Michael Desmond and Keith Ward, editor in chief of MSDN, are at PDC09 this week. Here's the scoop direct from L.A.
When U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra was remotely demoing Microsoft's "information as a service" subsystem, codenamed Dallas, he demonstrated a job-search application running on a mobile device. It was a cool demo, but perhaps the most interesting aspect is the device on which the app ran -- an iPhone. No Windows Mobile devices here.
I'm sorry, but two-hour keynotes are just too long. Too many demos, too many speakers, too many Microsoft partners. Too much, too much.
How much new stuff was announced? Not much at all. Dallas was new, and looks promising. And the vision of Azure was somewhat clarified. Microsoft promised to make the adaptation of existing internal applications to cloud-enabled apps almost as simple as clicking a few buttons. This is what's known in the industry as "overpromising."
It's interesting to see the reaction in the press room when the coding portion of the keynote starts. Conversation among the reporters picks up. The buffet gets full in a hurry. Attention wanders off of the bigscreen monitor broadcasting the keynote, and the media schlubs start blogging, tweeting, etc. In other words, we all get bored.
How many of you are ready for Azure to go live on Jan. 1? I'd be interested to see if you are, and how you're going to use it. Email me and let me know.
Posted by Keith Ward on 11/17/20090 comments
Michael Desmond and Keith Ward, editor in chief of MSDN, are at PDC09 this week. Here's the scoop direct from L.A.
Ray Ozzie looked a bit nervous as he took the stage today at PDC, but he quickly settled into a cloud-heavy presentation that offered attending developers a 60,000-foot view of Microsoft's ongoing efforts around Windows Azure.
Ozzie fared well on stage, but I was honestly surprised at how marketing-driven his message was. The Microsoft chief software architect, widely lauded as a keen and innovative software mind, hammered out Microsoft's highest level messages. Target Windows 7 as the ultimate client target and extend Web experiences from there; focus on online services and Windows Azure on the Web; and use Microsoft's latest innovations to tap into the enormous potential of cloud-based data-intensive applications and services.
Ozzie enthused about the "Dallas" project, which promises to give Windows Azure developers the ability to uniquely explore, manipulate and present data stored on public and private sources. But even there, his articulation of the initiative was extremely high level for a dev community clearly looking for a glimpse at the bare metal.
Server and Tools Business President Bob Muglia hosted the more technical half of the keynote session, playing host to a series of code-level demos and diving into the new Microsoft Application Fabric and detailing capabilities in Windows Identity Foundation.
Overall, the session was a mix that initially looked like it might disappoint with its lack of new technical detail, but then took a hard right turn that should have pleased most of the PDC crowd.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/17/20090 comments
Michael Desmond and Keith Ward, the editor in chief of MSDN are at PDC09 this week. Here's the scoop direct from L.A.
There's a whole lot of publicly-available data out there. What can you do with it?
Microsoft says it can help you build applications with it, through its just-announced new project codenamed "Dallas". Dallas was previewed during today's PDC keynote presentation. The idea behind it, according to Microsoft Technical Fellow David Campbell, is about "Taking friction out of discovering, exploring and using data."
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie positioned Dallas as part of its overall Azure strategy. "It is an open catalog and market place for data, both public data and commercial data."
Ozzie offered a laundry list of capabilities. "Dallas makes the whole world of data better than the sum of its parts by creating a uniform discovery mechanism for data; a uniform binding and access mechanism for data; a uniform way of exposing trial data sets for developers; a uniform licensing model so data from multiple providers can be easily joined and recombined. By delivering data as a service, our aspiration is that Dallas might catalyze a whole new wave of remixing and experimentation by developers. [It is] an opportunity for innovation that is uniquely unlocked by the cloud."
There's lots of public domain data out there from government and other sources. Finding it and harnessing it to build useful applications is the goal of Dallas. A demo showed a mobile app that was developed "in a few days," according to the speaker. The program was a job-search app that used Dallas to cull public information about jobs, and use that information to find a match for open teaching positions.
Check out Microsoft's Dallas website for more information.
Posted by Keith Ward on 11/17/20090 comments
I'm just about to head off for the Las Angeles Convention Center to attend the opening keynote of this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). While PDC09 will not match the scope and scale of PDC08, it's still going to be a major event in the .NET developer community.
