Anyway, I’m not there this year.  I think I will go next time, if only because it seems weird *not* to be there.

I would have thought Microsoft learned its lesson here. It has already tried to take the full version of Windows 7 and run it on tablets. These “slates” — as Microsoft calls tablets — have gotten trounced by the iPad. Now, Microsoft has decided to take the full version of Windows and make sweeping UI changes so that it’s much more tablet-friendly and then apply all of those changes to the standard desktop/laptop version of Windows as well. Say what?

My comparison to the old Windows Mobile world, although not technically “One Windows to rule them all”, covers similar ground.

As a developer, I love the idea of write once and run everywhere, but in today’s world that applies to only one technology HTML5 and JavaScript.  It just doesn’t apply to the OS.

The users have already spoken on this.  And they are right on so many levels.

Pure mudslinging about conflicts of interest based on things that don’t seem to be true. I won’t mention the mudslinger, but I can tell you that if I bothered to read that other blog — which I don’t — I would unsubscribe.

Build your brand on merit like InsideHPC did, not on publicity stunts.

Somesegar just announced that Microsoft is letting BizSpark Startups keep their production licenses after they graduate. 

The program is designed to get people hooked on the Microsoft platform.  They just removed a major hurdle for companies who were worried about what happens after they exit the program (not that the licensing issue goes away, mind you).  Anyway, BizSpark was already a great deal for startups with a Microsoft bent and now it is a lot better.

Great move by Microsoft.  The Microsoft developer story is truly a great one, and getting better all the time.

New API surface for simplifying EF:  DbContext, DbSet<T>, more. DbContext gives a vastly simplified view at an EntityContext.

Code first can created a database automatically.

Of course, makes all sorts of assumptions based on conventions.

• Pluralization convention
• Infers references between tables into keys and foreign keys
• EdmMetaData table contains snapshot that is kept to keep code/database in sync.
• Attributes can be used to override conventions (e.g., StringLengthAttribute overrides the default length of 4000 for strings).  In Microsoft.Data.Entity.Ctp System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.
• StoreIgnore
• DatabaseInitializer can force your code to be in sync.  Automatically?  Sounds dangerous, but they give you many options. Pretty cool, really.
• Conventions for inferring many-to-many relationships.

They added an OData service on top.  OData is really cool.  May change my itinerary to go to an OData session.

Other things:

• Enum support!
• Spatial
• Alternate keys
• TVF support!
• Migrations and deployment
• Perf & scalability
• Designer improvements (multiple models!)
• Better SQL generation

Available now in a CTP, 5th CTP out in another month.  2011 Q1 will be the first full release.  Terrific that Microsoft is delivering on their out-of-band enhancements.

Ray Ozzie was sorely missed in the keynote.  I can’t help but wonder if this PDC was put on just to show that Microsoft is still developer focused even with Mr. Ozzie’s departure.  Ballmer did a fine job this morning, but without Bill Gates and now no Ozzie, it doesn’t feel the same.

Anyway, in terms of the announcements (i.e., the “reveals”), not too much and nothing I would say is truly big.

There are lots of announcements though, but mostly they are incremental additions to existing products (e.g., all the new Azure enhancements) or the completion of initiatives that have been in process for years (e.g., Dallas).

All together the announcements show terrific strides for the Azure platform making it all the more compelling.

Windows Mobile 7 is also pretty cool.  I don’t know I’ll every use it, but I can see why a lot of people will.  I think they’ll have a homerun here.

Here is a live view on my PDC10 tweets:

PDC’s are quite valuable to attend (access to Microsoft product teams, exposure to their roadmap, opportunity for light-bulb” moments, etc).  That said, I may decide not to go after the session list is released – a simple balancing of priorities.

Anyway, I’ll likely keep my registration – I would actually love it if Microsoft could change my plans about Azure this October.

Are you going? Or not? If so, please share your reasons.

• The intrepid John Powers dives into it more in his post, Digipede Network 2.4 — Beyond the Press Release.
• Also, Michael Feldman of HPCwire wrote about the release here Digipede Sticks to Its Grid Computing Roots. 
• The press release (this is a link to the PDF).

Those paying close attention might ask "what happened to 2.3?"  The answer is Digipede trivia.

• Part of a failed experimental branch? No. 
• Is 2.4 actually numbered 2.3.1 under the covers? No. (A minor dig at Windows 6 R2).

The actual reason dates back to the days when .NET 2 was released.  Back then, we were ready to release Digipede Network 1.1 with .NET 2 support.  To avoid naming confusion with .NET 1.1, we decided to skip the “.1” and went straight to “.2”.  Was it in fact less confusing?  Probably not materialy.

So, why no 2.3?  It is an ever so slight (and obscure) homage to those early days: for .NET 4 we decided to release something that ends in “.4”. 

Like I said: trivia.

I agree, but it doesn’t work.

