Anders characterized C# 1.0 as getting something out there, 2.0 as being about Generics, 3.0 being about LINQ, and 4.0 being about Dynamic Programming.  He addresses the zealots on both sides of the dynamic and static argument and states that both have benefits.  There is a new keyword coming in 4.0 – dynamic.  When you define a variable as dynamic any subsequent actions on that become dynamic actions.  Making a method call involves a call through the DLR (I would assume) to dynamically dispatch to that method, property, etc…  I love the way C# is going – we have the ability to leverage dynamic when needed, but within the static framework that so many of us are comfortable

  With the new dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0 it should help developers leverage anonymous types more effectively I think since you get duck typing and so you can take an anonymous type and use it like it is a richer type (or at least use the properties of the anonymous type that way since an anonymous type doesn’t have any methods).  What you do today using the Silverlight-Javascript bridge could largely be done by C# now.

  Concurrency is the elephant in the room in programming today - Moore's law will yield more cores, but not faster ones - there is no silver bullet here.  It will take hard work in language design and I believe likely with developers as well to change our perspective and perhaps how we develop to adjust to the multi-core revolution.  I wonder if things like Windows Workflow and Azure represent efforts in this space as they allow developers to plug into concurrency in a different way.  As has been highlighted in an internal training class that I have been taking lately state is the killer to concurrency.  The more state has to be maintained the harder a problem concurrency becomes. 

  A major focus of VS2010 is in the Testing space.  One of new tools allows testers to capture trace information during testing that can then be linked to bug work items when they are found.  The trace information that can be captured consists of videos of the testing session, screen shots, historical debug files (so that you can walk the stack trace of what happened), and even a snapshot of the VM that the test was being run in so that the developer can go to the exact machine where the bug was encountered.  The goal of that effort is to reduce the amount of times a No Repro answer comes back from devs for bugs that are filed.  With the trace information collected the developer has many avenues to research the how, why, and what in relation to the filed bug.

  Other capabilities showing up in VSTS is the ability to determine what tests cover the code that is being changed in a changeset and thus become key candidates to be run during the testing process.  Gated Checkin is a new feature in VSTS/TFS 2010 – today a somewhat similar feature can be found on Code Plex called Buddy Build.  The goal of the Gated Checkin feature is to help reduce the number of broken builds.  A checkin before being committed when the Gated Checkin feature is turned on will be run in isolation with the latest version of the checked in code to validate that the code builds successfully and then depending on configuration that some or all of the tests pass. 

  Another feature related to build (but not Gated Checkin per se although I would imagine it could be applied during a Gated Checkin build) is Architecture validation.  With 2005/2008 the Architect SKU provided little value it is being overhauled dramatically with 2010 (the new features with it deserve their own post altogether).  One of the new capabilities showing up is an architecture validation step associated with the new Layer diagrams.  This will ensure that code is not calling outside of the layers it is allowed to call.  If that happens these will show up as architecture errors in the build.  They also showed the Architecture Explorer which enables you to do NDepend like dependency analysis quickly and easily from within Visual Studio.  I inquired on the licensing strategy to determine what access the Developer SKU will have to these types of things.  The answer was that the Developer SKU will be able to read the artifacts output and navigate them (zoom in and out, drill in and out), but not produce them.  That seemed to be a reasonable trade-off I thought – the Architect SKU potentially has value now, but the Developer SKU were everything seems to come together isn’t left out in the cold completely. 

  The last thing that was shown was the Automated Testing capabilities which will be available for both Web and Winforms.  They hope by RTM to have a beta of WPF support.  You get an impressive ability to reach into Webforms and Winforms and validate the content of controls (the only way to truly appreciate this is to see a demo of how slick it works).  MS will enable a greater degree of test automation with this capability I believe (at a lower overall price than the tools available today), but it is also beefing up the manual test case side of the story as well realizing that there will always be things that for one reason or another can’t be or shouldn’t be automated.  

I am sitting in LAX waiting for my flight home and just finished a video done by Channel 9 with Ori Amiga who is one of the stars of the Live Mesh Development team.  He was showing a custom gadget that he built to integrate with his car that included integration with Live Mesh so that he had a Meshified car.  It was pretty cool so I thought I would link to it – With everybody excited about the release of the Mesh client for Windows Mobile this is A different kind of Mobile Mesh.

