Stiller on Software

PDC 2009 Day 1: Cloud: The Next Generation

In the second PDC keynote, Bob Muglia, President of Server Applications & Tools, spoke of the Cloud Application Model as the next widespread and accepted software model: Mainframe. Client-Server. Web. SOA. Cloud Computing. According to Bob’s vision, cloud computing would be successful as it would enable some very complex scenarios such as scaling out, failure resiliency and many more which are hard to deal with today. Several announcements were made during the session, and these are highlighted...

PDC 2009 Day 1: The Microsoft PDC 2009 Keynote

Finally, the PDC itself has started and it has started with the keynote by Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. The main vision which was threaded throughout Ray’s keynote is the concept of “ Three Screens in a Cloud ” – server runtime over “Windows Azure” and “SQL Azure” cloud computing platform and user experience on top “Windows 7” and “Silverlight” across platforms. Windows Azure Special attention was given to the cloud platform “Windows Azure” which was announced to be in production...

PDC 2009 Pre-Conference: Windows 7 Memory Management

At his lecture at the PDC’s “ Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp ”, Landy Wang showcased many of the memory management changes done in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 kernel, one of which is highlighted below. These changes, on average, lead to performance increase of up to two times in memory constrained systems – for free. All you have to do is move to the new operating system. Removing the PFN Lock The Page Frame Number (PFN) lock, up to Windows Vista (including), is a single lock in charge of...

PDC 2009 Pre-Conference: Windows 7 Kernel Changes

In their presentation at the PDC “Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp” pre-conference, Mark Russinovich and Arun Kishan highlighted some of the main changes in the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 kernel. I’ll highlight some of these changes below. Note that many of these changes were also explained in Alon’s session at the Windows 7 User Group. Many Core Platform Support Windows Server 2008 R2 now supports 256 logical processors, as opposed to “only” 32 or 64 logical processors on the 32 and 64 bit...