Rutger de Vries, nothing much exciting

PDC – fourth day: An introduction of Microsoft F#

Rutger de Vries — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:12:31 GMT

Luca Bolognese started his talk with the statement that writing code is fun. The crowd responded with a loud cheer :-)

Most of the time programming is like:
we tell the machine how things must be done instead of what must be done.
Luca made an analogy with when we want a cappuccino and tell the waiter that he has to grind the coffee beans, put them in a filter, in the same time heat milk, etc…

When we as developers write x = x + 1 it makes perfect sense; we increment x by one.
A mathematician can’t do anything with it; he finds it a very weird function.
It is all in the eye of the beholder.

Luca continues with his talk with one big demo where he explains various parts of the language.
Very entertaining and funny, especially his accent :-)

If the are three things to remember it must be the following:

let : bind a value o a symbol. An extention to that is let mutable which binds a value to a variable
|> : pipeline operator, concatenate code pieces
fun : define a function on the spot

At the end he showed a roadmap of when to expect what.

PDC – fourth day: Live Services: Notifications and Communications

Rutger de Vries — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:40:54 GMT

John Mcintyre started by showing a picture of the Live Framework and the part of it where his talk is about.

The connected experience is about user expectations of integrated experiences that span devices, applications and browser-rich clients.
It also has to face the enginering reality of that even simple scenarios are difficult to implement, lots of infrastructure is required to get it of the ground.
The result for the user is that devices, applications and services create islands on which the user must survive.

How does the user get off that island? Services and devices must be working together to deliver connected experiences by unlocking data for anywhere access, by lighting up devices with consistent capabilities and connect data and devices through services.
So connectivity and communcation is the key by closing the gaps between data and devices and by delivering relevant information to enliven experiences.
Communication Services is able to connect devices, data and users through a consistent, approachable framework.

Communication Services powers connected experiences.
It enables connected data by using subscription and change notification services.
It enables connected devices by using an overlay of communication network and peer-to-peer.
It enables connected users by using awareness and activity services

Subscriptions and Notifications should be simple, scalable and resilient.

In order to get connected data a user must subscribe to a resource for a particular device. LiveFX supplies methods for that which get passed through to a Resource Manager. The Resource Manager subscribes to a Subscribtion Service. These services fanout to the Queue Services. When a resource is queued that has a subscription it gets transported to LiveFX which delivers it to the device associated with the subscription.

Notification scale is achieved by horizontal scaling through partinioning and instance management, consistent hashing for resource addressing and all is stored as in-memory tables, TTLs enforced
There are two failure modes: state loss when subscription instances go down and queue loss when queue service instances go down. In both cases the notification service will alert and recover.

Connected devices use peer-to-peer communications which should be seamless, secure and reliable.

Activity and News services are used to get users connected.
Ativities are used to supply a high performance for transient state consisting of presence information. Publishers should also subcribe too which implies possible state loss.
News services are used to supply durable “news worthy” state or state change.

One final slide to wrap it all up.

PDC – fourth day: Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:59:08 GMT

Joshua Goodman split this session up in three parts:

1. Working better together
2. Faster
3. Fewer bugs

Working Better Together

He began with a little history first.

.NET 1.0 was first released in 2002.
.NET 1.1 worked side by side with .NET 1.0.
.NET 2.0 also works side by side with .NET 1.0 and 1.1.
.NET 3.0 and 3.5 only work with .NET 2.0.
.NET 4.0 again works side by side with all previous versions.

Version 2.0 and 4.0 should be able to run in de same process.

Because sometimes a picture can say more than a thousand words here a picture of what the CLR is.
It is the blue box at the bottom ;-)

I didn’t know about this but the work to get a native app exposed to managed code was rather cumbersome. In .NET 4.0 there is a wrapper tool that does all the hard work for you.

Since the launch there are 16 languages available for the .NET platform. For new languages like IronPython, IronRuby and F# new features become available like Tuples, BigInteger and Tail Recursion. All other languages benefit from this too.

Faster

.NET 3.5 SP1 is faster to install and has a faster startup.
New features to make it easier to write parallel/multi-threaded applications Parallel.For , Parallel.ForEach, AsParallel() in LINQ
Garbage collection enhancements: for Server side with notification when Gen2 collection, for workstation with background collection
Profiling improvements: ability to attach and detach performance and memory profilers

Fewer bugs

Corrupting state exceptions: cannot be caught by normal catch statements
Support for dump debugging
Code Contracts: goes further where Asserts stop

PDC – fourth day: Live Services: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:08:07 GMT

Steven Lees started his talk with taking a picture with his mobile phone of the attendees of his session and let it be synchronised to his laptop on stage and the live desktop.

