Microsoft postpones PDC and more

May 26, 2007 at 8:15 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0

Robert Scoble had a great post on the PDC and what is going on at Microsoft.   I liked it so much I included most of it here with my comments.

The PDC stands for “Professional Developer’s Conference.” It happens only when Microsoft knows it’ll have a major new platform to announce. Usually a new version of Windows or a new Internet strategy.

So, this means a couple of things: no new Windows and no major new Internet strategy this year.

I agree there is no new strategy this year and that is disappointing; however, Silverlight is huge and this year, and if not an Internet strategy it is an Internet developer strategy. 

Cleary Mix07 was the place to be — I would have made sure I went if I had known that PDC was going to be cancelled.

Some other things I’m hearing about the next version of Windows? There still is a ban on .NET code in core parts of Windows. They aren’t getting enough performance yet from .NET to include code written in it inside major parts of Windows. This is a bummer, because .NET is a lot easier to write than C++ and letting Microsoft’s developers write .NET code for Windows would unleash a bunch of innovation.

I fully agree with you here — a definite bummer.  Yet I don’t agree about the performance of .NET.  Certainly there are parts of Windows that need to be unmanaged code; but Digipede has a slew of customers using .NET for computation and getting terrific performance from it.  Face it, this “not performant yet” argument is used by people at Microsoft from kernel / device authors (OK) to the Office team (what?).  It is hard to separate the good arguments here from just plain bias and inertia. 

The person who told me this (who works at Microsoft) told me .NET still takes too long to startup and load into memory and because Windows is now being compared to OSX they can’t afford to ship components that would slow down Windows.

What?  If this were baked into the OS, couldn’t they do a better job of sharing this startup cost (i.e., doing it once with reuse)? 

This gets right back to my posts about how the Windows .NET API is actually dead (see these: WinFx).

It also means that Ray Ozzie’s team probably doesn’t have anything dramatic to announce yet and they aren’t willing to have live within the bounds of a forcing function like the PDC (PDC forces teams to get their acts together and finish off stuff enough to at least get some good demos together).

This is the “no Internet strategy this year” part.  Yup.  Definite bummer.

Some other things I’m hearing from the Windows team? That they are still planning out the next version of Windows. So, I don’t expect to see a beta until 2008 (probably second half of the year, if we see one at all) and I don’t expect to see a major new version of Windows to ship until 2009.

Microsoft says it won’t be as long between releases of the OS now.  I think, though, we won’t see a major new version released until Windows till 2010.

Anyway, this is sad cause I was hoping to see Microsoft make an all out push for developers this year.

Well, I think they have.  Their developer story is getting better and better every quarter.  I think they should have had the PDC anyway and continued to flog the .NET 3.0 and new .NET 3.5 stuff particularly Silverlight. 

What do you think it all means? Am I reading too much in between the lines?

Maybe you are.  I think the timing for the PDC was definitely wrong for Microsoft.  The Microsoft Internet strategy we are really waiting for has to do with Office / other applications and Internet services.  When this is unveiled, I think it will have less to do with developers than warranted at a PDC.  Ironically that should have been announced at Mix, but will have to wait for the next one.

Will Microsoft unveil a new Internet strategy at Mix08?  I bet.

Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, .NET3.5, Digipede, Microsoft, MIX07, PDC, Scoble, Silverlight, WinFx

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Silverlight and Ajax

May 2, 2007 at 8:18 pm · Filed under .NET

I’m glad to see that the CLR story for Silverlight (aka WPF/E) has made it out.  There was much discussion about this at the recent Microsoft ISV CTO Summit.  Scott Guthrie let us know at the time that there would be announcements at MIX07 as there have been.

Silverlight really is a game changer.  It pushes the very compelling managed code and XAML stories into the browser.

At the Summit someone asked how Ajax (and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions) fits in with the WPF/E strategy.  The answer (from the ASP.NET AJAX guy) was something to the effect of “they are solutions to two different problems”.

Certainly this is true.  I put it a little differently:

• Silverlight is a new way of deploying apps on the Web while leveraging the existing .NET tooling and languages.  It is an entire development platform and strategy for building rich applications in a browser.  It provides an OS and browser independent story (albeit limited on day one).
• Ajax is a set of techniques to create dynamic HTML.  Basically this is to force dynamic Web applications into the browser.  Ajax (and HTML/XHTML/CSS for that matter) is notoriously browser dependent.  Much Ajax work is made more painful because of browser-specific hacks.  In addition, building extensible and maintainable Ajax is extremeley difficult.

So, one is a new way of building web apps with killer toolking.

The other is a way of building web apps with killer hacks.

Which would you rather build, deploy, support, and maintain?

Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, ajax, Microsoft, Silverlight, WPF, WPF/E

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Digipede Sponsoring Microsoft FDC

April 22, 2007 at 7:41 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

Digipede is sponsoring the Microsoft Financial Developers Conference in New York City this week.  John and Dan will be there Wednesday and Thursday (April 25th and 26th) attending the conference and presenting on scaling SOA. 