I watch a lot of podcasts and videocasts.  So much so that I often wish I could watch them in a “faster” mode.  Which I can do with podcasts that are in WMV format.  When they play in Windows Media Player you can right click on the play button and select “fast” playback.  It isn’t double time, but it certainly is sped up.  I listen to all I can with that setting – it helps me get through them faster while still being perfectly understandable etc…  Not all WMV support this so I suspect it may be an encoding feature, but most that I run into do (all the Channel 9 for example - .NET Rocks – etc…).  Windows Media Player on my Samsung i730 can’t do it unfortunately.  All in all it is a nice feature to help me consume information a little quicker than I would otherwise be able to (I get so used to it that it gets to be painful to listen to someone in “normal” speed).

If you go to http://www.mesh.com you’ll find that your mesh is currently unavailable due to the upgrade so we should be seeing the beta update available sometime relatively soon.

  I am new to Workflow and my notes on this session are a little light – but the big news is that WF 4.0 required a major rewrite of the underlying infrastructure such that old WF activities etc… aren’t compatible with the new runtime.  You can use an Interop Activity wrapper to enable running older activities so they enabled backwards compatibility in a different way, but interesting to hear about such a huge rewrite of WF so early on in its lifecycle (it is still somewhat of a baby being less than two year since RTM of the first release).  I am not sure if you could do this in the past, but with WF 4.0 if you have a WF persisted and do an upgrade of the workflow it will still be able to run the old version of the workflow.  I may have butchered the description of what he said, but the demo he showed was persisting (or in other words suspending) a workflow, changing the activity in the workflow, and then resuming it and it was able to run without problems.

  That is about it for this session – but it should be said that with 2010 and WF 4.0 and WCF 4.0 (which by the way everyone pronounces Dub F and Dub C F) MS is working hard on making WF and WCF work together better including enhancing WAS (Windows Application Server which enhances IIS infrastructure to be a WCF host for more than just HTTP) to be a host for both WCF and WF.

   Workflow is now embedded in Team Build.  It isn’t clear if the workflow (with the associated source files)replaces TFS Build.proj, but I think it probably does? I would imagine that we could write custom workflow activities and plug that into TFS.  I would imagine some things would still be better modeled as MSBuild tasks because certain activities will still call msbuild tasks to do what they need (like compile for example).  All in all TFS Build is getting a really nice upgrade although I imagine that for many it will take some getting used to using workflow to design builds rather than XML.  Count me as one who thinks the move away from XML will be a good thing (although technically I think Workflow ends up being XAML in the background which would still be XML – you just don’t have to work with it necessarily).

  Branch Visualization was also very cool – basically a variety of graphical ways to see branching.  Branches become a first class citizen and show up in Source Control under a different icon (no longer just a subfolder structure).  You can visualize the hierarchy.  You can also visualize the way a changeset has been merged through the branch structure to help you see if a parent or child has been missed etc…For smaller shops these will be nice and perhaps promote branching more – in larger shops with more complex branching strategies and a greater need for parallel development this should be a tremendous benefit.  TFS now drills through a merge changeset to tell you who truly originated the change and not just who performed the merge.  Rollback has now been surfaced into the UI (Brian didn’t show it though) which should make it easier to presumably undo those files that shouldn’t have been checked in rather than having to do an additional check-in to reverse the changes.  You could do this from the command-line previously I believe (or perhaps it was a tfpt feature I don’t remember).  I don’t need to do this often, but it will be nice to have it there and I definitely have need to do this in the past and because there was friction with doing it (dropping into another environment) it was usually just as easy to do an additional check-in that reversed the relevant changes.  Oh – I can’t forget that in the Changeset visualization on branches you can drag a specific changeset to a branch that should have that changeset and it will pend a merge of that changeset onto that branch.

Brian didn’t demo the Agile workbooks that I really, really wanted to see and I won’t be able to go to the session that it will be demoed at so I will have to catch the video :(.  Brian showed how you can now create query folders to improve the way you organize work item folders (about time!!!).  They have made some really nice improvements to the Excel experience with TFS as well.  You can now customize a bound table with additional columns and formatting etc… and they will be retained across data refreshes and publishes.  This will help big time in building reusable Excel type reports.  Also they made it so you can right click on a work item query and have it create an Excel workbook that is a report bound to the TFS Warehouse and not the work item query which would then allow it to be edited and added to easier.  Oh – I can’t forget to mention hierarchal work items.  That is a huge feature that everyone has really, really wanted.  TFS 2010 will provide a huge amount of value there to support better work breakdown and thus richer planning and reporting scenarios.  No ability to attach dates to Iterations (or otherwise enhance them) yet.