FeedSync should be comprehensive, simple and open.
It comes down to you want Access Anywhere and Share Anything.

The role of synchronisation:
- there are lots of ways to move data
- so why Sync, why FeedSync

What are the requirements of Anywhere Access:

Create new items anywhere
Universal ID
Efficient notifications of deletions
Handle concurrent edits

They solved this by adding a sx:sync element to the feed message. It contains basicly version information regarding the message. Extra attributes handle things like deletion and concurrent edits.

Data from a phone gets synced with Live Mesh through FeedSync. From there the date can synced with a website or desktop computer also using FeedSync.

There are various choices for API use:
- HTTP
- FeedSyncClient / Syndication ….
- Live Framework
-

He ended with a few teasers you’ll want to know about …
- delegated authentication
- common data formats
- efficiency (incremental feeds)
- enclosures (file attachments)
- conflict reesolution

PDC – third day: The Future of C#

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:21:00 GMT

I’ll refer to Robert-Jan van Holland his post about this.

PDC – third day: Improving .NET Scalability and Performance with Visual Studio

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:17:50 GMT

Ed Glas and Steve Carroll showed us the performance lifecycle and it looked a lot like the development lifecycle. They wanted to emphasize that in every step of the development cycle performance is a to be taken into account.

During a short demo with a One Last WalkThrough Before Launch Test scenario they showed the new diagnostics and profiling capabilities of VS10. Some of it was alreade shown by Cameron Skinner (see this post).

When gathering requirements for your application also gather requirements for performance.

In the design phase a prototype can help verifying that the performance specifications are met.

It helps to focus on key scenarios to make those perform best.
Run tests eagerly and measure the results against the requirements.
Isolate components (and save testresults as proof) so that individual components can be blamed or not.
Pre-production testing is very usefull. A development environment always perform because of the limited size.

VS10 has JavaScript Testing and Profiling now!
Reports can be generated in Excel with graphics support.
A comparison tool is made to compare a baseline performance profile with a regression performance profile. Very powerfull!

Avoid reflection. Reflection is powerfull but slow.
Garbage Collection is a source of performance problems. Bad Allocation Paterns are Midlfe crises, managed leaks and large object heap. Large object heap is mostly used in corporation with the use of ViewState.
New problems are .NET locking problems caused by multi processor machines and multi-core processors.

PDC – third day: SQL Server Futures

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:50:48 GMT

Patric McElroy started his presentation with summing up some Services challenges:

Trust
Reach
Interaction (internet, latency, connections)
Administration
Resource governance (bad queries)

The focus will be on Data Model, Occasional connected and Business Intelligence.

Data will be stored using Windows Azure storage which is storage in the cloud.
SQL Data Services is the database in the cloud and extends the rich capabilities of SQL Server to the cloud.

It is the Data Services tier and is built on the SQL Server foundation.
Broad data platform capabilities as a service.

This picture wraps it up all nicely on what we have today and will get in the future on both the Data Model and the Operational Model.

On the client side there is ADO.Net Data Services (Astoria) which evols towards Flex Entities and on the Data Services side there is SQL Data Services which involves towards Schematized data.

There are three ways to share data: sharing via the Internet across devices and enterprises, sharing with offline capabilities and sharing through a sync service.

Business Intelligence is all about data mining and reporting.
For data mining SQL Server Analysis Services is put up in the cloud.
Reporting Services is also available through the cloud and everything adds up to
BI-as-a-Service (BIaaS)

PDC – third day: keynote

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:08:00 GMT

Just before we went to the Los Angeles Convention Center I had some time to enjoy some coffee at the hotel lobby. I heard a loud dripping sound and soon it was clear. The roof was soacking wet. Maybe this was also the cause of that the internet didn’t function this morning also? Naaahhh, don’t think so.

This day it was somewhat less crowded at the breakfast so we were welcomed by a whole parade of waiters. Thanks guys.

Because it was so quiet we were finished early and went to the keynote hall on the other end of the Convention Center. There we had some time to post a prepared blog e.g. Things look like this then:

Here some photos to give a slight impression about the size of the hall.

Today’s keynote was entirely about Microsoft Research.