John has more on his blog; Microsoft has registration here (note that last link is broken, but ought to be working soon enough).

BTW: The event is free.

Tags: .NET, Digipede, financial-services, grid, Microsoft, SOA

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Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain

March 26, 2007 at 10:30 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Very cool — I installed it this morning (now it is a free download) and had it working in munites.  This will make it so much easier for my company to handle the migration of our issue tracking from Gemini into TFS.

From bharry (excerpted heavily):

Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System.  TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser.  The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support.  TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines.  It also improves reach by enabling some access from non-Windows clients.

. . .

TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access.  Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here.  It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL.  Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via the DevBiz online forums.

Source: Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!
Originally published on Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:58:12 GMT by bharry

Tags: DevBiz, Microsoft, TeamPlain, TFS, VSTS

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2nd Microsoft ISV CTO Summit

March 23, 2007 at 8:12 pm · Filed under .NET

I’m coming back from the 2nd Microsoft ISV CTO Summit up in Redmond (I blogged about the first one here).  A good trip with worthwhile content.  I’m not sure any of it was really new, but I did see some cool stuff:

Expression Blend

The tool for designers to design and build WPF projects.  Definitely cool. 

I had two questions for one of the presenters (Eric Zocher) afterwards: when will Visual Studio look as good as blend (e.g., Blend uses WPF and allows smooth scaling of its own UI).  Answer: um, maybe never. 

Since Blend is basically a developer tool (for designers) that can create and edit Visual Studio, does it integrate with TFS?  Not yet.

Of course, these answers don’t take away from Blend at all (and certainly TFS will eventually come even though outsourced designers may get little value from that). 

I’m no designer, but I’m  looking forward to playing with it.  Though they haven’t announced this part yet, I expect it will be made available through MSDN Maximal (or whatever they are calling it now) or through our Gold Certified ISV Competency.

WPF/E

This stuff is very cool.  Actually, Scott Guthrie demoed the WPF/E Vista emulator that Savas recently linked to.  The great thing here is the unification of the presentation story here.  I won’t go further into the roadmap because it is never clear to me at these NDA events what is open knowledge and what requires the secret-squirrel decoder ring.

AJAX ASP.NET

I tracked this as a really good thing (to greatly simplify AJAX for .NET devs), but I hadn’t taken the time to look at it or the demos.  It is really cool.  Aside from all it can do, the coolest thing is how easy you can enable it for existing ASP.NET applications.  I would have tried it out already (i.e., in our Digipede product), but I stayed out too late last night to get into it.

WinFx dead?

I had a chance to ask Scott Guthrie directly about whether the WinFx name change was an indication of the death of the managed Windows API (as I argued here).  His response, basically, naaah.  Just a marketing change.  I still disagree, as long as the managed API rides atop Win32, it isn’t the actual Windows API.  In this case the managed API is either dead or were waiting for Singularity.

Swag

These events always come with some swag.  This time we got a strange floppy neoprene folder (for small laptops here) and what I think is a screen cleaning cloth (though looks like a compressible handkerchief). 

Cheers, though, to Microsoft for not giving us a bunch of junk for the landfill — I include in this: lamps, USB speakers, travel clocks.  Also, I think it is great that they didn’t give us a whole bunch of resource CDs, trials, betas, etc.  Last time they did and these are mostly useless.  Not for the content, but because we all already have this content in MSDN or available through other partner programs.

They did give us one useful thing, though: a Vista Ultimate DVD/license.  Frankly, that is my kind of swag.

Tags: ajax, asp.net, Blend, CTO, ISV, Microsoft, Swag, vs2005, WinFx, WPF, WPF/E

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HPC Presentation in Denver

March 16, 2007 at 1:20 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

If you will be in Denver on April 5th, come by and see my good friend Nathan Trueblood present on the Digipede Network.  

From John: 

The presentation is part of a Microsoft HPC event in Denver on April 5, 2007, featuring the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), the Digipede Network, and other Microsoft HPC partner offerings. 

All details about this free event, as well as the link to register, are here.

Source: Digipede and Microsoft — HPC Presentation

Tags: .NET, Digipede, Grid Computing, HPC, Microsoft

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To Office 2007

March 1, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

Tuesday, I had lunch with J. LeRoy. 

He probably doesn’t remember it this way, but he convinced me to make the switch to Office 2007.  It went something like this:

Jim (All paraphrased):

• I have finally given up on Outlook.
• I’m sick of waiting for five minutes for it to start.
• It never closes when you click on the ‘x’.
• Business Contacts Manager constantly asked me to reinstall its database.
• Which database is that?  I remember installing a database.

and the one that convinced me:

• It does some really cool things with tasks (and follow-up).

That was it.  I had to install it.

Having the tools to manage my to-do list efficiently is kind of my Holy Grail. I have tried various tools and not been happy with any of them.  So I have fallen back to using tasks in Outlook which are synchronized with my Treo.

This works okay, but Outlook 2003 treats tasks as some kind of afterthought.

