Day three is officially over, I’m pretty tired today after staying up to late yesterday and playing around with the “goods”. I installed Windows 7 and tried it for a while, but to my disappointment I found out that the nice stuff that were shown on the keynote was missing in my release…
This morning started with the last keynote of PDC 2008 and it was Microsoft Research that should be in the spotlight. An hour and a half was filled with stuff such as environment and healthcare studies done by MSR, important, but hey – you have an audience of 6.000 programmers/geeks here… The last 20-30 minutes was cool though, they showed up a kids-programming-language called Boku (not only for kids, for me too!) and Second Light an evolution of Surface, where you can project a secondary image onto a surface that is above, yup not in touch with, the surface. Really cool!
First session I attended after the keynote was about how to architect services for the Live Framework – It’s all about using HttpWebRequest and RESTful services. If you know about these you can work with the Mesh and Azure. Now I’m just waiting for my activation codes for Azure and that Live Mesh will support non-English regional settings..
I took a quick lunch so I could do one of the hands-on-labs with Microsoft Surface. Easy lab, but I spent some time extra and played with it. All is based on WPF and XAML and it’s really easy. Finishing the lab allowed me to claim the SDK for Surface, which otherwise is quite expensive, so I will have it within a few days. All that then remains is someone to hand me $12.500 so I can replace my living room table at home with a brand new Surface machine!
Then it was time for some more of the Oslo stuff and this time the Quadrant application. Quadrant is the program to use when you are visualizing the repository you have described using the M-language. It’s one heck of a tool which you can turn inside out and more, but the question still remains – how will this really be useful? I’m sure that Don Box and his crew had a lot of fun making these tools and languages, but at this “pre-alpha” stage of Oslo, I have hard to tell how to apply this to my daily work.
To ease things up I went to a talk about Oomph, an incubator project from Microsoft that tries to take advantage of the Microformats such as hCalendar and hCard. The session was a little to light-weight but shows the intention from Microsoft to take advantage of existing standards.
Last session of the day was a long awaited talk from Miguel de Icaza on the Mono project, an open source version of .NET that runs on Linux, Max and Windows machines. Miguel made some really nice demos and it was neat to see how far Mono has come. I did participate in the first release of Mono with some contributions. Mono has some really nice features, such as the C#5(?) compiler as a service, and some sweet JIT optimizations that makes Mono worthy as a game framework. The Mono project also implements a Linux version of Silverlight, version 1.0 will ship any day now and version 2 will be at beta for Mix 2009.
The Mono talk, Oomph talk, Windows 7 Wordpad with ODF/OpenXml support and a bunch of different framework released under the MS-PL open source license really makes me see a Microsoft in change.
Before finishing the day off I walked around and talked to various experts in the Meet the Experts reception at the convention center. Tried to get some more information on Office “14”, but in vain…
During this day the picture of Windows Azure is getting clearer, but the picture of Oslo is still quite blurry. I still have hard to find out to what Oslo is really about but I think I’m getting there – I have to try it some more.