Rick Rashid started his presentation with a short look in history. His group started in 1991 when Microsoft was rather small and not the kind of company to has a research department.
Their statement was and is still today:

Expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we do research
Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
Ensure that Microsofts product have a future

Rick talked about the organisational model (like a university), how fast is has grown to over 850 people in 6 locations, how bright all those people are with lots diploma’s, recognitions and publications.
A lot of products of Microsoft have their cradle in Microsoft Research like ClearType, Datamining (SQL 2000) and TabletPC.
The value of research to Microsoft is that they are the source of new product technologies, a problem solving force task for hard problems and an early warning system on new technologies. They let Microsoft respond more quickly to changes; they are smart guys, let them thonk of a solution.

Looking forward to 2020 Microsoft Research is busy with provable systems using the SLAM process.
Energy efficiency is becoming more and more of an issue. Research made a small sensor they are using all over the world.
Microsoft research is working with people in the healthcare field helping sciencetist with solving problems using algorithmes used to detect spam e.g.
Education is also a field Research is investing in. They developed a programming language for kids using the XBox.

At the end of the keynote they demonstrated a new way to display things using a technology called SecondLight.

PDC – second day: Live Services: Building Applications With The Live Framework

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:34:16 GMT

Raymond Endres began his presentation with the remark that we as developers would like to share data and applications.

You can devide applications in two groups: Reach applications (through the web) and Rich Applications. In the middle there are hybrid applications called Mesh Enabled application.

To make your application Mesh enabled integate Live Services into your application, use as much of the Live Framework as you like.

Raymond gave the first meaningfull demonstration of an application using Live Framework: MeshBoard; a sort of messageboard application.

Various API’s are available: .NET, Silverlight and JavaScript.

Main entry point for accessing Live Data is LiveOperatoinEnvironment class. After connecting to that all available resources can be used.

Live Services: users control their own data.

Mesh object is the container of all application data. It contains Datafeeds, Members, Mappings, News, Activities.
Datafeed stores application data as metadata or blobs, has replication and sync capabilities
Members represent LiveID’s, have to be invited to be part of a resource

FeedSync handles the synchronisation between members.

LiveFX is the uniform way to program Live Services.

PDC - second day: Microsoft Visual Studio 10: Easing ASP.NET Web Deployment

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:50:36 GMT

Deployment is difficult today. It is easy to forget something to get deployed.

Here comes VS10 at the rescue!

The base of everything is the WebPackage which is basically a zip file with what your website needs.

A new thing are profiles for deployment. You can have different deployments for development, test and production. Most commenly is the difference between debug and non-debug version of the binaries. Or a different web.config file for each environment. Profiles let you handle that.

1 Click deployment is possible now!

How does it work?
In VS10 you can create a WebPackage and copy that to a local machine. Together with an also created command-file you can deploy the web-site to the local machine. In a similar way you can copy the WebPackage to the webserver and let a administrator deploy the WebPackage. At every stage the new tool MSDEPLOY plays an leading role.

The Web Publishing Pipeline is for better understanding the process. The whole process can be invoked by MSBUILD so automatic deployment after a nightly build is possible.

PDC – second day: Live Services: A lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:22:45 GMT

After lunch when we were walking to our next sessions we stumbled upon Don Box and Chris Andersen. Yiiihaaa! Celebrity spotted!

Who’s that guy on the left?

Back to reality.

Ori began his presentation with the Zen of Mesh:

Data (lots of data)
Devices (lots of devices)
Applications (even more applications)
People (stop counting)

After that he continued with the hard problems of Live services:

You need a foundation and the cloud is the core
Identity: not only people but also devices and applications
Data: we need a universel representation
Devices: topology and management
Sync: bring data closer to usders and apps (really hard to do it well)
Sharing: distribute data among users
State: complete awareness (at control of things all the time)
Comms: seamless connections

Definition of Live Services: –> (see photo)

One demo with code says more then a thousand pictures and that’s why he continued with a lengthy demo. The application he build was more a kind of test app I would write for testing a library. So very straight forward with lots of listboxes because with Mesh everything is a list of something. The listboxes will be filled with entities of collections of the Live Framework (see photo of the Live Framework Resource Model).

PDC – second day: key note

Rutger de Vries — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:13:06 GMT

Americans are such helpfull people. Everywhere you look there are nice young people pointing you in the right direction. When you are waiting in line to get your breakfast and you finally got it, they show you where there is available seating. And they are very happy about it too. Love them!!