All in all it was a nice intro to what TFS has.  There are a bunch of more detailed sessions as well to cover the capabilities in depth.  When you add to that what is going on in the other SKUs of Team System – 2010 shapes up to be a huge release.

10:59 – The power of the syncing capability available with Mesh cannot be underscored enough – it will enable a huge number of very cool scenarios for collaboration.  Silverlight is also a huge capability making it happen

10:52 – Showing editing in Word using Word for the Web – now showing Excel for the Web and showing it in FireFox – I assume that this is using Silverlight?  Also will the synchronization settings enabled by Office Live Workspace be available with SharePoint -

10:49 – Showing collaboration of Web and Rich Client OneNote on the same workbook – Wow – syncing included – included showing that happen with OneNote Mobile – WOW – WOW - WOW

10:48 – Announcing Office Web Application – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote – coming with Office 14 – Demo coming

10:46 – Live Mesh to move into Beta this week – and is now available for Macs and Windows Mobile 6 – which is a bummer since I only have a Mobile 5 phone – time to start hunting for a new phone

10:40 – Application running in the Mesh – allows you to sync applications anywhere

10:37 – Loving it – Now we meshify a web application

10:36 – This is getting cool now – I can’t wait to get access to the Mesh SDK – showing programmatic access to the Mesh – very cool!

10:34 – Ori Amiga out to show how to take the Guthrie demo app and Meshify it

10:33 - Mesh now a part of Live Services which is now available using the Live Framework akin to the CLR of the .NET FW

10:32 – Mesh Services now part of the Live Services platform

10:30 – Talking about device connectivity and the need for it – okay – here we go Live Mesh

10:28 – 460 million users, 11% of Total Internet minutes using hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide

10:27 – Talking about Windows Live ID enhancements that have been announced – OpenID support for Windows Live ID, Live Services accessible using your private identity infrastructure, etc…

10:23 – David Treadwell now on stage – here comes Live Mesh announcements – hopefully some other Live announcements – please announce something for Live Spaces

10:22 – Silverlight has about a 1 in 4 machine penetration on the Internet

10:22 – Silverlight outside the browser coming!

10:21 – VS2010 will have a Silverlight Designer built in – including WYSIWG

10:20 – Highlighting the Silverlight Toolkit which is a bunch of controls and is MS-Pl so you can modify them.

10:18 – Silverlight now up – what will be announced now??  Probably highlighting NetFlix and Olympics

10:16 – Scott Gu talking about web development enhancements – nothing super new here – most things we have been aware of.  Cool update to configuration for the Web

10:06 – Tesco demo was very cool – I would like to see more innovative grocery shopping experiences

10:05 – Need to go get my head around MEF – been keeping it at arm’s length so far

10:03 – Showcasing WPF Source editor that is in the VS2010 CTP that we get  - showing how you can customize the editor and extend it – very nice and easy – good, good stuff – Scott Gu’s group continues to do great stuff

10:02 – MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) getting a lot of talk time – key, key piece of the future

10:02 – Much More possible – nice!

10:01 – Talking about .NET 4.0 – lots of stuff there – wow – Visual Studio will be built using WPF – WOW!

9:59 – Announcing release of WPF Toolkit including Visual State Manager and a Data Grid!

9:54 – Back to the HP multi-touch and showing how his WPF app is touch enabled.  Showed how you can enable a ripple effect that shows up on everything including controls

9:53 – Showing JumpList support in WPF with Windows 7 for jump lists – very cool – think quick launch type tasks – very easy – just declare the tasks in XAML.

9:50 – Guthrie out there – heading into the code – showing a new RibbonWindow control that they are shipping this week

9:45 – Sinofosky winding down – Guthrie up next or Treadwell?

9:40 – Beta in early 2009 – open beta.  Talking about how they collect the feedback (telemetry data plus customer submissions)

9:37 – We all get Windows 7 pre-beta today – talking timeline now about when we should expect to see Windows 7 – will he announce a ship date???

9:37 – Showing how they have maintained personalization and the slider to control the detail of UAC notification

9:36 – Showing much improved projector support and the ability to use multi-monitors over RDP

9:32 – Create a Virtual Hard Drive from within Windows 7 natively and can attach VHDs and can boot natively from a VHD as well – very cool – and freaking about time!

