Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, took the stage at 8:39 AM PST and introduced both himself and the purpose of Microsoft Research (MSR).  Rick has been with Microsoft since 1991 where he setup MSR and remains to this day.  This was during a time when other organizations were cutting back on R&D.  Rick has been in

MSR Mission Statement:

• 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 Microsoft products have a future

This mission statement has remained unchanged since its inception in 1991.  The division is run much like a computer science department at a university.  It has an open research environment, ties to other universities, keeps rotating interns, welcomes visitors, etc. MSR has an army of 850 PhD researchers spread out across the globe.  Many of these researchers have amazing resumes including three of which who have Turing awards. Over 4000 peer-reviewed publications have gone out this year alone.  Many of the innovations from MSR have made it into products such as TabletPC, Robotics Studio, Surface, Office, Vista, etc. And almost every Microsoft product has some tie back to MSR in some level.

Research departments are really about “Agility”.  They give an organization the ability to rapidly change to the environment and continue to push the barrier and adjust to a changing environment. MSR adds value to Microsoft in many ways:

• Source of IP and new product technologies: MSR generates roughly 25% of the company’s patents and generally MSR patents are more fundamental
• Problem solving: ability to bring smart people to bear rapidly on hard problems confronting products
• Early warning system: ears to the ground in new areas across technologies

Rick discussed a few things that have been going on over the years and new things coming down the pipe. On area that is gaining momentum is cluster computing. One of the key items here is the Dryad stack. DryadLINQ  is used to automatically generate query plans at run time, and Dryad itself is the distributed execution of the code. This can execute on 1000s of notes and terabytes of data.

Sensor Research: Energy Efficiency

Computers can be made more efficient, and computers can be used to make other things more efficient. A tiny sensor device was introduced that can collect humidity and temperature and transmit the data via radio waves back to a central hub.  These can be thought of as “mini weather stations”.  Dozens of these have strung around the Los Angeles convention center to monitor the environmental conditions at PDC 2008 throughout the week.  This is a great experiment to run at an event like this. Throughout the day, some areas are more populated that others. The demo showed in accelerated time a map of the convention center and how the temperature and humidity changed throughout the week.  There is about 100 meg of data pulled per day from the convention center.

SensorMap
SensorMap is a Live Maps application that pulls data from sensors that have been placed in various areas around the world.  This data is stored in the cloud on the SensorWeb.  This data is humidity, wind speed, snow height, air temperature, surface temperature, radiation, etc.  This data can be used to map correlations over time and in various areas.

HealthCare

Computer Science isn’t usually thought of as a cutting edge research area for fighting disease.  However, the underling structure of life is information technology. For $100 today, we can measure 1 million points of variation in a person’s DNA.  There is currently an X-Prize to try to get the entire genome of an individual done for only $1000.  This is really only 2-3 years away.  This data opens huge doors for data mining of both diseases and gain a better understanding of the mysteries of life. 

Fighting HIV/AIDs with machine learning
As we know, the HIV virus mutates at a staggering rate which makes it hard to fight.  However, these mutations are not random and respond to the human immune system.  There is reason to believe that based on this, we could mind the data to find trends and help better treatments or a long term cure.

Worldwide Telescope

Worldwide Telescope (WWT) is a virtual observatory which has  over 1.5 million active users from hobbyist to professional astronomers. Releasing today is the next version of WWT called the Equinox Beta.  This release over doubles the amount of data and will allow you to zoom out to the entire known universe.  This software has amazing potential for both learning and discovery.

Education

General programming only really requires basic arithmetic and could be picked up by very young children.

Boku
Boku is a lightweight programming environment for children. It is a game development platform that is programmed through the XBox controller.  The game itself is a virtual world where you control the main avatar and the objects and actors around it. It uses an iconic based language that is expressed with visual representations of concepts that can be combined together to create meaning. The general format is “When” –> “Do”. Such as, “If you [see fruit], then [eat]”.  Using these activities you are programming how characters in the game interact with through environment.  Concepts such as variable and functions are in the game, but are shown in a intuitive way. You can also program the controls on the gamepad.

SecondLight: Interaction Beyond the Surface

The last topic of the keynote was a technology called SecondLight.  This is a new multi-touch technology that allows you to project through the display and onto other surfaces.  This display is independent and invisible to the primary surface. This can lead to “hidden” information and opens up new doors in interaction with the device. The technology offers pre-distortion so that it will still work with unlevel objects or those that may move. Since the infrared camera is in the device itself it could potentially be used to touch enable the displays above it.

Microsoft PDC 2008 Day 2 kicked off with a Keynote from Ray Ozzie after a montage video of various applications running on Microsoft .Net.  Yesterday’s keynote was about the cloud and services.  Today is all about the client and “hands on” side.  In today’s world it’s hard to image life without PCs.  Image no PCs at our work desk: “What would we do all day?”

