Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

Thursday was kicked off with a general session by Bob Muglia the Senior VP for the server division. He showed off some of the new stuff coming in Longhorn Server, and talked about a new prodcut released for Windows Server 2003 called High Performance Clusters, which enables you to create farms of computing nodes, to which you can delegate work. It’ll be integrated with Office 12, so that heavy duty calculations can be off-loaded to the HPC farm. An example of this could be an Excel spreadsheet doing all sorts of calculations.
During the keynote Bob Muglia also announced that the missing DVD for The Goods™ could be picked up at the Material Distribution Center. I picked this up later, and it contained a new build of Windows Server Longhorn, and the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2005.

Next up was Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects and Future Directions in Modelling Tools. This talk was about the work that Microsoft has done with its DSL Tools, an add-in to Visual Studio taht allows you to create DSL’s with a designer and everything right in VS. By doing so you can create DSL for the domain you’re working in with full designer support.
Although the product is a beta (a new one was released at the PDC) it looks very promising! The presenter showed off a demo and the only basic thing missing was designer support to create the designer for the DSL. At this moment you have to do this work by hand in an XML file.
He also said that the product will be a free download which can be used on top of VS Professional. Very cool indeed!

Next was the second part of the session on Atlas. This session drilled down into the details and created a full blown AJAX’ified photo album slideshow. After the session I felt llike I did in my last post on Atlas:

However, the fact that it’s work in progress and just a CTP shows. You still have to write a lot of plumbing script, and some black magic to get it to work

After lunch I attended Windows Vista: Building RSS Enabled Applications which was presented by the Group Program Manager. Here I also found Erik Dibbern Röser (a former Developer Evangelist from MS DK, who now works at Microsoft Business Solutions). The session was okay, although Amar Gandhi (I believe is his name) talked very, very fast (MIT like) and said “you know” a thousand times. He presented the Common Feed List (a built-in feature in Windows Vista), which contains a list of feeds sorted in folders which a user has subscribed to. The different RSS readers can then sync against this store. It also includes an API, which can be used to program against it. And here comes the spooky part: this API is built on COM in C++, not .NET!! However, the API is designed with the .NET Framework Design Guidelines in mind, which means that when genereating a Type Library, it doesn’t create those whacky types, as is normally genereated when creating type libraries from native COM objects. The rationale for this seemed to be that they were very wary of requiring that the different teams who wanted to use the Common Feed List had to lad the CLR (examples of this were IE and WMP). I understand the argument but think it’s a bit lame. I mean everything else is primarily ,NET: Avalon, Indigo, Windows Workflow Foundation, you name it, so why does the new RSS platform have to be built on old technology? The least they could do was offer a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA), such as those created for Office XP/2003. Maybe that’ll come before the release.
Anothter weird thing with the API was the way it dealt with enclosures in RSS feeds. To download these they use Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), which is cool. But when a API user has to find out if a specific enclosure has been downloaded, they have to ask for the local filename and check if that file name exists on the local file system yet. If it doesn’t the enclosure isn’t downloaded, otherwise it is. How about a property guys? IsDownloaded on the Enclosure class would be a good candidate.

Next session was Workflow + Messaging + Services: Developing Distributed Applications with Workflows presented by Don Box and Dharma Shukla.
Warning: goofy stuff coming up
Before the session I went to the toilet, and realised that the dude standing next to me in the booth was Don Box. So I took a leak with Don B

Well outside the restrooms I told Don Box that I had seen him at Developer Days in Copenhagen a long time ago, and that he was the reason I started looking at .NET. I don’t think that the way I said it, aligned with how I meant it to be said, but I guess he got the meaning.
End Warning: goofy stuff coming up

The session was good, showed off the new Workflow engine and how you can compose activities. A really cool feature is that you can modify running workflows, which was demonstrated in the session. Dharma started a workflow, that sent a message and slept for some minutes after which it would resume and just exit. During the delay he logged on to the workflow editing tool (an ASP.NET page), and added an activity “Post to blog”. Which meant that when the workflow later resumed it would pick up this new activity and post a message to his blog. Pretty cool stuff!!!

Next up was Windows Communications Foundation (“Indigo”): Web Services for XML Programmers with Doug Purdy. Man is he energetic, he is like a Ballmer on steroids! Reallly cool demo with a really cool guy. There are some videos with him on MSDN TV, and I think Channel9.

In the evening there was Ask the Experts with dinner in one of the main dining halls. Mostly every team at Microsoft had a table, and you could pick up your dinner and go sit down with whatever team you wanted and start talking about what they did. We didn’t stay for long, because I had some erands to run (big ass shoes for my brother), and I was exhausted off the day.
I met one of the other Danes on Friday and he told me that when Anders Hejlsberg came he was surrounded by swarms of geeks wanting to ask questions and talk to the guru. Whenever Hejlsberg moved the hord around him moved aswell. That must be the closest you get to rock and movie stars in the geek world (at least the Microsoft part of it).
Later in the evening there was Show Off!, but I didn’t attend it so I don’t know how it went. The videos herefrom should be up on Channel9 in the coming week.

After returning to curb side at the hotel, I went down to the Show Warehouse and bough the shoes for my brother. Returned to the hotel, and started packing up all of my stuff. That was a lot of work! I thought that I had brought a large enough suitcase with me, but I could have used a larger one! I had to fill my PDC bag with stuff and carry that with me aswell as my regular back pack. That’s a lot of swag guys! There’ll be a swag report when I get an overview…

Written at 20.15 Danish local time.

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