9:31 – Showing the use of BitLocker encryption with memory sticks

9:30 – Sinofosky showing his Netbook running Windows 7 (Netbooks currently don’t run Vista, but XP)

9:29 – Talking about Windows Performance improvements to boot up, memory footprint, etc..

9:25 – Cool – multi-touch demo of AutoDesk and how they do modeling using touch – the big question will be the cost of the device – they said the HP machine they were demoing with cost less than 2000 dollars in a year when Windows 7 ships – what does that mean cost wise – for 1500 I could start to see it making sense

9:21 – Ribbon Interface to move in more broadly, Jump Lists (come from start menu), Libraries, Multi-touch, Ink, Speech, and DirectX are some of the areas of developer investment

9:20 – Talking about the scenarios they have been focusing on  - Home Networking is a key area of emphasis – talked about how you can connect your work computer to home wireless network – it will detect and allow you to access home resources without opening your work computer up to security issues.

9:18 – Talking IE8 and the standards emphasis – also WordPad will support OpenXML format and and the other open document formal that I can’t remember right now

9;16 – Sinofosky in summary – we won’t be killed by the driver debacle that killed Vista

9:15 – Talking about the lessons learned from Vista – all the feedback we have heard – including from those commercials (meaning obviously Apple)

9:12 – Didn’t like to hear that – over the new few months we’ll see Wave 3 services – I want them now!!!!

9:11 – Moving on to Windows Live  - now Windows Live Essentials (which is the Windows Live client suite) and Windows Live Service is how they are framing it – good differentiation – or at least a good start

9:05 – Showing touch capability in Windows 7 – All mouse commands are now touch enabled – showed using touch to scroll and zoom.  Showed manipulating Word 2007 using touch.  Then showed IE using gestures and on screen keyboard and navigation using touch.  My next computer will be a touch enabled Windows 7 machine.  Showed updated Paint program and using Touch to drag a picture in and then touching it to draw on it.  Showing Virtual Earth using Multi-touch – very cool.

9:05 – Small improvements in System Tray

9:04 – Showed theming and how Gadgets no longer constrained to Gadget bar

8:57 – Deskbar is a combination of Quick Launch and the open app list.  Improved home network connectivity.  Libraries are new concepts that combined multiple storage locations into a single virtual store.  Search has been extended to easily search across Home Groups.  You can interact with other devices from within Windows 7 – Device Stage is there to show you what it can do with your machine.  You can dock windows now to enable scenarios like side by side comparison.

8:50 – We will get an Office 14 look today it sounds like

8:50 – Guthrie will be talking about the development story around PC and Mobile (probably some Silverlight stuff)

8:49 – Sinofosky coming to do Windows 7 and Windows Live Wave 3

8:48 – Ray is talking web apps offline – will this be Live Mesh that enables this or just some Silverlight extension?

8:46 – Ray is going on – stalling to take more time I think

8:38 – “Take one thing away – we can do our customers a great service by making the PC, Phone, and Web more valuable together than simply the sum of their parts.” Couldn’t agree more – they each have their strengths and weaknesses – leverage the best of all of them.  A friend of mine who I would have thought would have been a prime iPhone guy just texted me and said he hated it.  Why – because the iPhone does the web well, but the experience for the rest of it according to him was subpar – that is not the first time I have heard that from someone about the iPhone.  The danger of the web, PC, and phone is trying to make them what they not instead of making them work together.

8:37 – Ozzie on stage talking about how pervasive PCs are – Without a PC on your desk – what would you do all day?

Azure is/was the product formerly known as Red Dog.  It is more than just a Cloud OS.  It is a hosting platform as well (ala Amazon EC2) with components that give it S3 and Simple DB capability.  The Simple DB capability comes from SQL Server Data Services which has been renamed SQL Services or SQL Server Services.  The name change comes from the added capability to support Reporting Services and Analysis Services.  So the Data story of Azure looks to be much deeper than Simple DB as MS fills it out.

There is a rich service infrastructure built on top of it including Live Services and .NET Services (there are others).  The .NET Services provides the ability to make your app Cloud-aware as well as integrate with your existing in house infrastructure.  It is on that point that Azure really starts to set itself apart. 

I will ignore the fact that MS historically has done a better job of making things easier than any other vendor (you are of course welcome to disagree).  Because on that point alone I can see the average developer taking advantage of Cloud Computing more often now that it is almost a Visual Studio click away.  The existing infrastructure investment is an fascinating twist on the Cloud Computing story that has been spun by everyone to date.  Google App Engine says come to me and I will host you – you can use Amazon a little more piecemeal (use just S3, etc…), but the ability to authenticate a Cloud app against your existing identity infrastructure (and taking that and extrapolating that out to the other components of an app) is a huge innovation and makes Cloud Computing much more palatable especially for the enterprise.

