I am currently attending the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles to scout out some of trends in tomorrow’s tech and software. Here is some thoughts to be updated during brakes and at the hotel, so plaese forgive any misspelling or inconsistencies but be welcome to comment, criticize and correct.
Thursday October 30: Silverlight and VirtualEarth
Peter flew home yesterday, so I’m on my own today. I have made a habit of attending a morning Silverlight session, and today was about the roadmap for integrating more controls. Soon, web apps will be fully featured apps. Exiting times.Then I went to hear more about integration of Virtual Earth because I thought it would make a really cool view for our global information infrastructure. The conclusion isthat it would, but it’s dificoul, so I guess it’s a bit further down the road for us.
I also started mocking up a prototype of our backend in Silverlight with a few of the tips and tricks from sessions. It is giong to be really cool, I think. Now including user friendliness.
Wednesday October 29: Touch
Today we were introduced to some of the key features of the coming Windows 7 OS. Apart from fixing the obvious travesties of Vista such as gadgets being confined to the sidebar, accelerated search and better window preview. All good. But the real fun lies in Windows 7’s support for touch and multi-touch. Touch will also be supported by Silverlight, so the bank willing I’ll slap some win7 on a touch screen in no time. One could go with Microsoft’s Surface that looks much like a touch enabled coffee table, but at $15.000 I think that I - like today’s session speaker - will go for the more affordable (about $2.000) HP TouchSmart.
Tuesday October 28: Live Mesh
Today I’m paying more attention to fiddling with Silverlight than to the release keynote on Windows 7 which is basically a fix of the most critical bugs in Vista plus a few convenient additions and UX reworks. I am told they want to connect the PC, web and phone which is hardly a controversial strategy.
What is really cool is that the Live Team has released a new service called Mesh. Mesh basically allows you to integrate live services such as Live ID and Messenger into rich web apps. We have seen some relly cool demos of a Tesco grocery shopping Silverlight app running outside the browser and the iPlayer at BBC. But unfortunately none of them are online yet.
Other than that I’m just looking forward to the party at Universal studios tonight.
Monday October 27: Releasing the cloud
Today Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie launched the Windows Azure clouded ‘operating system’ for rich web applications. Azure is the big thing here so I’m really paying attention to figure out what all the fuzz is about. What Azure does is basically taking over all the tedious tasks of setting up the servers and communication and all that stuff that usually happens in a server farm deep underground. What Microsoft has done with Azure is basically to build huge data centers with som really big servers all over the globe and made them available through a service management interface.
See what Azure can do by downloading the Beta version of BLueHoo (Its just like Imity in the old days only cooler) to your mobile here.
As far as i can compile at present what Azure is giong to mean to the Internet is something like this:
- Service management: No more need to worry about managing apps, allocating server resources and managing files when developing web apps. Your software conglomerate can start in the garage.
- Infinite scalability: 5 to 5 billion users instantly. Everybody is going to be able to deploy and scale web apps as needed. You do not need to actually own a server or bother with upgrading capacity as you speed to fame.
- Deployment of web apps is made easier as the Azure datacenters will act just like an operating system on a desktop computer. This means that it’s easier to develop, deploy and MANAGE web apps. So you won’t have to spend your time allocating database resources and all that boring stuff.
BUT: It’s a professional service provided by Microsoft and they will not tell us what its going to cost until sometime next year, so don’t leave your host just yet. In fact, I think that for non-rich web apps such as this blog a traditional host will probably work just fine, so I’m not leaving media temple for a while. But for RIA’s, Azure will be a gamechanger for sure!
Sunday October 26: Silverlight
Today I attended a pre-conference session on Rich Internet Applications (RIA for those of you who can actually keep up with the acronums) in Silverlight - Microsofts enhanced visual User Interface platform. Its like flash only with the power of real apps in C#. Its the way of the future. Rumour has it that Adobe has developed something similar but noone dares speak the name so I’m not sure what it’s called..
Saturday October 25: Jet lag
I think its 9 PM.I just arrived at the millennium Biltmore Hotel at 506 South Grand Avenue in downtowl LA after 26 hours of travelling from Copenhagen with transfers in Amsterdam and Washington. Tired.
