instance with a Shipment ID, and the correlation is done by the host.
- Collecting Workflow Events – You can customize the ETW events which are published and collected and published to the DB, and also write custom visualizations on top of this DB in order to support advanced monitoring scenarios custom-fit for your needs.
The Bottom Line
I have shown my enthusiasm from the AppFabric application server before, however I’m not sure I correctly understood all of the extension points reviewed and their internal implementation. In addition, the speaker mentioned that there are additional extension points which were not mentioned during this session. I’ll deep-dive into AppFabric sometime after the PDC and update accordingly.
Want to Know More?
Take a look at the Sela Developer Practice (SDP) homepage, and come join Sasha’s and mine session on “Building Workflow Services with WF 4.0 and WCF 4.0”, hear all the details in person and watch the demos live.
In this PDC session, DJ Park, C# IDE Program Manager, reviewed a lot of tips and tricks available in Visual-Studio 2010.
Announcing CodeRush Xpress
CodeRush Xpress is coming soon for Visual-Studio 2010, and will be free and downloadable. This release is scheduled soon after the release of Visual-Studio 2010.
My Highlighted Features
Below are the features which impressed me the most. Watch the session Video to see all of the available reviewed features.
Multi-Monitor Support
Visual-Studio 2010 now (finally) support multi-monitor setups. Just click and drag document windows onto other monitors, outside of the main Visual-Studio window. For me, this is definitely a performance booster as I like working with a dual-monitor setup!
Dependency & Call Graph Generator
The IDE is now able to generate a very intuitive dependency graph between assemblies and classes in a loaded solution. You can also generate a call graph which visualizes all of the call flows in your application. Check out the “Butterfly View”. I feel like I’m going to use this feature quite a lot.
IntelliTrace
IntelliTrace allows stepping back in time while debugging your application and is very useful in scenarios in which it is hard to catch that exact moment your bug occurred, allowing you to return to it after it has happened.
Pin Data Tips to the Editor
Visual-Studio 2010 now allows you to pin data tips (which are basically watches you define) to the editor and comment them. When you move around your code – your data tips move around with it allowing for a convenient debugging experience.
Camel-Case Search in IntelliSense
IntelliSense now supports Camel-Case searches as it suggests completions to your code. For example, typing “XmlReader reader = new XR” would immediately bring the classes which XR is their initials. I like this feature as it means much less typing…
The Bottom Line
Go ahead and use Visual-Studio 2010 Beta 2. It’s fun!
In this PDC session, Mark Fussel, Program Manager at Microsoft, spoke of creating Workflow Services in .NET 4.0, and hosting and deploying them on Windows Server AppFabric.
AppFabric
AppFabric provides a set of features for hosting, managing and deploying workflow services:
- A set of runtime databases for persisting and monitoring the running instances.
- Persistence services.
- Hosting of the runtime.
- Auto-start applications – start the service when the machine starts.
- Pushing diagnostics information from the hosted services into a DB.
- Caching (formerly “Velocity”).
- Management Tools both in GUI and via PowerShell command-lets.
Live Demo
Impressive Live Demos were performed during the session, and below are my highlights and impressions of them:
- WebDeploy - Package/Publish settings on a WF service project which allows utilizing WebDeploy which allows very easily deploying a WF service to IIS
- Monitoring Capabilities – Consistent WCF and WF instrumentation integrated with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), allowing to both check the status of an application and investigate what went wrong once it happens. The monitoring capabilities and drill-down menus absolutely make life much easier for the WF service developer.
- Configuration Capabilities – The configuration capabilities are also simply amazing, allowing you to configure almost anything, up to the level of a single workflow instance.
- Composition and correlation of service calls.
- Message Correlation – relating messages to each other or to application instance state. Today (in 3.5) correlation is performed inside a context header which can only be used in WCF-to-WCF based calls. In 4.0, correlation is based on the content of the message (e.g. “UserId” or any other application identifier) and is much more comprehensible and usable.