Few enterprises were ever going to move all their data or capabilities out to the cloud – too many info security, reliability, and availability concerns.  So the I will host everything models that exist today only really work for small business and startup areas and could (the market is so new we don’t know how things will truly evolve) cause problems as you grow and want to move stuff in house.  Azure really changes that – it still has a very compelling story for the small business/startup, but with the integration with existing infrastructure it starts to work for enterprises as well. 

An example of that is LDS General Conference.  Twice a year the LDS Church hosts this conference and does quite a bit of online streaming (both video and audio).  This has fairly significant infrastructure implications.  What do we do – do we setup our infrastructure to scale to the peak demand (which we really could never do) or something close?  The cost associated with that is just not worth it for the two times a year that the infrastructure is needed.  Enter dynamic resource allocation from the cloud.  Now we deploy our app to the cloud with hooks into our identity and storage infrastructure (or even push some of the storage to the cloud).  Now we can dynamically add resources leveraging our existing app.  Another area that was mentioned by a co-worker is the community development initiative that the Church is starting – hosting in the cloud with secure access to internal services provides some interesting food for thought.

I have registered for the Azure CTP and am looking forward to writing some real code with it to try out some of the claims and see where they deliver and where there is more vapor than substance.

I will try and add posts here as I can – but Twitter is much better for sharing the bite-sized updates that are captured as part of sessions.  You can catch my Twitters at http://twitter.com/HintonBR.  A summary post will be coming sometime soon to capture my notes from the VS2010 session I went to plus the Dublin session I am in as well as others depending on when I get it done.

Here are the pictures I took of my time hands-on with Surface

Snowboard Design app

App list that you can flick through

Photo app grouping photos by categories

Virtual Earth app – I loved it – no 3D mode yet – that would be even better – but cool to use Multi-Touch movement to navigate the map

Keynote stage

Video of Surface

And we are done and off to the first session of the day – Whew!

10:10 – Ozzie back on stage for a summary – PDC participants will get first crack at Azure – no cost during CTP – pricing will be competitive, but not set right now

10:08 – Showed a sample app that connected on premise services to CRM Online and SharePoint online

9:57 – Talking about how you would connect your on-premises security to the cloud – Microsoft Online using that today.

9:50 – David Thompson on stage now – 20 minutes or so to go it sounds like – Thompson was a leader or the lead of the Exchange 2007 project – among other things

9:48 – Azure is such a huge game changer – huge bet by Microsoft – I can’t wait to play with it – Muglia said that Azure capabilities will be rolled into on-premise software so that you can leverage Azure platform internally eventually (or at least that is how I understood what Bob said)

9:44 – Showing a System Center project codenamed – Atlanta – that will allow you to push System Center data to the cloud – Azure will process the data using SQL Services to transform it for analysis – and then expose reports to companies on their data and their system health compared to other companies (if you want - opt-in model)

9:43 – Demo of how you can connect B2B

9:36 – Muglia talked about some cool stuff – Azure will contain the ability to connect your local identity stores (like your local Active Directory) and your local services with the Cloud versions securely so that you can leverage your on-premise capabilities in the cloud – it no longer is one way or the other – you can have both cloud and local capabilities and have them play together

9:24 – Muglia on stage now – back to high level stuff for now – what is Windows Strata?  I think Windows Azure is what people thought Strata was – was MS just playing with people?

9:21 – Showing how easy it is to scale up the number of servers available using Azure

9:20 – Showing Bluehoo’s management interface showed

9:18 – Bluehoo is a Silverlight app hosted in Windows Azure

9:16 – Bluehoo – social networking type app is one of the killer demos – built on Windows Azure

9:15 – Management interface looks great – plus a Staging environment prior to Production – will MS finally deliver a good deployment solution at the launch of a platform?

9:13 – Cloud on your desktop – so with debugging you can run locally to test your apps using API parity – WOW!

9:10 – Azure supports both managed and unmanaged code and Visual Studio will provide a rich developer experience.  A Hello World demo is going – Steve Marks showing how to build and deploy a service.

