Dan shows off the Digipede Network
Dan’s “Grid Computing for Windows” PDC05 show-off video was just posted on Channel 9. Check out how easy it is to grid-enable your applications with the Digipede Network.
Good job, Dan!
rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. AndersonFrom MTC to eScience
Dan blogged that he would rarely post this week because of our work at the MTC in Mountain View. Boy, was he right — it has been pretty consuming. So, I’ve been quiet too.
We’ll be heading up to the MS Research eScience event next week. I’ll be blogging about that soon enough. If you’ll be up there, contact me. It’ll be a whirlwind trip for me, but it looks like there is a bit of “meeting“ time in the schedule.
Hope to see you there!
Tags: grid
Please update your feed!
Dan noticed that he was no longer getting posts from my blog and that he had originally subscribed to the wrong feed (i.e., the Atom feed from Blogger) instead of my Feedburner feed: this one.
Those of you who originally subscribed to the Atom feed probably won’t get this post! Otherwise, please update the feed to the following:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering
I apologize for any confusion this might have caused.
Cheers!
Microsoft done for?
Robert Scoble is spending a bit of time refuting this point. The latest post is here where he refers to responses to the current company meeting. He is in a good position to refute these claims as he has a broad view of what products are coming at Microsoft.
I do find the premise that “Microsoft is done for” a bit naive. I’m sure people have reason to be skeptical about recent management changes, execution of new projects, and as far as I know, concerns about company morale and cohesiveness.
But, so many are so anxious to relate the story of Microsoft’s imminent demise that they are not seeing straight. People keep looking for the next big thing and then making the connection that is the Microsoft killer.
Linux was going to dethrone Windows. Well, no. Certainly very many machines that might be running (and licensing) Windows are running Linux; however, the growth of new machines running Windows is phenomenal. Microsoft is winning this battle.
Now Google is going to dethrone Microsoft. How again?
- With the best search engine out there?
- With the best mapping / sattellite software?
- A new special-purpose OS (quick, everybody: rewrite everything! Microsoft will be buried in a year!). (Dan has recently posted some thoughts on this)
- With new applications for Windows? A new Word processor?
- In the enterprise?
I see much more opportunity for synergy between these companies than one destroying the other (I actually have tremendous respect for Google, by the way). I can understand why there is a battle here starting with the search engine (and going down into the OS). Microsoft wants to be the top search engine (eyeballs equate to revenues in the search market). But, this doesn’t equate to Google causing Microsoft’s demise.
And of course, Microsoft is not sitting still and waiting to be destroyed by anybody. Not only are they creating new products (and product features), but they are working on a bigger more connected vision that is actually pretty cool.
I think the big problem is that the Microsoft haters will always hate Microsoft. These people revel knowing that Google and Microsoft are at war and hope they have finally chosen the right horse.
Anyway, I think the reports of Microsoft’s death are greatly exaggerated. (apologies to Mark Twain).
XML Intellisense in VS2005
When I was at PDC05, I was talking to Faisal Mohamood about performing distributed builds on the Digipede Network. I had a question about Intellisense in VS2005 and he said something like “Really? That should just work”.
Finally I have gotten to sit down and spend a few focused minutes on this Intellisense issue. Our XSD works great in VS2003, but not in VS2005. Lots of warnings that look like this:
Type ‘x’ is not declared in namespace ‘y’.
I made the assumption that the VS2003 schema was actually valid; but it turns out that it wasn’t. Strangely enough, it appears that VS2003 is much more forgiving about errors in XSD than VS2005 is. I’m happy to say that the XML validation features of VS2005 told me what was wrong with the schema and it was easy to fix.
Note: our original schema had been created using xsd.exe from a class library. I had to tweak some things in it by hand, but basically VS2003 accepted it as it was generated. Oddly, it had several problems in it. The most major one (and the cause of the problem above) is that there were many top-level element nodes that should have been complexType nodes. It seemed kind of arbitrary whether types were defined or not. So, don’t trust xsd.exe for creating valid XSD.
Tags: Intellisense, vs2005
Newsgator Outlook Edition trouble? Reinstall!
I have been using the Newsgator Outlook Edition for the past year and was pretty happy with it, but I just realized that it has been discarding posts somewhat arbitrarily.
For example, I had subscribed to the PDC Bloggers feed and hadn’t gotten a new post since the Wednesday of the conference. With all of the feeds I was reading, I didn’t even notice. Several other feeds have been behaving the same way. Newsgator online was working fine, though. Definitely not the feeds, just the reader.
A trip to the Newsgator support site clued me into “Shift-Refresh” as a way to force a refresh of a feed. This didn’t work. A service release (SR2) was released earlier in the month. Upgrading didn’t make a difference.
Uninstalling and then re-installing did work. Now I have (unfortunately) a whole lot of posts marked as unread. It is a good think that Newsgator can sync your feeds from the web site. Handy feature, really.