The PC is adapting to the changing world around us.  Ubiquitous connectivity and the web have changed our own lives as well.  We have “barley scratched the surface” of what we can do on the web.  We all have a PC phone and web access.  These are separate devices, but they can they be more than just  disconnected devices?

Users find immense value in the storage on their PCs.  A Windows PC most important value is it’s rich interactivity.   to manage our data.  The web on the other hand is our portal to the world.  The internet has become our “common meeting place”, our “common library”, and the “front door to our organizations”.  A phone is always with us, always knows where we are, and as the PC has a natural UI and high performance access to displays.  A application that can span all three of these is brings them together and harnesses the power of each to create something greater than the sum of its’ parts.”.

All of the announcements today are about how to span these three major platforms and how to harness this “synergy

Windows 7

Steven Sinofsky introduced Windows 7 to the world.  The keynote broke down into 7 areas:

1. Introduction to Windows 7 client

We have a new taskbar item in Windows 7 called “Jump Lists”.  This will group related applications in a new way.  For example, the Internet Explorer icon will show each tab in a separate preview window. There is a Word icon that will show open and most recent documents. 

As another bonus, we have “snap to docking” to allow us to dock applications to the sides of the screen and easily create split screens.

Windows Explorer has gotten a few upgrades as well. “Libraries” allow us to group items across the different directories into related libraries.  It also appears that the desktop search has become faster and easier to use.

Home networking has been with us for awhile, but has been hard to use.  “Homegroup” is a simple directory interface to all devices in your home such as PCs, phones, photo screens, etc.  There is a simple settings dialog to allow you to add some security as to what is shared.

MediaPlayer upgrades allow us to “play to” other devices from any device on your “Homegroup”.  This works for any media such as audio, pictures, or videos.  So you can pull or push media to devices around your home.

Desktop Gadgets can now be placed anywhere, not just on the sidebar.  This level of customization brings more personalization to the field.  You can also package up your themes and desktop configuration easily to allow you share or backup your desktop appearance or quickly switch between a personalization setting that is “just what you need” for your task.

The task tray is now customizable.  There is a new interface to manage what the task items do, when they pop alerts, etc.  Hopefully this will help bring some order to the shear number of taskbar applications that are out in the wild today.

Touch support is one of the most highly anticipated features of Windows 7.  Mobile devices and Surface have really brought touch support into the limelight.  We have scrolling, zoom, a full ribbon control in windows, an onscreen keyboard, etc.  There is also about 25% more space between items in the context menus to allow easier control.  Touch support also extends other new features such as the “snap to docking”, etc.  Now dev each application will need to be modified to take full advantage of touch support.  We have yet to see what these environment will look like, but it is probably close to what we see in the Surface SDK today.

Some additional previews include:

2. Software + Services (Windows 7 & Windows Live)

Windows is our Core PC Platform, but Live Service and Live Essentials allow us to extend the power of the web down to the OS.  We will continue to see more integrated support for the Live Platform baked into the OS>

3. Transition from Vista

Transitioning from Vista should stay easily.  Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 a step closer to Windows 7.  However this is a lot of new support for standards and compatibility.  For instance, Wordpad has been upgraded to support open xml.

UAC was a good idea, but has had its issues.  And to developers, this has been a major pain to say the least.  Windows 7 has lighted things up a bit to help keep a high level of security, but make it easier to work with.

As stated earlier, the ribbon interface is getting more support throughout the OS.  Both Paint and Wordpad will have a ribbon interface out of the box.

4. APIs

Not much has been mentioned about the APIs outside of the touch support.  However there are new DirectX APIs that have been extended down to 2D support in the operating system itself. As well as support for some of the OS features such as “Jump Lists”.

5. Fundamentals

Windows 7 strives to reduce 3 things:

1. Memory on things used like Graphics and the Reference set
2. Disk I/O such as registry reads and Indexer
3. Power usage needs to be reduced for DVD Playback, panels and timers

At the same time Windows 7 increases:

1. Speed of boot time and interactions
2. Responsiveness
3. Scale of processors and memory.  Windows 7 now supports up to 256 processors out of the box.