On our way after breakfast to the key note session, we sumbled upon the channel 9 guy and I had to take a picture of him. Who’s that guy next to him? He seems to pop up every now and then in my pictures.

Key note session

This was the session Microsoft announced Windows 7. Ozzie and friends were elaborating about all kinds of features. Some where small, some where big. To name a few:

full and high performance access to display and peripherals
natural UI and common controls for voice/audio, camera, touch, …
local data privacy, portability, reliable/fast/full acces
Use & recombine applications, data, documents, media as needed
A ‘personal’ environment, trusted & assumed to be under your control

All the time they were talking about the PC, web and phone. At almost every highlight they named those three things.

Here are some pictures

Ray is stereo	Little popups at the taskbar
New mobile-device app	Gadgets are freed from the sidebar

For the developer there are some new things to work with:

Ribbon User Interface
Jump Lists
Libraries
Multi Touch, Ink, Speech
Direct family

Microsoft says they changed some fundamentals regarding

Decrease of

Memory use
Disk IO
Power

Increase of

Speed
Responsiveness
Scale

You can also hook up a Virtual PC image as a startup drive. This is what I call a big feature.
Also the handling of monitors and dual monitors is enhanced. And when your computer uses dual monitors and you have a remote connection to a server, that server is also using the dual monitors.

First dual monitor at a conference

Also for remote connection

Scott Guthrie(?) talked about the new Visual Studio 2010 and related things. Most of it I heard about it in break-out sessions yesterday. What I didn’t know was a really cool feature regarding the comment block above methods, classes etc. They removed the boring three slashes in from of the comment lines and replaced it with a fancy box with a nice layout. If you have a hyperlink to bugs it shows a popup with the comments regarding the bug. Nice!

Web deployment is made easier and the handling of the web.config file is enhanced. You can have different web.config’s for each environment you have: development, testing and production. More on that later.

At the end there were some announcements made regarding Live Services and Office applications using Live Services.

After a short break Don Box and Chris Andersen did a no slide deck presentation about the capabilities of Windows Azure using Live Mesh. Very entertaining.

PDC – first day

Rutger de Vries — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:03:00 GMT

Key Note session

I don’t know what it is with Americans. At some point they are very independant but on another side not.

When we arrived at the KeyNote hall, thanks to the helpfull personel, we were confronted with enormous screens.
Two screens left and right of the center stage which also has a screen at the background. Hugh.

To give you an impression of the scale I took a picture of Ray Ozzie performing on the center stage.
Right after Ray announced Windows Azure some Indian took over (edited: his name is Amitabh Srivastava) and he had the strangest combination of suit and (red) shoes.

After that some other people joined one after another to elaborate about various parts of Windows Azure in their own field of speciallity.

VSTS: A lap around VSTS 2010 by Cameron Skinner

Cameron started with the question: “OK, Windows + Services == Windows Azure but what’s in it for me as a developer?”
He made an analogy with the release of the .NET framework in 2001 and how it changed his world then.

For then and now, a development environment is needed and Visual Studio Team System is that tool.
The new 2010 version is a BIG release stuffed with implemented suggestions given as feedback by us the developers.
There are more testing and architecture related features incorperated into this release.

So why 2010? Because it all about hapiness

What was hard is now easy
You are more productive
Code is more maintainable
Your team is more effective every day

He then explains a lot of the new feature during a demo where tries to reproduce and solve a reported bug.
He starts of with the RichEdit capabilities of the comments field on the details tab of a workitem.
After that he continues with that developers have trouble with reproducing bugs. I can’t solve it because I can’t reproduce it.
VTST has a new feature called TestRunner. A tester can attach a movie where he reproduces the bug with pointers from the TestSteps into the movie. It’s getting better: they stored the state of the application so that you can ‘debug’ the application by drilling down the call stack!! So, for the developer no repro is not an excuse anymore.

He continues with things like Gated Check-Ins so in theory there are no more broken builds.
After a fix is solved an architect can perform the new Architect Validation and inspect if classes are still in the appropriate layers. The architect can inspect that with the new Layer Diagram using the new Architect Explorer. Another feedback issue mentioned by developer is the butterfly effect: when you make (small) change in the code, somewhere else in the project some code seems to break and causes all kinds of nasty problems. A way to tackle this is to make sequence diagrams which can be generated from the existing code.

He finishes with a new feature called UI validation using the UI recorder. It records the clicks you made and things typed in. After that you can specify a part of the screen to be validated using value properties of controls in the selected part. Very cool!