9:09 – High Availability features handles data replication – showed a graphic showing subsystems that looked like it included S3 and Simple DB capabilities

9:07 – Services in Azure involve not just code, but the model that describes how the fabric should handle your service

9:06 – Keeps referring to the fabric controller as a key piece to sharing the resources and enabling scale in Azure – manages services and not just servers – allows for automation of service lifecycle

9:05 – App and OS managed separately to handle service degradation

9:04 – Multiple levels of security – including CAS and HyperVisor isolation

9:03 – Azure is a scalable hosting environment – use as much as you need – using HyperVisor

9:02 – Here comes the Azure demo formerly code-named Red Dog

9:01 – SQL Server Data Services is renamed to SQL Services and they will be adding SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services to the offering – Sql Services is part of Azure

8:57 – Demo coming it sounds like – Azure starts in North America first – CTP launches today – starts with a fraction of the capability of where they envision it going.  MS betting on Azure today – not sure what that means today – Live Mesh? Online offerings going to Azure?

8:56 – Windows Azure different in some ways than what we are used to – but Ray set the stage such that it sounds like Azure will be pluggable by partners ala what Windows has allowed for years

8:50 – Ray mentioned a couple of the best and brightest that formed a team to build a platform for the nextgen web – Ray tipped hat to EC2, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos for their innovation – Windows Azure is the new service in the cloud – I believe to be the competitor to EC2 – a new Windows Web Tier offering or Windows in the Cloud

8:48 – Wireless network is going nuts – can’t keep an IP so this Live blog isn’t so live :)

8:45 – Ray talking about the great emphasis on community and collaboration that exists today – mentioned the impact that a note in the blogosphere can have on traffic and how a company has to plan for that spike scale – obviously going to how utility computing can ramp up your need without you investing in the infrastructure – leveraging Amazon for example as a way to handle spikes in traffice – is the announcement of MS EC2 competitor coming?

8:41 – Big emphasis on what Software + Services means – we’ll see what MS means by this over the next couple of days

8:39 – MS builds apps on their platforms to vet the platform

8:38 – Ray going on about stuff – talking about platform shifts

8:36 – Lights going down

Over the last few months it has seemed like every interesting discussion about MS products has some how involved a “just wait until PDC” statement.  Thankfully PDC is finally here.  Tomorrow Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia kick it off with a keynote starting at 8:30 am PT.  On Tuesday there are two keynotes one from 8:30-10:30 with Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, and David Treadwell and then another one from 11:00-12:30 with Don Box and Chris Anderson.  The second one is for sure about Oslo and demoing that.  If I had to guess the first one on Tuesday will involve a Live Mesh show and tell – I wonder what Monday will bring with Muglia and Ozzie – VS2010 stuff to show??

The “goods” or the “bits” won’t be given to attendees until Tuesday – undoubtably because they don’t want the surprises slated for the keynotes to slip out beforehand.  I will be busy twittering for sure and probably a little live blogging as well.  Can’t wait to get started tomorrow. 

I am staying up in Hollywood as all the Conference hotels were sold out by the time I registered (or at least the ones that where semi-reasonable were sold out).  So I am taking the Metro into the Convention Center every morning.  Not too bad actually – I actually enjoyed the experience today – we’ll see if I get tired of it as the week wears on.  The only bummer is no cell reception on the metro – is it like that in New York and other places (Washington D.C.) – if so that is lame – and if not then why hasn’t LA figured out how to make it work yet?

This news article reflects my same sentiments.  Blu-ray may have won the format war, but it has already lost the overall battle.  Streaming videos into your home is already a reality.  You can do it with Netflix (their partnership with Starzz makes their list of movies to watch now much more interesting), Movelink (partnered with Blockbuster), Amazon, and Apple.  Netflix launched their set-top box this year and Apple has had the AppleTV out for quite a while now.  You also have Media Center extenders that take XP Media Center and Vista Media Center and allow you to watch movies from Amazon, Netflix, and Movielink including the renting and downloading all from right at your TV. 

People are ripping their movies from DVD onto HDDs at an increasing rate as well (I can’t count how many Disney DVDs we have had to replace because of scratching).  These HDD based movies are available through some of the mediums discussed above (notably Media Center) to be viewed without ever having to put a disc in anything.  I see this mode increasing especially when you add to it the home movies, photos, and music collections that people are accumulating.  As an aside the increasing amount of digital storage that the average user has puts increased emphasis on having a solid backup strategy.  Even with the likes of Time Machine, Windows Home Server, Mozy and other online services, and even the improved backup capabilities in Vista there is a lot of room for improvement here in the consumer market.  In the end Blu-ray will undoubtedly stay around for a few more years until the streaming options include HD quality, but its demise is already fixed.  Let the streaming wars begin!