6. Path to RTM

The path to release for Windows 7 is made up of 7 components:

1. Pre-Beta – available to all PDC attendees
2. “E7” Blog (Engineering Windows 7) will continue to show new features and additions
3. Beta – Will be released early next year
4. www.microsoft.com/windows
5. Feedback tool
6. Customer Experience Improvement data – again this is optional, but as beta users, this information is important to development
7. Release Candidate to RTM Phase – there will be release candidates after the beta

7. Call to Action

• Install and use Windows 7 Pre-Beta
• Develop for 64-bit
• Focus on Fundamentals in your code
• Integrate with Windows 7 Desktop
• Evaluate the new APIs
• Code to Web Standards with Internet Explorer 8
• Download Windows Live Beta @ download.live.com

Developer Support

Scott Guthrie took the stage to introduce more of the development side of Windows 7.  .Net 3.5 sp1 will be built into Windows 7 and support has been added for the new APIs in the OS.  Scott showed how WPF has been extended to have support for touch, “Jump Lists”, the new Windows 7 Ribbon, etc.  All of these run on top of the GPU in WPF to allow for speed and aesthetics.  These allow us to build Surface-like applications for any computer that can run Windows 7 and has touch support.

We do have a new .Net 3.5 sp1 add-on coming soon that will give us new WPF controls: DataGrid, DatePicker, Calendar, and the Ribbon.

We also got a small update on the next versions of the .Net Framework and Visual Studio.

.Net Framework 4

• We will be able to load both the CLR 2 and CLR 4 in the exact same application space.
• The DLR will finally be released
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) will be baked into the framework
• We will finally have support for multiple versions of Configuration files in .net .  So you can have separate config files for debugging, staging, and production.

Visual Studio 10

Visual Studio 10 has been rewritten and on WPF and gives us not only a better looking UI but also multi-monitor support.  Other features include:

• Better testing support
• A new editor that is using MEF
• Visualization extensions that can be used in the editor such as viewing “triple slash” comments in a new way and adding links to items in the comments for screen pops.

Web Development Improvements

• Dynamic Data
• More integrated REST Support
• jQuery support including integrated intellisense.  The jQuery.com website now has the intellisense file available for download
• ASP.Net MVC
• Velocity for distributed caching.  A new CTP has been released this week.

Silverlight

According to Guthrie, 1 of 4 machines in the world are now running Silverlight. 100 million of those have upgraded to Silverlight 2.  Third parties are really starting to embrace Silverlight such as AOL’s new email interface and Netflix which will all you to watch movies online through a Silverlight player.  Other Silverlight announcements were:

• Silverlight will be able to run both inside and outside of the browser.
• Visual Studio 2010 has a dedicated Silverlight 2 designer

Live Services

David Treadwell rounded out the first keynote of Day 2 with a series of Live Services announcements. Live Services today consist of: Identity, Communication/Presence, Directory, and Search/Geospatial.  live Services account for  11% of internet minutes and are used by over 460 Million.  There are Hundreds of Thousands of Live services servers located around the world.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh’s purpose is to bridge all of our devices with a single user experience.  We have always known that there was and will be more behind what we have see with Mesh.  Mesh is now a key and underlying part of the Live Services platform.  This will allow user to integrate their clients and the cloud.

The Live Framework was announced as the programming framework to work with Live Services.  It provides a “Live Operating Environment” (which is like the CLR for Live Services) and a new Programming Model.  As a .net developer, you will be able to harness the mesh and access its services in any number of applications.

The key example of how to use the Live Framework was a photo application written in WPF.  This application used the Mesh APIs to share pictures.  With two PCs running this application, if photos were added on one machine, it would sync to the next.  This brought over metadata and everything associated with that object.

Another demo of the Live Framework was given for the web-based BBC iPlayer which uses Mesh services.  This is a social network to allow you to see what  you friends are watching.  It also allows seemly transition from the PC to the mobile device.  If you pause a video online, you can pick up right where you left off on your mobile device.

• The Live Framework CTP will be on teh PDC hard drive today.
• Mesh will have Mobile and Mac support within a week!

Office 14

Most of the new features of Office 14 wasn’t revealed today, but there was demonstration of Office Web Applications.

Office Web Applications

Office Web Applications will be part of Office 14.  These are online versions of the most popular Office applications:  Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.  The entire application including the ribbon interface are replicated on the online versions.  These applications integrate with their desktop counterparts.  Documents that are shared on Office Live can be accessed by the Web, Desktop, and mobile versions of the applications and since they are stored online can be accessed instantly by other users on various devices.

A Lap Around Windows Azure

This session was previously called “A Lap around Could Services”, but the title was updated after the Windows Azure announcement.  This session is setup to answer two questions:

1. What is Windows Azure?
2. What are the key features?

The “cloud” is defined as:

• Set of connected servers
• On which developers can:
• Install and run services
• Store and retrieve data

As we all know, an Operating System is an open platform that provides: an application execution environment, a shared file system, threading support etc.  Up until now the “Cloud” has bee missing an OS which treats applications as services to provide functionality to users and developers. Windows Azure is an Operating System for the cloud and as such it provides:

1. Abstract execution environment
2. shared files system
3. resource allocation
4. programming environments
5. 24/7 operation
6. pay for what you use
7. simpler, transparent administration

Components of the Platform

1. Automated Service Management
• The platform follows the rules
2. A powerful service hosting environment
• All of the hardware: servicers load balancers
• Virtualized and direct execution
3. Scalable, available storage in the cloud
• Blobs tables and queues
4. A rich, familiar developer experience

Automated Service Management

What’s in a model?