Tags: blog
Microsoft wins the PDA OS war
Business Week is reporting that soon there will be an announcement of a Windows Mobile Treo. This was expected, but now it is (almost) official:
Microsoft has won the PDA OS wars
Being an avid user of Palm OS devices since the Pilot Professional and recently a user of the JASJAR (a Windows Mobile 5 Phone), I have to say that Microsoft won this one on marketing.
That is not to say that technically Windows Mobile isn’t impressive. It certainly is; however, the ease of use and responsiveness of the T3 stands in stark contrast to the slowness and complexity of the JASJAR. OK, I should try other Windows Mobile devices before I make a statement about relative speed, but the overall complexity of the PIM functionality makes Windows Mobile very hard to use.
I just don’t see how an average (non-technical, non-geeky) user could use a Windows Mobile device as their PIM.
Update: fixed a typeo and an admission: no, Windows Mobile devices are not necessarily slow.
More from the PDC05 Day -3+
The third day of the PDC were of particular fun. It was so much fun, and it has taken me until Sunday to get around to writing about it!
Our booth was full of prospective customers, partners, and several Microsoft people.
In terms of customers, there were people from all sorts of companies both big and small. We heard from many IT people in need of improved performance and distributing existing processes. Many of the customer prospects said one of the following:
I didn’t know you could do grid computing with Windows.
Wow, you can do that with .NET (or C#, or . . . ).
We look forward to following up with these prospects and getting more satisfied customers.
We also talked to several exhibitors who could take advantage of our product to enhance the performance of their product. Look for the “Digipede Inside” logo coming soon to a product near you!
I had a good talk with Eric Lantz from the Microsoft HPC group on many things related to their coming offering and their beta that was just released. He cleared up any confusion (at least for me) about where CCE fits into the release schedule. The good news is that both CCE and CCS are scheduled for release in the first half of 2006. Kyril and Bob Muglia demonstrated CCS during the third keynote. As CCE is merely a limited version of the Windows Server 2003 64bit OS, it hardly got a mention. I think this makes sense for the PDC crowd, however, I think that the HPC customers will be quite happy with CCE for its competitive price.
I had several conversations with people in the Visual Studio and other groups. Not only did I get some technical issues resolved, but some good ideas for how to further enhance our product and its integration with different Microsoft products. And even better, now I have met many of the Program Managers that will help me if/when we have any difficulties. I will be blogging more about this as I dive into these integration points.
All in all, PDC05 was a great conference for us. Sometimes when exhibiting at a conference, it can be hard to know if it will be full of actual customer prospects, or just an opportunity to interact with other potential partners. Of course, the answer to this is different for each customer. One company in a nearby booth had very little traffic. For us, though, it turned out to be the best of both worlds.
Universal Studios Party
The Universal Studios party was a lot of fun. I have not been there since the 70s. Jaws and the Six Million Dollar Man were the exciting things to see then. Now, I think the highlights are The Mummy Returns ride and the Jurassic Park ride.
They are not kidding when they say you get wet on Jurassic Park. The guys I went with weren’t too keen on getting wet, but I went straight for the front of the boat. The attendant told us the front-left was the worst on the boat. That is where I sat. I could tell what was coming because once I sat down (before the ride left) my pants were already quite wet. Anyway, it was a blast.
We brought a prospective customer with us to the party. He only recently began coding for the Microsoft OS. at one point, out of the blue, he said “Man, I have to tell you, that Visual Studio absolutely rocks!” He was talking about Visual Studio 2003.
Thanks to Microsoft for a great party and a great PDC05!
PDC05 Day 2
The keynotes today at PDC05 were interesting. I’m excited about the Windows Workflow Foundation. Any chance that it will be released for XP? There was a lot more on Office 12 today. The server-side stuff looks great. These kinds of tools will transform the file-server from a ubiquitous catchall of data for all users into special purpose storage for IT staff.
I spoke with Jesse Kaplan today from the CLR team. We talked about different ways to selectively launch a process using a specific runtime. He also confirmed a strategy for supporting a second level of registration-free COM. We are already doing registration-free COM, but there are some ways that I want to make it more flexible for our customers. The best thing is, that if I have any trouble getting this to work I will know who to talk to! I recently blogged about putting together an article on COM APIs for .NET Libraries. One of my motivations for doing this is to provide end-to-end steps on how to handle getting registration-free COM to work with embedded Win32 resources in a real release environment. I’ll have to get back to that soon.
My thanks to Jesse.
I appreciate the effort that Microsoft is putting into creating an open community for developers (and ISVs). Talking directly to people who have the answers certainly saves all of us a lot of time. This is a great thing about these events: for we can always locate the person we need online or through our Microsoft partner representatives, it is a whole different thing to walk into the middle of a group of 20 experts on a specific topic.
Jim Gray from Microsoft Research came by our booth today. This was my first time meeting him. Our CEO, John, has met him (and met with him) several other times. It is nice to see that he is taking an interest in what we are doing. We will be seeing him again in October up at a Microsoft gathering for academic and scientific computing.
And now, I’m looking forward to the party tonight at Universal Studios.
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