- Workflow Management Service for IIS/WAS is installed on the server and monitors the persistence DB, and it can manage these flows (restart, shutdown, etc.).
- Instances availability in a farm – scale your service easily.
The Bottom Line
WF services were much improved in this release of .NET, and they truly allow you to very easily model your business logic and expose it as a WCF service. When put together with the AppFabric application server, this is an amazing technology which can surely help in the development of many server applications. Go ahead, watch the video once it publishes, and be impressed!
Want to Know More?
Take a look at the Sela Developer Practice (SDP) homepage, and come join Sasha’s and mine session on “Building Workflow Services with WF 4.0 and WCF 4.0”, hear all the details in person and watch the demos live.
As we come towards to SDP, I’ll try and post several in-depth blog posts on this technology and explain all of the great new features which are present in it. Stay tuned!
In this PDC session, Ed Pinto, Program Manager at Microsoft, reviewed the many new additions to WCF 4.0. REST and WF services were not covered in this session, as they are covered in other sessions.
WCF Configuration
- Default Endpoints – The WCF team took feedback in and decided to prefer “Convention over Configuration”. This means that if an endpoint is not explicitly configured for your service, a default endpoint will be created whose configuration is set by convention.
- Default Bindings – It is now possible to specify an unnamed binding configuration, which becomes the default binding configuration for that particular binding.
- Default Behaviors – Services and Endpoint pick up default behaviors from higher in the configuration hierarchy if on other behaviour is specified.
- “ServiceActivations” configuration element – Allows configuring a WCF service to run in IIS without an svc file.
Windows Server AppFabric
As was already described, AppFabric (formerly codenamed “Dublin”) is a set of integrated technologies for building, scaling, and managing web and composite apps that run on IIS. AppFabric ships as part of the 2010 launch wave and is now available in Beta.
Monitoring WCF Apps
WCF now support Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) which can be configured via the standard way, and AppFabric provides an Event Collector which inserts events into a Monitoring DB which can be configured via the AppFabric tools.
Message Pump as a Service – Routing Service
Since WCF 3.0 many developers (including Sasha and myself) needed to implement a message pump (or message router) which basically takes messages from an input channel and puts them on an output channel. This is useful for various scenarios which include:
- Basic Message Routing
- Protocol Bridging
- Service Aggregation
- Versioning
WCF 4.0 now ships with a Routing Service which fully supports message routing, thus decoupling the client from the server. This service supports:
- Basic message routing based on a configured filter table.
- Protocol bridging including transport conversion, SOAP version conversion etc.
- Security decoupling and impersonation.
- Error handling – configure alternate service endpoints in case of failure.
- Transactions – flow transactions and control of transactional queue reads (as opposed to the destructive reads done in WCF 3.0 and 3.5 which delete the message when it is read).
Service Discovery
Discovery is the ability to publish a service’s endpoint metadata and discover services using well defined criteria. This is very useful both during design time to find available service and during runtime to allow reduced configurations, location agility and dynamic/self-healing applications. This service is an implementation of WS-Discovery and is standard interoperable.
Discovery comes in a couple of modes:
- Ad-hoc Discovery – No central discovery server, and discovery is performed via multicast messages.
- Managed Discovery – A discovery proxy is used to facilitate discovery. This suppresses the use for multicasting, and it also allows us to expose our own service repository to all clients in a standard way.
WCF 4.0 provides a full implementation for the ad-hoc mode and all of tools and contracts for building your own custom managed discovery mechanism. “DiscoveryProxy” is the base class required for creating a discovery service.
Making a service discoverable is very simple – just add a “ServiceDescoveryBehavior” and a discovery endpoint (such as “UdpDiscoveryEndpoint”) and you’re good to go. On the client side all you have to do is use a “DynamicEndpoint” instance, use it to create an instance of your service and you’re done!
Adding announcements to services is just an easy – all you have to do is add an announcement endpoint and that’s it. This gives you a very impressive ability for the client to respond to service availability on the network.