Outlook 2007 is a much better job with providing a usable UX integrating tasks (and the calendar) across many different views.

And for me, it doesn’t take very long to start.  It also closes when I click on the ‘x’.   I suspect that Jim is having add-in trouble.  Something (probably Business Contacts Manager) is keeping Outlook alive when it shouldn’t.

Now, I’m using the entire Office Ultimate suite.  More on that as I actually start to use it.

Tags: JLeRoy, Microsoft, office, Office2007, Outlook, Outlook2007

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Microsoft’s DST Fix is a real problem

February 12, 2007 at 11:41 am · Filed under .NET

Dan blogged last night that MSVCRT hasn’t been fixed for the new US daylight savings time (DST) rules that go into effect next month.

Last week, Wayne Citrin posted about a problem with Microsoft’s DST patch for Windows:

There’s a very interesting problem with Microsoft’s DST patch for Windows that you should be aware of, since it can impact date conversion results when mapped date proxies are used.  The patch applies the new rules for whether date and time are daylight savings time without regard to year.  This means that if you ask .NET whether a given DateTime in the past is DST, it will apply the new rules even if the date would have been standard time under the old rules.

Wayne points out that this isn’t really a .NET problem, but an OS issue fixed in Vista.  (and not in XP and presumably Server 2003, and anything before).  

As someone who used to work with lots of timeseries data (and more importantly, conversion in and out of formats that don’t support UTC), I can tell you: properly handling DST can be really hard.  Not rocket science, but hard just the same.

And Microsoft is telling us we can’t trust the tools nor the OS to do this right. 

So you just have to do it yourself — it is easier to fix when Congress enacts some new arbitrary rule.

Tags: DST, Microsoft, UTC, Vista, XP

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Vista / Office Launch

January 30, 2007 at 6:21 pm · Filed under .NET

Some thoughts I had during the keynote at the SF launch today:

Much different than the last big launch event: VS2005/SQL Server/Biz Talk.  No Cheap Trick, but the CEO of Sierra Nevada Brewery spoke.  That was cool: their Pale Ale is a real winner.

Things I like about Vista:

1. User Account Control (UAC).
2. I like the new UI and search capabilities.
3. Microsoft Application Compatibility Manager.
4. Reliability Manager

I am excited about this upgrade, but I’m still waiting for the final VS2005SP1 for Vista patch and the Netgear VPN driver upgrade.

About Office

Office looks cool and certainly offers the enterprise real benefits, but I’m just not personally excited about the upgrade.  The main reason, compatibility: I just don’t want to be bothered with making sure my files are compatible with co-workers, partners, family members, etc.

I left the launch a bit early — too much actual work to do.

Tags: Launch, Microsoft, office, office12, Vista, vs2005

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Q to 700w

January 29, 2007 at 9:12 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

For some time I have wanted a new smart phone, but I have been lazy about it — as a gadget-user I am not easy to please.  Choosing a smart phone is an exercise in compromise.  And the few minutes of time with one in a store isn’t sufficient.  My musts are:

• For me it needs to have a pen (for writing w/Graffiti 2);
• email / calendar sync (push);
• extendable (tweakable);
• and, of course, be a usable phone. 

David Sugarman* of Microsoft gave a Treo 700w to my business partner Nathan — this gave me the chance to take a hard look at a phone.  I’ve played with other phones extensively too (some Blackberry models — they’re all right, but they smack of proprietary platform).

Anyway, the 700w is a solid piece of hardware.  I have really liked the Palm hardware since their Tungsten line.  (I was a user of the Palm OS too, but abandoned that when Palm Source was sold).  I still have a T3 in excellent shape.  I should have sold that the minute I stopped using it, but I have a hard time parting with gadgets (any one want an Apple MessagePad 100?).

Anyway, I didn’t act on my lust for a new gadget.  As much as I wanted one, I have far too often bought something because I thought it would make my life easier only to find that I did not.

Then the hinge broke on my cell phone.  It still worked.  It just had the annoying habit of hanging up on people when I flipped it open. 

So David offered me a Motorola Q.  No pen, but I thought I’d give it a try.  After all, the penless UI (i.e., for WM Smart Phone) has some advantages over the Pocket PC UI. 

I explained the advantages of the penless UI to Nathan — a light bulb went off in his head.  He had thought that WM5 was just a little harder to use than WM-2003 (his old phone), but he realized that he was comparing an older penless model with a new penful (?) model.  It was the pen that was an impediment to his 700w experience; not the version of the OS.  

So . . .

Nathan has the new Q and I have the (pretty new) Treo 700w.  I am pretty happy with it.  It has some shortcomings, but all in all it works great.   The best thing about this phone is the push synchronization of contacts / calendar entries through Exchange.  The thing I would most like to change is that there is no good push e-mail solution outside of Exchange (or across multiple Exchange servers, for that matter). 

Thanks, David! 

*Industry Partner Manager and Mobility Lead, Capital Markets, Financial Services Group.

Tags: 700w, Graffiti, Microsoft, Palm, Q, Treo, WM2003, WM5

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