• Service topology and size
• health constraints
• Configuration settings

Develop and model your service, then just deploy and run it!

Maintaining the service health has been made easy.  The goal is to keep a service responsive and healthier even during failures and upgrades.  This is done by providing a level of abstraction where a service declares logical resources in the model.  APls allow you to map logical resources to physical entities.  The service code in turn calls these APIs.

The bottom line is that there is a balance between the poser and ease of use.  You can write well behaved services to reduce your total cost of ownership.  There is a way out.  You can program in “raw” mode by which you can build your own VM and manage the service yourself!

Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud

Azure provides simple and essential storage abstractions to use:

• Large: blobs, file streams, etc
• Service state: simple tables, etc
• Service communication: queues, locks, etc

There is an emphasis on:

• Massive scale, available, and durability
• Geo Distribution

Rich, familiar Developer Experience

There is a simulated could service environment on the desktop that supports asp.net, .net languages, native code, PHP, etc.  There will be a number of tools and support such as: Visual Studio, Eclipse.  Logging Alerts and Tracing will be also be available to make debugging and maintaining your application easier.

Putting it all Together

Windows Azure is a simple architecture for scalability.  It is designed to encourage best practices:

• Stateless compute + durable storage
• Co-location of computation and data
• Queues for asynchronous processing

Windows Azure is an open platform to connect outbound to any server and a set of open protocols and APIs on all components.

I arrived at the convention center about an hour before registration for Microsoft PDC 2008 opened.  I enjoy the relative solitude before the storm of people come crashing through the doors.  By the thousands, people came through registration and hit the breakfast tables before lining up yet again for a good seat at the first day of keynotes.

At 8:30AM PST, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the stage and acknowledged his role as a Microsoft employee and previously a developer and even competitor. Ray made it clear that it is the developers that make this all possible and it is us that need to be thanked for making the event possible.

It is no surprise, this PDC is about the “cloud” and “Software + Services” (S+S).  Computers are being ambiguous.  From cell phones to laptops to PCs, we need a way to seemly move from device to device.  The line between what is and isn’t a PC is blurred.  The “reach and scope our systems” have expanded.

Customers expect a certain level of data from a website, and that expectation list keeps growing.  The website is the “front door” to many companies today.  The website for any organization is becoming one of their most important assets.  Some sites’ traffic shoots up only during the holidays, or the delivering of new products, etc.  This creates a number of scalability concerns.  Moving a site to a redundant scalable web host becomes ever more important. Have a highly scalable website to meet higher demands creates a kind of “overdraft protection for your website”.

How due we efficiently deploy software to various computers around the web?  What about auto updating apps? Ray proposed 3 major tiers of systems

1. User Tier
2. Enterprise Tier
3. Web Tier (the size of the web and a high level of scalability)

Windows Azure

It was great to hear Ray tip his hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s EC2 offering. However, Microsoft is introducing their own cloud service offering: Windows Azure. This is “Windows in the Cloud””.  It is the service based operating system for the emerging cloud. It offers:

1. virtualized  computation
2. shared storage
3. automated service management system and provisioning of a cloud based service

This is not a personal computer based OS, it is housed in Microsoft’s data centers.  it is being released as a CTP starting today (10/27/2008).  5 major components make up the Azure Services Platform:

1. Live services
2. .Net Services
3. SQL Services
4. SharePoint Services
5. Dynamics CRM Services

Windows azure is:

1. Scalable hosting platform
2. rich developer experience
3. Model drive service lifecycle management
4. Enterprise ready and hobbyist friendly
5. Supports both managed and unmanaged code

Services Requirements:

1. Interoperability, Business Processes
2. Identity & Security (federated)
3. Data management and compliance
4. Services Management

.Net Services

1. Service Bus – allows you to connect your local systems to the cloud in a secure way
2. Access Control – federated and unified security across applications both on premise and out in the cloud
3. Workflow Services – workflow that can scale out to 100s of systems out in the clouds

Identity Services (Geneva)

• Users control their own identities
• single federated identity platform
• Open and interoperable
• Claims based access control

SQL Services Components

1. Database
2. Data Sync
3. Reporting
4. Data Mining
5. ETL – used to bring in and cleanse data
6. Reference Data

On-Premises vs. Cloud Services

There is a need for symmetry between things local and in the clouds  On Premises platform that will have “bridging” support at first will be: SQL Server, Biztalk, Office Sharepoint Server, Dynamics Crm, Windows Server, and System Center. These will be able to integrate with the online services we have in the Azure Service platform.  To bridge these we have Visual Studio & .net, “Oslo”, and partners.  Oslo will bring us a new modeling language called “M” and the ability to build Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to worked between the two platforms.