I am watching the debates tonight and was discouraged on the initial statements about the economy.  I would love to hear the candidates say that while the government will help people where possible that people made bad decisions and to some degree they will have to suffer the consequences for those decisions.  That is a bad way to get elected of course and so I won’t hold my breath waiting to hear one of them say that.

The fact of the matter is that much of the economic growth over the last couple of decades has been fueled by credit.  Credit that people chose to use (the excuse that a person qualified for it so they took it makes no sense – if a person doesn’t know what they can afford  then they shouldn’t go out and incur more debt).  We are suffering the consequences of that today as the market corrects drastically (the Dow has lost 1/3 of its value in the last year).  In these drastic times the government has to get involved.  But don’t do it by buying out bad debt - do it by investing in American infrastructure!  Invest in roads, energy, and technology!  Doing so will create all different kinds of jobs and help people to ride out the bad times.  Lifestyles will have to change for sure, but we will make it through and we will come out stronger if we invest.

Americans are constantly faced by a myriad of choices.  When we go out to eat we have to pick between Italian, American, Chinese, Greek, Thai, Mexican, Indian, etc….  Once you have picked a type then you have to choose between Applebees, Chili’s, Outback, etc…  The same thing happens on trips to the grocery store, picking a dentist, or what movie to go to.  Many times we sit and spin on making a choice about something that likely doesn’t truly matter that much.

In the technology world this problem continually manifests itself.  Most techies have probably seen projects where the project deadline was hit before all the architectural choices were made because too much time was spent weighing the pros and cons of the variety of choices available.  That isn’t to say that decisions shouldn’t be weighed and measured, but that this activity should be time-boxed and at the end of the time the decision be made based on the data available.  One common example I use as evidence for this is citing the variety of technologies used by the big sites out on the Web.  Facebook uses PHP, MySpace and Microsoft use ASP.NET, Google uses Java (I believe) as do many, many others.  The same argument could be made about what server OS to use, what database to use, and so on.  The fact of the matter is with good people most technologies can be made to meet the need.  The argument that many people will try to cite is the productive improvements that technology X will bring.  The problem with that argument is that productivity is very difficult to measure (many smart people have tried and I have yet seen anyone to trumpet a truly successful way to measure) and so that argument is easy to make, but very, very difficult to prove correct (and often not worth the cost of doing so).

The danger comes when the new technology of the day or moment causes continual churn in an organization.  The seduction of always looking for best of breed (assuming for a moment that there was someway to truly determine best of breed) is that you are then set up to become a technology merry-go-round.  Invest in your technology selections, build expertise, and go deliver value.  Choose to get off the merry-go-round and make a commit.  Change of course will come over time, but when it does it should be obvious and done for obvious reasons.  In most cases change should be made because it will be a game changer either in dollars saved or dollars earned or provide obvious (emphasis on obvious) productivity gains.

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Hotmail was updated this week as part of the Wave 3 rollout.  When the Live Calendar Wave 3 update rolled a couple of weeks ago we got a good idea of what the UI for the new Hotmail would look like.  I like the cleaner look a lot.  In my previous post about the Client pieces of Wave 3 I commented that the UI change on the client didn’t do much for me.  That is not the case with the UI changes for Hotmail and Calendar, I like the changes a lot.  The performance as promised by the team seems great. 

The search feature worked great – sweeping quickly through my mail collection to find matching items.  I couldn’t find a way to make it only search a specific folder which I like as an option to constrain search results from time to time. 

One glitch to note is that with IE8 when trying to switch to Calendar it opens a new window.  With FF3 the Calendar view shows up in the same window that Hotmail was showing in as I would prefer and expect.  Not sure if that is a problem with how IE8 is working for me specifically or if that is the anticipated behavior for IE8 – I hope not!

Contacts

I have a couple of gripes about contacts to air, but they really stem from the fact that I love what they have done to the Contacts view.  There has been some great work done there.  Not all the integration is available to us at this point I am assuming because in blog postings about the upgrade from the Hotmail team I could see People showing up on their Wave 3 header and that doesn’t show up on mine (although People does show up on the Contacts page as the “title” for that page.  You have a better breakdown of all your contacts versus who is a Messenger contact.  You get to see their profile pictures and when you click on it you can send them a Spaces message, IM them, email them, or view their contact information.  When I try to IM them Live Messenger comes up from what has been written I would expect a Web version of Messenger would be displayed for you to chat with the contact if Live Messenger wasn’t installed on the system.