At least not with compound words.  If you are authoring a reusable class library, you are bound to have compound words in literal strings.  Do yourself a favor and turn off the warning.

I had to search around to get this acknowledged, and finally found it on Microsoft Connect here. 

http://www.demo.com/fourthcoffee/entities/1

First thought, isn’t the demo.com domain owned by the DEMO conference? 

Uh, yup.

Not a good idea to use a “random” URI for namespaces.

The content for the class looks pretty good, but I’m surprised that neither Ron Jacobs nor Zoiner Tejada caught the problem namespace. 

Certainly contract-first is not the only way to build services, but it is if you are implementing a published standard.  Maybe there is some way to tinker around with the output of the tools sets to make a Workflow Service compatible with some existing WSDL, but would it be worth it?

One answer might be to put a pure WCF facade over the Workflow Services.  Kind of a headache, but maybe workable.

This makes me think that .NET 4 Workflow Services are really targeted to be internal to the enterprise or at least where contract definition is flexible and controlled by one entity.

This follows a standard Microsoft pattern: help the enterprise dev in V1 and then expand from there.  This strategy makes sense, I just want it all in VS 2010, not in V.next.

• 1% battery life.  If Apple is willing to cripple the phone with no background applications to save battery, then I can believe that disallowing Flash supports this same cause.
• 1% of this is that Flash is “lame” or proprietary or any of that nonsense.
• 98% of this about the App store.  Apps delivered through the browser can’t be monetized (and to a lesser extent controlled) through the App store.  If Flash was enabled on the iPhone anybody could write apps for the iPhone without Apple’s permission. 

That’s it.

The iPhone is as open as is useful to Apple.  I’ll bet that if they could get away with shutting off Javascript on the iPhone they would do that too.  Of course, that would also cause an enormous uproar, so they won’t.  Javascript in the browser is the leak in the App store.  Their only defense is to make their browser lame (or be slow to adopt new standards). 

One thing that backs up my point about the App store is that neither the Flash nor Silverlight runtime is actually banned from the iPhone.  You just have to build it into an iPhone application for the App store and you are in business.  Miguel de Icaza and his excellent team proved that last year (with Mono anyway) as has Adobe with Flash.

What do I think about this?  I find it irksome to say the least, but I didn’t buy the iPhone thinking it was anything but a closed platform, controlled by someone who thinks they know best.  I’m OK with that for now – the phone works pretty well.  Eventually something will work just as well without the restrictions. 

And then I’ll jump ship.

• Hosting HTML
• Context menus
• WCF and REST enhancements
• Support for RIA Services
• Drag & Drop
• Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
• Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4

Lot of other things too.  I’m excited to start using this.  Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.

Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.

He did announce they are giving away laptops to all attendees, though, so I suppose it was worth it. 

• Model-first development.
• Lazy loading through relationships (i.e., no longer have to call Load)
• POCO (i.e., define your own data classes against a model).
• POCO only (i.e., define the model fully in code).
• Code Generation options using the new T4 facility of VS 2010.
• Testability improvements through IObjectSet
• Can override SaveChanges
• Better disconnected workflow (both by writing a little code and a no-code option that uses a different code generator).
• Much better SQL (more compact, more efficient)
• Execute arbitrary SQL
• Easier Stored Procedures
• Functions (a little strange how this was implemented, but now they are available).
• Foreign Keys in the entities (no more manual interpretation of the Reference!)
• Better Binding for forms apps and WPF

Pandelis, what do you think?

It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner. 

This last point is an important one.  Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud.  While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit. 

The offering was rich then, but since then Microsoft has continued to push these offerings forward dramatically. 

At the time, my biggest concerns were the one-size-fits-all approach to their provisioning model and their lack of full trust (two things that could make it harder to deploy the Digipede Network onto Azure).  Today those issues have been taken off the table and help support many more use cases, opening up Azure even more to non-Microsoft technologies and fortifying the extremely important IT bridge.

So what are the improvements in openness?

Allowing full trust opens up the door to, well anything.  Unmanaged code,  PHP, MySQL, Java, TomCat, etc. can all run on Azure.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic demonstrated a WordPress instance running that way.  Kind of anti-climactic, because it would have been a big deal if wordpress.com was moving to Azure.  Simply running a WordPress instance isn’t really that interesting.

Custom VM images are also coming to Azure which will make it much easier to put whatever you want on a VM and deploy it efficiently.

For IT?

Too many items here to enumerate.  SQL Azure integrating into SSMS; Azure integrating into MOM; SQL synchronizing with cloud instances; (this list really does go on and on . . .).

Another important part of this IT bridge?  Not Microsoft’s new App Server, AppFabric.  Though I am excited about this – it is something that has been missing from the Microsoft stack – the key point here is that it runs on premises and in Azure.

Conclusion?