You can download the Oslo SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx and start playing with it now!

Automated Service Management

How do you upgrade an application without bringing it down? How do you upgrade a OS without bringing it down?  One of the main architectural differences is known as “Automated Service Management”. Windows Azure separates the apps from the OS such that either can be shutdown without messing up the other.

Model your service

1. Roles and Groups
2. Channels and endpoints
3. Interfaces
4. Configuration Settings

All four of these make up the “model” of our service and together generate a an xml format called “ServiceModel”.  This appears to be an extension to the Wcf “serviceModel” node in app.config files today.

Windows Azure online management console. allows you to configure the servicemodel configuration.  Today this exists as an xml snippet to edit, but Steve Marx promised an editor to be made available sometime in the future for those who don’t like to manually edit xml.

Visual Studio Development

When developing applications for Windows Azure, how do you test and debug? Visual Studio gives you a “cloud on your desktop” which runs on your local machine and mimics the Windows Azure cloud environment on your local OS.  This features all of the services you would see on the cloud and brings them to your desktop.

There will be an SDK available to develop for the Windows Azure.  This SDK appears to have 4 templates that are known at this time.

The first public demo of Windows Azure development was a “hello world” app done by Steve Marx immediately after Ray Ozzie’s announcement.

Cost and Licensing

There will be a lot more announced as we get closer to release, but Ray did note that cost will be based on: application resources consumption and service level agreements.  However, it will be competitive with other offerings in the market.

Microsoft Online Services

Evidently all of Microsoft’s major offerings will be available online.  The first three being announces are:

1. Exchange Online
2. Sharepoint Online
3. Dynamics Crm Online

All of these services can be accessed via web services to “mashup” the data to create new line of business applications. These will line up with the Windows’ Live and Office Live offerings

The first demo of this was a VSTO application that pulled data from Dynamics Crm Online and allowed the user to format this data into a document which could then be published through Sharepoint Online Service seamlessly.

Software + Services brings together the best of on-premise and cloud computing.  There are a number of challenges with this including Federated Identity and Extensibility.

Keynote Demos

Blue Hoo

The first 3rd party demo of Windows Azure was an application called BlueHoo.  This is a silverlight application that uses REST based services to allow people to socially interact with each other and find other user’s who are in close proximity to each other.

Red Prairie

Microsoft PDC 2008 starts up in a couple of days.  I have been here in LA with my wife since Thursday.  We have been getting our fill of some fine cuisine, calming beaches, expensive shops, and hectic traffic.  I have thoroughly enjoyed the time out here with my beautiful wife, but I am getting very excited about PDC.  With each passing day, the anticipation keeps building and building.

If you aren’t making it out to PDC this year, be sure to check out the MSDN Developer Conferences which are touring the United States right after PDC.  The will be great events for those that couldn’t attend PDC and those that do make it out.

The entire PDC week will probably be one of the busiest weeks of life.  There is so much going on both inside and outside of the conference, I doubt I will be able to keep it all straight.  My good friend, Dave Bost, wrote up an agenda of where he is planning to be all week.  I am going to pick up his torch and write up my own agenda as well.  Hopefully this will help others find me so that we can meet up, and  I also anticipate that this will help me be where I need to be.  Some of these events are private and I have tried to mark them as such.  If it is a private event and you are attending as well, feel free to meet up with me.

Outside of the events listed below, I plan on spending time Open Spaces area, the Partner Expo, the Product Pavilion, the Hands-on-Labs, blogging, napping, playing with the new bits, and sitting in comfy chairs.  I really do want to spend the majority of my time networking, meeting new people, and seeing how others are using Microsoft technologies.

Here is what I have planned so far.  It will change over time.  You can follow me on Twitter for more instant updates, or just follow me around.  I will be moving quite a bit!