The Bottom Line
WCF 4.0 sure adds many required features which were missing in WCF 3.0 and 3.5, and enhances some areas which were already present. This session makes a great job showcasing these abilities and is highly recommended for viewing if you’re new to WCF 4.0.
Want to Know More?
Take a look at the Sela Developer Practice (SDP) homepage, and come join the session by Manu and Bernie on “What is new in WCF 4.0”.
In this PDC session, Clemens Vasters, Principal Technical Lead at Microsoft, showed how can an existing “regular” distributed enterprise application be migrated to the cloud.
DinnerNow.NET
The session revolved around the migrating the DinnerNow.NET sample application into the cloud. DinnerNow.net is a popular Microsoft sample illustrating IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax, LINQ, WCF, WF, WPF, PowerShell and .NET CF.
This demo is interesting since it is an existing application code base which was not designed for the cloud, with parts that cannot run in the cloud (such as the kiosk application) and parts that we don’t want to run in the cloud (such as placing the private client data in SQL Azure). Or, in other words, this is just like your typical home grown application.
This is Hard
Why is this hard? We have a lot of interconnections between different tiers running in the cloud and tiers running locally on-site. For example, the website, which is hosted on the cloud, needs to get profile data which is stored on-site.
The suggested hybrid cloud architecture for the DinnerNow.NET application looks like this:
Connecting Everything
How can we connect between cloud and local tiers? During one of the PDC keynotes, project “Sydney” was announced. “Sydney” is basically a VPN integration into the cloud environment causing your machine to become part of a virtual network. What we want to do here is a more surgical point-to-point connection with “Port Bridge” which allows multiplexed connections on top of TCP or named pipe through a service bus between a Port bridge agent and port bridge service.
The Bottom Line
If you are a software architect dealing with distributed enterprise systems, you should look more into Windows Azure and watch this session’s video once it gets published.
Well, the second day of the PDC is now over with only one more day to go. I can really start to feel the end…
So what have we had today? Silverlight 4 announcement, several technical sessions, a free laptop and at the end – Geek Fest.
Geek Fest was basically a party Microsoft arranged instead of the traditional big PDC party which was probably canceled due to budget limitations. This festival was comprised mostly of a lot of games spread across the conference hall, massage tables, good music and a lot food.
All in all, it was very nice. Enjoy the pictures!
In this PDC session, Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Principal Software Architect at Microsoft, presented the caching functionality of Windows Server AppFabric, which replaces the project formerly known as “Velocity”.
What is AppFabric Caching?
AppFabric caching is an explicit, distributed in-memory cache for all kinds of application data. In a typical 3-tier application, one has three tiers: User/Presentation, Application/Web and Data. As the load on the application grows, things start to work slower and the DB becomes sluggish as more and more DB accesses are required. The solution for this situation is the addition of an additional Cache Tier before the DB.
Why Should You Use It?
- Share data across applications and save the need for sticky routing.
- Performance improvement.
- Scale out by adding more cache boxes.
- High Availability due to the distributed nature of the cache.
- Proven Technology – “Associated Press Custom News” is running live on CTP3, as well is “Dell”.
- Low Cost – Commodity hardware along with software shipped in Windows Server AppFabric.
The Bottom Line
If you’ve used “Velocity” before, you might be familiar with most of the content in this session. However, if you haven’t used it, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with this technology, since a Cache Tier is an important piece of the puzzle in many server n-tier applications which is often overlooked.
Today at the PDC, I attended two sessions on WF 4.0 - “Spice Up Your Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation 4” and “Windows Workflow Foundation 4 from the Inside Out”.
I didn’t blog live about these sessions as their main punch was delivered via code examples and usage of WF designer which in my opinion are hard to capture with words. If you are new to WF than I recommend watching the videos once they get published as these sessions start from a very basic level without requiring prior knowledge of WF at all. On the other hand, if you’re an experienced WF developer like myself you might find these sessions too basic as they do not focus on the changes in this new version of WF, and you’re probably better off going ahead and reading the .NET Endpoint (the WCF and WF team blog).
Want to know more?