These new features in Azure push Microsoft out even further than the other cloud vendors.  No one else has the depth and breadth in tool support and service offerings.  No one else is innovating so quickly on so many parallel fronts. 

Will Amazon and Google cede the space?  Of course not, but I think they’ll need  to reposition their cloud brands.

I’m going to PDC 2009 November 17th – 19th. 

Aside from releasing Azure, I expect it will be mostly about VS 2010.  I’m sure there will be a “reveal” or two to get excited about too.  At least I hope so.

The best part of conferences is meeting new people and catching up with friends and colleagues.

If you are going too and want to meet up, let me know. 

email me: robert at rwandering dot net.

That is as much of a pre-announcement as I can make . . . vague and conditional as it is.

I like those guys.  They are smart and do excellent work.

Anyway, they released the sample earlier today.  From their site:

As of version 1.5 (which is currently in beta), the world’s coolest spreadsheet can use Digipede Network grid computing to distribute and execute workbooks in parallel. The example on the Exchange is based on the excellent IronPython sample created by Robert W. Anderson of Digipede. The Digipede Network is a brilliant way to get distributed, parallel computation on Windows. It only took a few minor changes to convert Resolver One to run on the Digipede Network and to get the IronPython sample to execute Resolver One workbooks.

Giles gives some more background to the path that got us here on his recent post, Resolver One and Digipede.

The combination of our two products offers a pretty elegant solution.  Like I said before,

Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .

. . . like Excel and Windows HPC Server.  No, don’t. Trust me.  It is really hard, complex, and brittle.

They used my IronPython Worker sample and customized the front-end Python code, leaving the C# adapter as-is.  With very little coding they had an elegant grid-enabled spreadsheet.  Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .

Giles said they will have support for this in Resolver One 1.5, coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Very cool. 

I’ve just installed Resolver One to take a closer look.  Already I’m impressed, but I’ll leave that for a future post.

Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.

This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon.  In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7.  The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.

That is the wrong approach.

The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit.  The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows. 

Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case.  The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.

BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.

I have been playing with IronPython a little.  With the release of Digipede Network 2.2, I am now able to post the sample I wrote.  It shows how to distribute IronPython objects on the Digipede Network.  You can find it on the Digipede community site.  See the posting there for details and download instructions.

The sample uses IronPython 2.0.1 and the included version of the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).  While I focused on IronPython in this sample, it would be pretty easy to expand it to support other DLR-based languages.

Comments welcome.  I am specifically interested in feedback on DLR integration and initializing ScriptScope objects for each worker thread.  It seems that I should be able to do some of this only once at global scope.

By the way, one thing I like about this sample is that it shows how to keep user code completely de-coupled from the Digipede Network while still taking advantage of our deployment and payload distribution model.  This has always been supported by the Digipede Network, and this makes a good example.

I was familiar with SSDS before I knew anything about Red Dog Storage Azure Storage.  When I found out about the latter, my initial concern was that Microsoft would confuse developers by offering two overlapping services. Such overlap isn’t too surprising considering that these two projects came out of competing parts of Microsoft.  At the time, there was a pretty consistent message that SDS would someday support relational operations, but to me that meant they should  hold off on SDS until that day came.

Microsoft often offers multiple technologies to solve specific problems — often this is a result of legacy technologies — in this case it seemed a shame to start off with such overlap.

Because of all this, I am very happy to see this clear differentiation between the Azure and SDS services.  This is a good decision for Microsoft, Microsoft developers, and given the roadmap for SDS, an excellent decision for Microsoft’s enterprise customers.

If you aren’t familiar with it, NDepend is a static analysis tool that allows you to dive deeply into your code base.   Its feature list is truly truly impressive. Here are a few things that stand out for me:

• The Code Query Language (CQL) allowing SQL-like queries of your code base, with a set of pre-canned queries targeting code quality, design, naming conventions, and much more.
• A visual tool with dependency graphs and matrices and more
• Ability to compare between different runs of the same project – at an incredible level.
• Of course, A command-line tool for incorporation into your build process.

I loaded up the Digipede Agent assemblies and – kind of like a kid in a candy store – I found myself heading off in 10 different directions at once.  My thought process went kind of like this:

• Wow, look at these matrices and graphs, and all these CQL queries. 
• This is really cool to have this level of information available with build integration!
• Wow, there sure are a lot of warnings here. 
• Let’s fix them!  Wait, let’s prioritize them and customize them and, etc.

(The experience reminds me of when I started using FxCop.)

I highly recommend this software . . .

1. To help you make informed refactoring decisions; and
2. to add design and code-quality criteria (and enforcement) into your build process.

So, why do I say this is a “must-have” tool?  Because code quality is not a nice-to-have.  Quality reduces maintenance and support costs and allows you to spend your time and money on more profitable endeavors.

Go buy it.

BTW: I would like to post some of the results I’ve gotten with the Digipede Agent, but I’m not ready to share that yet.