Sunday, Oct. 26th

• 9:00AM-10:00AM: Speaking at SoCal Codecamp over Duplexing in Wcf (GFS 106)
• 10:30AM: Registering for PDC
• 11:30AM-1:00PM: Lunch at Together @PDC event (private)
• 1:00PM-6:00PM: Together @PDC event playing the part of a Hollywood tourist (private)
• Sunday evening: I may make it out to Party with Palermo, but I will probably spend the event with my wife instead

Monday, Oct. 27th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM-10:30AM: Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson
• 11:00AM-12:15AM: Identity Roadmap for Software + Services (502A) or A Lap around Cloud Services Part 1 (Petree Hall CD)
• 12:15PM: (Available for Lunch)
• 12:45PM-1:30PM: "Dublin" and .NET Services: Extending On-Premises Applications to the Cloud (515A)
• 1:30PM-2:15 pm: Small roundtable discussion with Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia, and others (will head to Anders’ C# session immediately after this if there is room and it is still in session) (private)
• 3:30 PM-4:45 PM: A Lap around Cloud Services Part 2 (Petree Hall CD)
• 5:15PM-6:30PM: Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service (Petree Hall CD)

• 6:00PM-10:00PM: Influential’s Party (private)
• 8:00PM-10:00PM: Private dinner (private)
• 10:00PM-12:00AM: PDC Bloggers party (private)

Tuesday, Oct. 28th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM-9:30AM: Partner Evangelist Breakfast, Sheridan (private)
• 8:30AM-11:00AM: Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell
• 11:00AM-12:00PM: Keynote, Don Box and Chris Anderson
• 12:30PM: (Available for Lunch)
• 12:45PM-1:30PM: WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale (515B)
• 1:45PM-3:00PM: Essential Cloud Storage Services (502A) or A Lap around "Oslo" (Petree Hall CD)
• 3:30PM-4:45PM: Identity: "Geneva" Deep Dive (409A) or "Oslo": The Language (151)
• 5:15PM-6:30PM: Live Services: Building Applications with the Live Framework (502A) or Architecting Services for the Cloud (Petree Hall CD)

• 7:00PM: Attendee Party at Universal Studios
• 11:00PM: After Party at the Lounge at Westin Bonneventure

Wednesday, Oct. 29th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM-11:00AM: Keynote, Rick Rashid
• 10:30AM-11:45AM: Service Bus Services: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery (406A) or WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0 (151)
• 12:00PM-12:45PM: Working down at the Microsoft Partner booth in the Pavilion, stop by and say “hi”
• 1:15PM-2:30PM: "Oslo": Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience (151)
• 3:00PM-4:15PM: A Day in the Life of a Could Service Developer (Petree Hall CD) or "Oslo": Repository and Models (151)
• 4:45PM-6:00PM: Live Services: Building Mesh-Enabled Web Applications Using the Live Framework (153)

• 5:00PM-7:00PM: Cocktails in the Clouds (private)
• 6:00PM–2:00AM: Underground@PDC, The Edison
• 7:00PM-9:00PM: Central Region DPE Mixer, Figueroa Hotel (private)
• 9:00PM-12:00AM: Together @PDC party, Figueroa Hotel (private)

Thursday, Oct. 30th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM-10:00AM: Services Symposium: Expanding Applications to the Cloud (515B)
• 10:15AM-11:30: Live Services: The Future of the Device Mesh (411)
• 10:15AM-11:45: Services Symposium: Enterprise Grade Cloud Applications (515B)
• 12:00PM-1:30PM: "Oslo": Building Textual DSLs (502A)
• 1:45PM-3:00PM: Identity: Windows CardSpace "Geneva" Under the Hood (411)

• I am open the rest of the day for talking, parting, etc.  Just let me know!

Friday, October 31st – Halloween Day

• 9:15AM: Flight back to Indianapolis and a couple of enjoyable days digging into all of the new bits from PDC

Let me know where you will be.  I would really like to meet everyone I can!

If you haven’t heard by now, Microsoft is hosting a little event out in LA next week called “Microsoft Professional Developer Conference” (PDC).  Not everyone can afford this event or can take the time out to make the trip.  Microsoft has recognized this and is going to be streaming all of the keynotes  live.  They will also be recording of all the sessions and making them viewable online sometime after PDC.  However, many people like to hear the content, ask questions, and learn more.  To make up for this, Microsoft has also just announced the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) series. 

What is the MDC

“We deliver the core message, content and experience of the PDC in a one day, multi-track event to multiple cities across the United States”

The MDC is a day long, 12 city tour in the US that will deliver the key information from PDC in a cheaper, more concise, and streamlined form. MDC is a glimpse into the future of the Microsoft Application Platform. Some of the major areas of discussion will be Windows 7, Cloud Computing, Internet services platform, Silverlight, .Net additions, Live Mesh, and other PDC surprises.  You will miss much of the excitement, depth, and social aspects of PDC, but for the price and convenience, this event will be one that you won’t want to miss.

Even if you did attend PDC, you may want to register for a MDC event near you as well.  You can use this time to brush up on things you missed, ask new questions, or hear about how development and feedback has been going since PDC.

