By Steve Ives, Senior Consultant, Synergex Professional Services Group.
Last week we heard about Richard Morris and Tod Phillips experiences when they visited the Microsoft TechEd conference in Berlin. Well, it's a whole new week, and now there’s a different conference to tell you about. This week Roger Andrews, William Hawkins and I are attending PDC09, which is Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. As is usual in Southern California for most of the year the skies are blue, but for some reason everyone seems to be talking about Clouds!
Of course the reason for this is that during PDC08 Microsoft made several very significant announcements, and two of biggest were Windows 7 and the Windows Azure platform.
Of course Windows 7 is already with us now, and by all accounts is proving to be extremely popular with developers and users alike. Windows Azure on th other hand is still an emerging technology, and is cauing quite a buzz around here! If you don't already know, Windows Azure is Microsoft’s upcoming Windows operating system for Cloud computing. It's been in CTP (community technical preview) since PDC08, and is on the verge of transitioning to full production use on February 1st 2010.
Much of the content at PDC09 is focused on Windows Azure, on the wider subject of Cloud computing generally, and on the many Microsoft tools and technologies that enable developers to start developing new applications for deployment in the Cloud. Of course there is also a considerable amount of discussion about how to modify existing applications, either for Cloud deployment, or to allow those applications to interact with other components or entities that are Cloud based.
When the Windows Azure platform was announced twelve months ago it was in its infancy, and it showed. But in the last year it seems that Microsoft have really gone to town, extending the capabilities of the platform and other related services, and adding the API’s and tools that will make Azure easier to embrace. Many of these tools and technologies are being developed and delivered as part of .NET 4 and the new Visual Studio 2010 (currently in a beta 2) includes many new features to help developers in this and many other areas. It's certainly going to be very interesting to see how developers are able to embrace the concept of Cloud computing platforms (Azure, and others). The possibilities are incredible, and the potential for increased efficiencies and cost savings is also considerable, but for sure there will be challenges to addressed and overcome.
There have also been lots of sessions detailing how applications can leverage many new capabilities in the Windows 7 platform. Most of us were just delighted to get our hands on a version of Windows that boots faster, looks better, is more robust and easier to use, and one which doesn’t exhibit many of the frustrating traits that we have endured with Windows Vista. But as is turns out there are also lots of new features in the Windows 7 platform that application developers can leverage in their products. In a recent post Richard mentioned some of the new features associated with explorer (such as jump lists), and there are also some interesting capabilities that allow applications to easily interact with “sensors” that may be present on the PC. Many modern PC systems already have some of these sensors present, sensors such as ambient light meters, temperature sensors, accelerometers, and location awareness sensors such as GSM interfaces and GPS devices. It is already possible to write code to use the information published by these sensors, and a new API in the .NET Framework 4 will make it very easy to do so.
When it comes to user interface it's now clearly all about WPF, and its Web counterpart, Silverlight. The visual presentation that can be achieved with these technologies is truly impressive, and it seems that the developer productivity tools such as Expression Blend have finally caught up with the capabilities of these underlying subsystems. This will make it so much easier for people learning these new UI technologies to get up and running more effectively.
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