After the PDC I sure intend (as time permits) to post some blog posts demonstrating the usage of WF 4.0 and the main differences between WF 4.0 and WF 3.0, and if you really want to hear the latest in person you better join me and Sasha at the Sela Developer Practice in our session on “Building Workflow Services with WF 4.0 and WCF 4.0”.
As was announced during the PDC keynote, all PDC attendees received a free PDC Convertible Tablet Laptop with an accompanying license for Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Of course, in order to get the laptop you had to stand in a long line, but fortunately the representatives at distribution desk worked very efficiently and the line moved pretty quickly.
This laptop is an Acer Inspire 1420P which is an 11.6” Multi-Touch machine, and it looks like a very nice one. I hope I’ll have some time to try it out later on today.
This PDC session was a little different from regular PDC sessions as this was not composed of a speaker and a presentation, but is composed of a panel of experts instead. This panels was composed by: Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter and Burton Smith.
I wasn’t present during the entire session, but here are my highlighted quotes from the part I was present in (unfortunately the quotes are brought without the name of the speaker who is quoted and I apologize for that):
- What is your view on transactions?
- “Transactions are like fairy dust. Programmers write their code as usual and than just sprinkle transactions around and everything works!”
- “Software tends to work when it works and fail when it fails. Transactions are a wonderful way to handle situations where failure is possible”
- “Don’t wait to use transactions. Just do it.”
- Can type systems help us write better code?
- “A type system is a Neanderthal program verifier.”
- “Type and memory safety is the way of the future, and any interesting language is going to have these systems.”
- Should pointers across machines (distributed pointers) be explicit?
- “Boundary transitions should be clear and known to the developer”.
- “The boundary transition should be clear since the connection to the pointer destination can fail, as opposed to the path from cache to RAM which rarely fails and thus transition boundaries there are not known to the user”.
- “URLs are actually remote pointers”.
- “I lung for the day that URLs are treated as first class language constructs”.
- Should we leverage the GPU cores for computational purposes?
- “GPUs are going to take form of more general purpose processors in the future, but we’ll probably going to call them GPU’s for a long while”.
- “We’re going to see much variety in processor architectures specialized for certain purposes and GPUs are going to be one of these types. The question is how do we utilize all of these CPUs in a uniform way”.
- “Developers don’t really want multi-core processors. They want faster single cores”.
- Should we have garbage collection in C++?
- “Having garbage collection is really really important… What was the question?” and in response: “His memory was garbage collected while he was speaking”.
The third Keynote of the day was given by Kurt DelBrane, Senior Vice President in Microsoft, and was focused on Office and SharePoint 2010.
Announcing Office and Sharepoint 2010 Public Beta
It was announced that as of today, the entire office 2010 suite is available as a public beta:
- Microsoft Office 2010
- Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010
- Microsoft Project 2010
- Microsoft Visio 2010
Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP
It was also announced that Microsoft is going to ship a tool for consuming and extending SAP from Microsoft Sharepoint 2010. This tool is to be shipped during the second half of 2010.
Outlook Social Connector
Another announcement is on the “Outlook Social Connector” which provides an out-of-the-box experience for using connectors to show activity from various social networks directly in Outlook and bring the social network world into the enterprise.
The Bottom Line
Personally, I’m not into Office and SharePoint development so this session was not exciting for me, but if you’re an office development guy go ahead and watch the session video and slides and get updated on some of the new features in Office and SharePoint 2010.
The second keynote given today focused on the Silverlight platform. As it turns out, 45% of users have Silverlight installed on them, and Microsoft has risen the bar with the new Silverlight 4!
Announcing Silverlight 4
Silverlight 4 was just announced at the beginning of the session, and the entire keynote was devoted to reviewing and demoing the new features it provides.
Media
- Webcam and Microphone – Silverlight 4 allows connecting to a microphone and webcam and performing a variety of pixel shader effects on videos and video image analysis such as a barcode scanner.