We expect to hear a whole lot about Microsoft Azure and cloud computing development -- there are plenty of sessions dedicated to migrating to cloud environments, mixing on-premise and cloud operations and many similar topics. Oslo will also be re-visited, in a less ambitious form than it took during PDC08.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/17/20090 comments
Back in February 2008, Microsoft announced with a flourish that it was committing to improving the interoperability and openness of its products, technologies and processes. The published document set out four guiding principles for Microsoft's approach to interoperability: Open connections to Microsoft products, support for standards, data portability, and open engagement.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/13/20090 comments
VSM Executive Editor Kathleen Richards on Wednesday reported in her RDN Express blog that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is showing off some welcome improvements in text handling, courtesy of the updated WPF 4 Beta 2 graphics subsystem. New tweaks like TextFormattingMode and TextRenderingMode are giving developers much finer control over text display and position in the Visual Studio code editor interface. These improvements may be seeing first light in the Visual Studio IDE, but they'll be available to everyone once .NET 4 ships in March. Check out the rest of the RDN Express blog post here.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/30/20090 comments
People like to complain that the holiday shopping season keeps creeping forward, until it seems that Christmas lights are going up at the local shopping mall before the leaves even come down. Well, you can excuse developers if they aren't noticing a similar phenomenon with Microsoft. This year the fall season has been as much about developer tooling as it has been about football, turkey and holiday shopping.
In 2008, Microsoft held its first Professional Developers Conference (PDC08) in three years. The event, as I detailed in a Desmond File blog post, was a blowout. Redmond, it seemed, lined up almost everything for the show--from the dizzying gestalt of Windows Azure and a host of cloud-aligned technologies and initiatives, to the launch of the Windows 7 public beta, to intriguing efforts like the Oslo application modeling platform and repository and the initial CTP of Visual Studio 2010. In fact, several show attendees and one Microsoft manager I spoke with at the show last year said Redmond tried to do too much in too little time at PDC08.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/21/20090 comments
Watching the opening keynote at the SharePoint Conference 2009 event and things unfolded pretty much as I expected. There was a broad, fast-moving series of demos and presentations, complete with caffeine-taut delivery. Microsoft Director of the SharePoint Group Tom Rizzo has a future as a horse race announcer or at least an auctioneer.
As for SharePoint itself. Perhaps it's no surprise that Microsoft is working as hard as it can to work SharePoint into every unfilled nook, cranny and crevice in the business. But as Steve Ballmer gleefully listed one SharePoint-viable scenario after the next, I could not help but think of the old Saturday Night Live commercial spoof about Shimmer Floor Wax. Honestly, if Ballmer had finished his list with "It's a dessert topping and a floor wax," I wouldn't have been surprised.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/19/20090 comments
Dave Mendlen sounded pretty jacked up on the phone on Friday. The senior director of developer marketing at Microsoft offered fresh details about the Visual Studio 2010 integrated development environment (IDE), which went to Beta 2 for MSDN subscribers earlier today. The general public will be able to download VS2010 Beta 2 bits on Wednesday, October 21. Mendlen also revealed that the final, shipping versions of VS2010 and .NET Framework 4 are scheduled for official release on March 22, 2010.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/19/20091 comments
On Friday I blogged about AVIcode CEO Mike Curreri's intriguing management stunt, in which he promised to shave his head if the company made its Q3 financial targets. The really important news for AVIcode employees, though, was that Curreri vowed to pay back income lost in an across-the-board 15 percent salary cut the company had implemented earlier, by providing a quarterly bonus to affected employees. While the headshaving bit is amusing, the real news here is that AVIcode was able to turn its fortunes so decisively last quarter.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/19/20090 comments
File this one under great moments in management. Times have been tough, particularly for software industry developers and executives who have had to weather the prolonged downturn. But at least one exec is putting his money where his mouth is. Or should I say, his hair.
Faced with a difficult market, Mike Curreri, chief executive officer of dev tools maker AVIcode, had put in place some pretty draconian cost-cutting measures, including a stiff 15 percent across-the-board salary cut. But he made a promise at the time that if AVIcode managed to exceed its third quarter goals, the salaries would be reinstated and bonuses would be issued to make up the lost income.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/16/20090 comments
If you've done any business with Microsoft the last few years, you've no doubt heard the phrase "better together." It's become a mantra of sorts in Redmond as Microsoft has worked to create value not just in the applications it develops, but in the interactions they enable. We've seen the strategy employed in everything from Windows Server and Exchange to Windows 7 and Live.
There's a bit of "better together" going on in the halls of Redmond Developer News (RDN) and Visual Studio Magazine (VSM) today. We just announced that RDN, the twice-monthly publication for development managers, will be integrating its print operations into VSM.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/30/20091 comments