Some may accuse me of being a Microsoft guy, but using a mac in the past or so, I can’t really say that about me. Nevertheless, I keep an eye on Microsoft Conferences ( and I even got to attend one or two) because really cool stuff come from them. I’m not kidding about this. Let’s see PDC 2008:
Windows 7
I’ve been following Engineering Windows 7 blog, so I was pretty up to date with this stuff, but seeing real screenshots was pretty impressive. I have mixed feelings about the taskbar redesign. While I really liked the old one, I understand that this way it’s more usable in smaller resolutions (say notebooks or even mobile phones, think Shift or Advantage). But in bigger displays, that are cheaper and cheaper each day, the old style was pretty cool.
The vista style of the windows was predictable, but I really hate it. I do! I hope they get a real theming engine, and not make us use some third party software to make them more macish.
One cool surprise was to see that they fixed the horrible wifi icon in the traybar. Linux and Mac did it right years ago, and in Windows up to Vista and even in Windows Mobile it’s a pain to connect to networks.
About the multi-touch? Well, they had it all along with Surface (and Surface SDK), so no big surprise. We’ll see MS release the iTablet before Apple does.
The Cloud Stuff
a.k.a. Windows Azure
Well, startups are going the Cloud way. Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine are just a first step. Microsoft wants Entreprise costumers to join this trend, and be able to have their business in the cloud. I don’t know if this is going to be such as a success and they think. a) real small business don’t want their data on the clould. They want it in their small server in their intranet. b) Large companies that have the need for a cloud server probably can support having their own infrastructure and not relying on Microsoft. Maybe I’m mistaken, but we’ll see.
James Governor has written a really interesting post on this matter and even mentions OpenID in Azure Services.
More Cloud Stuff
a.k.a. Live Mesh
Live Mesh is the Mobile Me for the rest of us. It syncs files P2P or through the cloud and for those, like me, with several computers rocks.
Since the Mac and Windows Mobile clients came out, I guess I’ll have to give it a try some day.
Dale Lane writes about the transition from USB syncing to Cloud syncing. It’s true Google doesn’t provide a offline sync out of the box in the Android, but I like to have the oldschool method available when needed.
Yet More Cloud Stuff
a.k.a. Live Services
Angus got extra points for the shirt and for spreading the social word among the entreprise developers there.
It’s true that Microsoft has a different view form Google and Yahoo that are embracing the OpenID+OAuth way, but this might change in the future. You can already see some little steps being made.
Dynamic Languages
Oddly, the first dynamic language I noticed in PDC was C#. Really! C# is now lightyears away from Java, and is evolving continuously. Version 4 brings a lot of new features and one of them is the ability to integrate dynamic languages directly in C# using the dynamic type. I believe C# is becoming more of a glue language (LINQ, Dynamic Languages, F#) that allows programmers to switch smoothly to other languages.
As usual, I love John Lam’s talk on IronRuby that besides the usual C#, Silverlight and Testing/Mocking stuff, demoed a Visual Studio Plugin in Ruby and Web Services using Sinatra. You should really take a look at it.
Oslo Modeling tools
DSLs are becoming popular in the several business software. and is something Microsoft was looking at a while ago. While I’d say IronRuby was the way to go (see RSpec examples), they took it further and made their own toolkit, Oslo, to develop both visually and textually Models The language they created to achieve that purpose is called M, and right now is supported through the IntelliPad editor.
In fact this editor was what got my interest in this area, since it’s codename was Emacs.NET, and since I’m in the quest for the perfect editor I wanted to take a look. Well, right now it supports the M language, but “you can extend it using IronPython”:hhttp://www.masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/PermaLink,guid,92ec6f1f-45e5-4b7d-b675-548be5131a07.aspx. I’ll wait to see the first plugins to support different languages in the IntelliPad.
In the meanwhile, take a look at the different Oslo sessions at PDC
Mono
Yeah, Mono gets to be one of the main points of this post, as it should also be very important to Microsoft. The work Miguel and the team is doing gives much more value to .NET and Microsoft, than any other technology they presented in my opinion. Since the Mac and Linux worlds are raising their share, it’s important to let developers target those platforms too. And their doing interesting new stuff too, like the C# compiler service, the C# interpreter and even running .NET apps in the iPhone!
So take a look at his talk, one of the best in the whole PDC.
Of course this wasn’t everything PDC was about, but the stuff that I really care about. And I really liked some of this stuff!