The main MDC website is: http://www.msdndevcon.com/

Registration

Registration opens Monday October 20th for all locations.  Space is limited, but each venue will be able accommodate between 300-1000 attendees depending on the location.

Register here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/register.aspx

Cost

Unlike some other community events, the MSDN Dev Conference is priced at $99.  It’s a lot less than the $2400 cost of PDC + travel, hotel, etc. The content alone is worth the cost, and it is a small price to pay for what is delivered and available.  It does include sessions, lunch, swag, social interaction, and other surprises.

Speakers

The speaker line up varies from city to city, but each of the sessions will be delivered by Microsoft team members, local Microsoft Evangelists, local community leaders, Regional Directors, and MVPs.

Tentatively, I will be presenting the Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services session at the Chicago event. More details about this will unfold in the coming weeks.

Agenda

You can view all of the session descriptions here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/sessions.aspx.

Dates & Locations

You can catch me at the Chicago location, but get out there and register for the location closest to you!

Open Spaces

Each event will feature a dedicated room for Open Spaces.  Open Spaces will run parallel to the main tracks, and will offer attendees a chance to dive deeper into a topic area or talk about topics not included in the MDC agenda.  At some conferences, the Open Space area is empty and often forgotten. At the MDC, thiswon’t be the case. The room will be manned by a coordinator with  local MVPs and other experts.

Social

• Facebook: join the group
• Twitter: follow the feed
• Flickr
• Delicious
• Twemes

The Zune offers a few command combinations that aren’t well documented. Below is a reference of these commands and how you use them.  If you are unfamiliar with the Zune button names, to the left is a picture with each of the 7 buttons labeled.

Comments:

• If you want to extend you battery life you can “shutdown” the Zune when not in use.  The device will naturally go in hibernate mode, but it will still use up some of the battery.  Shutting it down maximizes the battery life.
• Reformatting will delete all data on the Zune including any preloaded content.  However, it will keep whatever background you using, even though the original source image was removed.
• Some people have noted battery issues with the Zune.  These battery issues usually manifest with the device randomly rebooting while listening to music.  This issue can normally be fixed by performing a “Reformat” and making sure that the latest firmware is installed.  Version 2.3 fixed some batter issues, but the “Reformat” seems to do the trick to clean out any bad spirits that were introduced at the manufacturing plant.  This fixed issues that my wife’s Zune was having

As we get closer and closer to Microsoft PDC 2008, we keep hearing or finding all kinds of new news!  Just comparing new and old versions of the PDC site reveal so many new things from day to day.  It’s almost like an Easter egg hunt.  What will they reveal next?

Surprising registration still appears to be open!. I know a lot of people have to wait for many levels of approval before getting to sign up. If you are still mulling it over, just go ahead and register here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Registration/.  If you are not sure what PDC is or why you should attend, then check out this post: http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/18/microsoft-pdc-2008/

Four New Sessions

Since yesterday, the total number of sessions has jumped from 182 to 186.  I can’t pinpoint the exact changes in sessions as there are too many to track right now.  However, just looking at the difference in tags, the changes are:

+1 .Net Framework
+1 Cloud Services

Two tag additions doesn’t add up for 4 new sessions.  However, they adjust the tags so much that some sessions must have had tags removed to make up the difference.  Many sessions have multiple tags.

One of the newer sessions appears to be a Coding4Fun session staring Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman, Brian Peek, and Client Rutkas:

Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo’s Wiimote
Spend time with Coding4Fun authors as they walk through some DIY Development projects: TwitterVote, Wiimote, InnerTube, and BabySmash.

Two More Keynote Speakers

I haven’t seen a formal announcement about this yet, but if you look at the PDC speaker page, there are 2 new faces in the list: David Thompson and Amitabh Srivastava. David is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Online. While, Amitabh is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft who is “responsible for the next-generation services platform”.  Is this services platform related to all of the S+S stuff?

That brings us up to 10 keynote speakers to fill in 5.5 hours of keynote time.  The PDC agenda page lays out who is speaking when.

Geneva Sessions

All of the “Zermatt” sessions have been renamed to “Geneva”.  Zermatt is the programming model for the STS and ADFS security metasystem known as Geneva.  And Geneva is one of the potential building blocks of something called “Zurich” which is a .Net-based S+S infrastructure.

Here were the Zermatt sessions:

“Zermatt”: Deep Dive
In this session we examine the architecture of “Zermatt” next generation identity technology, and how it can be customized and extended for advanced security scenarios. At the center of the discussion is the Security Token Service (STS), a core component providing authentication and identity services. Many applications will benefit from an embedded STS, and many scenarios will call for an STS that is built on a specialized user store.