Microsoft Visual C#: Tips and Tricks

In this (short) lunch session Dustin Campell (a VB man ?!?) showed us some (mostly) keyboard shortcuts for Visual C#. CodeRush Xpress of DevExpress seems to be the tool to use. I didn’t find this session to be very inspiring but I must say that I have to give him credits that he can talk about keyboard shortcuts for an hour (inclusing mini demos).

ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap by Scott Hunter

This session started with a historic overview of previous releases of ASP.NET.
It seems that CodePlex is a new way for Microsoft to distribute the latest bit of products.
Scott stated that CodePlex contains the cutting edge of ASP.NET 4.0 including sources (of what?)
Feedback can be given through CodePlex and will be taken into account.

He referred to ASP.NET 4.0 also as Visual Studio 10. VS10 is multi-target: FX4.0, FX3.5, ….

Scott uses themes and they are:

Better standards support (HTML, XML, you name it)
Pattern based development
WebForm support
Core and Infrastructure
MVC
Ajax
Dynamic Data

For all of the themes he showed some (short) demos to support that ASP.NET 4.0 will be an exellent development framework.
The Ajax Toolkit will be part of ASP.NET 4.0

ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications by Phil Haack

ASP.NET MVC puts you in full control.
He asked the question why Web 2.0 apps are not build in ASP.NET. ASP.NET MVC should make that easier.

All releases are placed on CodePlex for transparency and user-feedback so the product could benefit from that.

Goals of ASP.NET MVC are:

frictionless testability
tight control over markup
user friendly URLs
leverage the benefits of ASP.NET

Seperation of concerns is main reason behind MVC

each component has one responsibility
more easily tastable

After this he starts a long demo with the making of a small MVC app and uses StackOverflow.com as an example (which is buld using ASP.NET MVC).

Microsoft .NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies by Scott Hanselman

Scott gives an overview of the .NET 3.5 and 4.0 framework by using a privately developed application called BabyMash and deviding the framework into 5 large groups: WPF, Core, Data, Communications and Workflow and Web.

He stated that WPF is about that the developer isn’t a designer.

With the Core part he touches things like the Microsoft Entity Framework and Parallel programming capabilities.

Data is where he discusses LINQ and ADO.NET Data Services.

WCF is used when it comes to communcations and appearently his toy project doesn’t use any workflow.

At last he uses ASP.NET MVC , Dynamic Data and Ajax to show that you don’t have to be a rocket siencetist to use it all.

In the end he showed a slide of what, when and where regarding the framework.

So, all in all a very intens day of information gathering.
Lets see what tomorrow brings.

Can't wait ...

Rutger de Vries — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:40:00 GMT

With this kind of weather

I can't hardly wait untill my plane leaves ...

Sessions

Rutger de Vries — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:39:00 GMT

So exactly as I expected, I overbooked myself with sessions.
If I could split myself up in three persons and I'ld still not be able to attend all sessions I find interresting.
So. choices must be made, very hard. But here is the list:

Monday 11:00 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010
Monday 12:45 Microsodt Visual C#: Tips and Tricks
Monday 13:45 ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap or
The Future of C#
Monday 15:30 ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications or
Microsoft Silverlight, WPF and the Microsoft .NET Framework: Sharing Skills and Code
Monday 17:15 Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service

Tuesday 12:45 FAST: Building Search-Driven Portals with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Silverlight or
                      Live Services: What I Learned Building My First Mesh Application
Tuesday 13:45 Developing Applications Using Data Services or
                      Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
Tuesday 15:30 "Oslo": The Language or
                      Microsoft Visual Studio: Easing ASP.NET Web Deployment
Tuesday 17:15 ASP.NET and JQuery or
                      Live Services: Building Applications with the Live Framework

Wednesday 10:30 SQL Server Data Services: Futures
Wednesday 12:00 Improving Code Quality with Code Analysis
Wednesday 13:15 Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
Wednesday 15:00 The Future of C# [REPEAT]
Wednesday 16:45 Live Services: Building Mesh-Enabled Web Applications Using the Live Framework

Thursday 08:30 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft
Thursday 10:15 Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures
Thursday 12:00 "Oslo": Building Textual DSLs
Thursday 13:45 An Introduction to Microsoft F#

Isn't that an action packed program or what?
Suggestions are more than welcome if I should attend another session.
I try to go to the sessions that developer kind of edge to it.

As we say in dutch: "nog twee nachtjes slapen en dan ..."