- IIS Smooth Streaming – Smooth Streaming analyzes the network available bandwidth and quality, and allows streaming both live video and on-demand video with rewind, pause, fast forward and more. A small network connectivity malfunction occurred while trying to demo IIS Smooth Streaming working an iPhone but we believe this works.
Business Applications
Application development with Silverlight just got a lot easier with support for the following features:
- Printing and Print Preview
- Rich Text Control
- Clipboard Access
- Right Click
- Mouse Wheel
- Implicit Styles
- Drag/Drop
- Bidi & RTL
- HTML Controls – These control allows some amazing HTML manipulations, such as using an HTML page as a brush (even if the HTML has a running video inside of it!)
- Commanding and MVVM
- Additional Controls
Data & Networking
Data & Networking features added for Silverlight 4 are:
- Share Assemblies Across SL and .NET 4
- Data Binding Improvements
- UDP Multicast Support
- REST Enhancements
- WCF Improvements
- WCF RIA Services
Visual Studio 2010 Integration
Silverlight 4 now integrates even better with Visual Studio 2010:
- WYSISYG Design Surface
- XAML IntelliSense Improvements
- Data Bindings
- and more…
A very impressive demo showcasing development of a simple Silverlight 4 application in Visual-Studio 2010 was given. From my impression, it is now indeed very easy to bind data from various data sources including Entity Framework, ADO.NET and even nHibernate if you’d like!
In addition the new WYSIWYG design surface is truly impressive and very easy to work with. Be sure to watch the demo in the keynote video once it gets published.
Sandboxed Applications
Silverlight 4 allows running applications outside of the browser in a sandboxed manner:
- Windowing APIs
- Notification Popups (similar to the popups used by Outlook when new mail arrives)
- and more…
Trusted Applications
- Custom Widows Chrome – full control of the shape of the surrounding window when running outside of the browser.
- Local File System
- Cross-Site Network
- Keyboard in Full Screen Mode
- and more…
Silverlight 4 Performance
A main issue in the development of Silverlight 4 was performance:
- Twice as fast
- 30% faster startup
- New profiling support and integrated profiling support in Visual-Studio 2010
- Still 10 seconds to install!
Facebook Application Reference Sample
Make sure to check out and download the Facebook application Silverlight 4 demo, showcasing many of the above features.
Schedule
Silverlight 4 has three scheduled releases:
- Beta – contains all the features and is now available for download!
- Release Candidate
- Release – During 1st half of 2010.
The Bottom Line
The Silverlight 4 demos were definitely very impressive and if you’re into Silverlight development or even just curious about it, be sure not to miss the video of this keynote.
This session left me wondering – if Microsoft has put so much effort into Silverlight 4, what is going to become of WPF? How to they coincide? I hope these questions would be cleared soon.
The second day of the PDC just started, and the first session is the keynote by the president of Windows and Windows Live division in Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, which was focused on Windows 7.
Developing Windows 7
Steven started with a review on what Microsoft has learned during the development process of Windows 7 including maintaining a strong connection with the community, improvements performed in collecting telemetry data from users of the beta and RC releases of Windows 7 and a lot of usability research performed on regular users. A surprising example of telemetry collection and analysis is that as it turns out, 55% of users use a 1024x768 resolution, while only less than 0.5% of users use full HD (1900x1200) resolution (!), and this allowed the development team to focus their efforts.
Later on, some nice demos of Windows 7 features such as touch support, DirectCompute, Energy Efficiency and more were given.
Windows 7 PDC Laptop
It was just announced that an Acer multi-touch laptop would be given for free to every PDC attendant! I obviously like that very much!
Development of Internet Explorer 9
Internet explorer 9 is three weeks into development, and the main areas of focus during development are:
- Standards Progress - HTML 5 and ACID compatibility improvements.
- Performance Improvements – Improvements to the IE 9 rendering engine. Special notice should be given to IE 9’s rendering engine ability to use hardware acceleration by default on standard HTML pages. For example, an animation would be animated using Direct2D by default, thus allowing much improved and smooth rendering.
The Bottom Line
We got a free laptop! Hooray!
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