November 5, 2008 - 12:45, by Dostalek, Kevin
November 2, 2008 - 13:05, by Dostalek, Kevin
A few have asked me to give my "picks" for best materials from the PDC for people to watch, so here goes. Note, that not all of the sessions from day 3 and day 4 appear to be available yet on channel9, so most of these will be from day 1 and 2. Also, here's the link that you can use to browse all of the publically accessible session recordings:
Keynotes:
All the keynotes are worth watching as they give the intro pitches to the new technologies, and have pretty good presenters (except David Tredwell, not a good choice there).
Keynote #2 - Windows7, New Dev. Tech, Live Services, and Office 14
Keynote #3 - Don and Chris's Lap Around the Azure Services Platform (all demo)
Keynote #4 - All about Microsoft Research (cool stuff in second half)
Sessions:
So here are my picks that are "best-of" taking also into account the things that I think you guys would be interested in, as well as what's presently available (mostly day 1/2):
Other Fun Stuff:
November 2, 2008 - 12:30, by Dostalek, Kevin
Well I didn't do a whole lot on this day, since I had a flight that left at 3PM and so I figured I needed to leave the PDC before lunch to make it to LAX in time.
So pretty much in the morning I went to the first half of the Services Symposia. The initial session was entitled "Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground: A Practical Look at Architectural Challenges and Opportunities in the Cloud". Some of the material overlapped with the "Best Practices" session I went to the day before, but this one went into a little bit more depth. I plan to watch the second half of this Symposia online, and then I'll probably have another blog post about the whole topic.
So then on to the airport, which was not nearly as busy as everyone said (maybe it's because I was flying Southwest and all their terminals are "isolated"). Unfortunately, my flight was delayed by an hour (some problem in SanFran). And so by the time I got to Indy it was 11:30PM. After waiting for my luggage, getting to my car, and then driving all the way back across Indy (BTW- they've closed the Airport Expressway apparently, maybe it was just for that night, I dunno), it was about 1:15AM. Of course I'm tired (physically), but not all that sleepy. So I'll probably head into work on Friday, and just leave when I'm ready to crash.
November 2, 2008 - 12:20, by Dostalek, Kevin
Day started with a keynote all about Microsoft Research (MSR). Key point is that it is structured like a University, and actually has more acedemic output than almost any other CS department and more patents/papers than any other R&D group worldwide.
They showed off some cool new tech they are working on, including sensor arrays, SecondLight, and Boku. Boku was especially interesting to me as it is a a programming skills game for children (7 years and up) that is a 3d interactive environment and uses an XBox controller to do all the "coding".
The rest of the morning I spent session hopping to lots of different "Showcase" and "Case Study" type sessions to see how these technologies have been used in the real world, including the NBC Olympics site, which registered more than 55 million unique visitors, which now all have SilverLight installed (due to this and other genious parterships, such as the new NetFlix Live service, SilverLight already is on 25% of all connected internet devices).
After lunch I did a short little presentation as part of the CodePlex Townhall meeting. My little demo (about 10 minutes), was on the Community Kit for SharePoint, Extended Blog Edition (CKS:EBE). That went very well and I got a nice CodePlex jacket out of the deal. Channel9 recorded it, so perhaps in the next week or so it will show up there.
Then I went to the Windows Azure: Cloud Service Development Best Practices which was a great session (no code), that covered all the considerations that need to be addressed when using the new mindset. I'm glad I went to this as the "Business Considerations for the Cloud" session I had planned on going to on Day 4 got cancelled.
Last session of the day was "Architecture without Big Upfront Design" which showed all the new modelling tools that are part of VSTS2010 Architect Edition. Not everything worked, but the stuff that did looked great. The overriding message was that it's rare that you ever get to start with a green field and so you need to evolve and adapt your architectures anyway (as opposed to designing them perfectly up front). Assuming you have the tools to do this properly, then it only makes sense to design your architectures to be flexible up front even when doing green field development. The presenter was very "Agilista".
October 31, 2008 - 09:35, by Dostalek, Kevin
2 Keynotes this morning. The first one went long but essentially highlighted Windows7, Live Services (including Live Mesh), Scott Guthrie's tour of new tech (including WPF futures, .Net 4.0 , SilverLight 2, and VS2010), and then a sneak peak at Office 14.
Windows 7 looks pretty much just like Vista with a few new UI tweaks and much in the way performance improvement. Two super cool new features though are: multiple-monitor support on RDP connections, and native mounting of VHD's as drives INCLUDING THE ABILITY TO BOOT FROM THEM! The major thing demo'ed from Office 14 was "Office Web Applications" which is essentially web versions of OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, that render pretty true to the desktop apps (both in interface as well as document formatting), and support multi-user collaboration.
The second keynote was Don Box and Chris Anderson doing their typical All-Code demo where they built a cloud app from scratch. It was highly interesting and entertaining, but as expected very fast and mind-crunching.
After lunch I caught the tail end of the Coding4Fun lunch session... I had hoped to see more of it, but with the keynotes running about 30 minutes late, there wasn't much time.
Next I went to Ori Amiga's Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services. Ori is a great presenter and with the LF and MS I can actually now see how Azure can be leveraged in real applications. They've really done a good job at abstracting away some complexities and providing some base services that can be used right away.
Then I went to the "Making Apps More Social" session. I think this session had a ton of potential and the presenter had some good ideas and a lot of passion. Unfortunately I think the presentation itself wasn't prepared that well and it was a bit of a disappointment.
Rather than going to the last session of the day, I completed my Surface scavenger hunt, which got me a ticket to their hands on lab and SDK invite. The lab was pretty cool, both using the Surface Simulator app (it uses 2 mice) and a Surface unit itself. I'm definately going to have to brush up on my WPF skills.
Tonight was the Attendee Party at Universal Studios, which was only a short walk from my hotel. They had a Halloween theme going on, including fog covered walkways and zombies/ghouls and stuff jumping out at you with running chainsaws and stuff. The rides were so-so, but one great show was the Bill and Ted meet HellBoy show which was hillarious and had great dancing. Of course all the food and beverages (beer) were free. Right towards the end I got trapped on the Simpson's ride with a bunch of the codeplex team, but luckily they got it running again after about 10 minutes of waiting in the dark.