“Zermatt”: Enabling Next Generation Identity
The security demands of applications continue to evolve in the face of compliance requirements, new online threats, and SOA and cloud re-engineering. See how to use the “Zermatt” next-generation authentication framework and services and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Find out how to use “Zermatt” with ASP.NET, WCF, Active Directory, and Windows CardSpace.

Here are the new Geneva sessions that replaced them:

Identity: "Geneva" Deep Dive
Examine the architecture of the "Geneva" next generation identity server and framework and how it can be customized and extended for advanced security scenarios. At the center of the discussion is the Security Token Service (STS), a core component that provides authentication and identity services. Many applications will benefit from an embedded STS, and many scenarios will call for an STS that is built on a specialized user store.

Identity: "Geneva" Server and Framework Overview
See how to use "Geneva" and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign-on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Find out how to use "Geneva" with ASP.NET, WCF, Active Directory, Windows Live ID, and Windows CardSpace.

There is also a 3rd Geneva session:

Identity: Windows CardSpace "Geneva" Under the Hood
Windows CardSpace provides a consistent, hardened sign-in experience that uses standard protocols and works with both thin and smart client applications. Learn about the features and architecture of the next version of Windows CardSpace.

All 3 of these sessions have the “Identity” tag and either the “Advanced” or “Expert” tag.

While doing my daily visits to the Microsoft PDC session list, I noticed a new session tag:

What is “Windows Strata”? The sessions with this tag are:

• A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer
• A Lap around Cloud Services
• Architecting Services for the Cloud
• Business Considerations for Cloud Computing
• Datacenters and Resilient Services
• Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service
• Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale
• Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud

Could this be the name or “codename” for the new Cloud OS that Steve Ballmer eluded to?  The name does have “Windows” in it, which makes us think it could be an Operating System.  And “Strata” could refer to the stratosphere which is associated with the sky and clouds.  Of course, the word Strata is really the plural form of stratum which is a geological formation, but that is just knit picking.

We might hear more before PDC, but we will know for sure at the end of the month!

There were a few other changes to the session tags too:

1. The tag “Dynamics CRM” has been renamed to just “Dynamics”.
2. The tag “Live Platform” has been renamed to “Live Services”.  New official name?
3. A new “Windows Embedded” tag was added.

Update 1:
I am not the only one who has noticed this: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081008/windows-strata-name-microsoft-cloud-os/ and http://geekswithblogs.net/kit/archive/2008/10/03/125633.aspx

Update 2:
[3:45pm EST 2008.10.08] The session list on the PDC site no longer lists “Windows Strata” as a tag.  Was this not suppose to go out yet?  Where they teasing or trying to trick us? There was a “test” tag out there for a little bit this afternoon.  It was probably a temporary tag while they got rid of the “Windows Strata” tag.

I was beginning to think it would never happen, but someone took notice out there, and over time my contributions to the community have mounted up to a Microsoft MVP award in Connected Systems for my relentless love of Wcf. It is truly quite an honor.  There are a lot of great MVPs out there, and I am not sure I deserve to designated like many of them.  However, I want to thank Microsoft and everyone out there in the community for this honor.  I had many people helping me along the way and giving me opportunities.  I especially want to thank my wife and family though for being flexible with my free time and allowing me to do all that I do outside of work for the community.

The MVP award “is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.”  The award is not easy to get and you can’t apply for it.  The award is based on your contributions for the past 12 months, and the award is granted for a period of 1 year.  After this time you may receive it again based on your contributions for that following 12 months.  Some of the rewards associated with it are quite nice such as the MVP Summit in Redmond, MSDN subscription, special downloads and training, etc.  The real gift though is being acknowledged for the love and dedication for the technology and community.  Most MVPs will probably agree that they do what they do out of a passion for these things, not to get any kind of award. 

There is not right or wrong way to get this award.  There have been many posts online about what it takes to get noticed.  For myself, I can’t tell you exactly what led up to this, but here are some of the highlights of my community involvement in the past year:

• Officer at IndyNDA (~100 attendees per month and over 1500 members)
• Blogging (over 100 posts)
• Wcf Forums (1800+ posts and Moderator)
• 6 Webcasts
• 15 Speaking Engagements across the Midwest
• Always looking for ways to help others embrace and understand Microsoft technologies!

I do these things because I love doing them.  Hopefully, I will be honored with this award again in the years to come, but if I don’t, it won’t affect how I feel about what I love to do.  Its going to be a very exciting year for .Net developers, and I am very excited to be part closer to the Connected Systems team which we will be hearing more about with Wcf, Oslo, Cloud Services, etc.

One other added bonus is the new title under my name in the MSDN Forums:

Here is a link to my MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/dan.rigsby