The Contact Info page is awesome in my opinion.  I love the Recent email listing sitting at the bottom.  The ability to quickly fire off an email to them embedded inline in the Contact page works really well for me (from a UI layout perspective that is – I never doubted that it would actually send an email to the person).  I went to my Gmail account to compare the UIs quickly.  Visually Hotmail was much cleaner to me – looks more polished as well.  All in all a much better UI look than Gmail IMO.  Back to the Contact page I LOVE that I can see a contacts permissions across Windows Live properties.  I can tell what Calendar permissions they have, what Skydrive folders they have access to (can wait for Skydrive and Live Mesh to have some integration story), and Profile information of mine they have access to as well as the same information about what I have access to of theirs.  It surprises me that I can’t edit those permissions from that screen – that enhancement would be Request #1.  Request #2 is that I would like to be able to sort my contact list in other ways than by name.  The main one that come to mind is by Status (Available, Offline, etc…).  There seems to be no effective way to see easily who is Online for example without selecting the Messenger Contacts option (since that is above the Category section it would seem to be considered something different than a Category) and then scanning the list which isn’t easy or effective.  Once again well done on the Contacts interface I love it.

Calendar

The Calendar Wave 3 upgrade rolled out a couple of weeks ago or so.  I talked briefly about it or referred to it is a more appropriate description in my previous post on the Wave 3 Clients.  I love the interface.  Clean and focused.  I love that To-Dos have made their appearance and with them being connected to a Calendar that concept of a shared task list etc… is really nice and MS has definitely one upped Google in this space.  With the subscription to ICS files worked out etc… my wife and I have started using this heavily.  We sync them to Outlook and update them in Outlook using Outlook Connector and that works wonderfully as well.  Calendar has made huge strides and now stands as a worthy competitor to Google Calendar.  That said I do have a few requests of course!

First – a way to search through your calendar – neither the online edition or the Live Mail Client exposed a way to search for future appointments.  Google Calendar has this and it is very handy – definitely a must have.  Second is To-Dos syncing down to the various Clients (Outlook or Live Mail).  I was disappointed that Live Mail didn’t have this with Wave 3.  I realize that there is a level of difficulty in matching Client capabilities with Server capabilities, but if the Clients are always going lag the Servers in functionality that is going to be a big disappointment.  Especially if new releases have the long lead times that Wave 3 has had.  Lastly, Recurring To-Dos!  I was surprised since we can add recurring events that recurring tasks weren’t available.  I use them heavily with Outlook and could never replace my To-Do tools without having recurring tasks.  You would also have to have that if you wanted to support a sync scenario with Windows Mobile.  I suppose that is truly my last request.  Windows Live for mobile has worked great for my email and contacts.  Obviously the last two pieces are Tasks and Calendar items.  Calendar is probably to the point where it may be possible to add that syncing capability.  Tasks/To-do synchronization with Windows Mobile will have to wait until we get recurring tasks.  I am not sure why I see a banner add on my Calendar.  I have a Hotmail Plus subscription and so I don’t see it on the Hotmail screen or on my Spaces site, but do see it on Calendar – that would seem to be a bug as I would expect it not to be there – am I wrong on that?

Additional requests aside I am very pleased with the server upgrades to Windows Live (much more so than the Client upgrades frankly).  I am very excited and hopefully to see similar good things with the upgrades to Spaces, Photos, etc… 

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Hotmail was updated this week as part of the Wave 3 rollout.  When the Live Calendar Wave 3 update rolled a couple of weeks ago we got a good idea of what the UI for the new Hotmail would look like.  I like the cleaner look a lot.  In my previous post about the Client pieces of Wave 3 I commented that the UI change on the client didn’t do much for me.  That is not the case with the UI changes for Hotmail and Calendar, I like the changes a lot.  The performance as promised by the team seems great. 

The search feature worked great – sweeping quickly through my mail collection to find matching items.  I couldn’t find a way to make it only search a specific folder which I like as an option to constrain search results from time to time. 

One glitch to note is that with IE8 when trying to switch to Calendar it opens a new window.  With FF3 the Calendar view shows up in the same window that Hotmail was showing in as I would prefer and expect.  Not sure if that is a problem with how IE8 is working for me specifically or if that is the anticipated behavior for IE8 – I hope not!

Contacts

I have a couple of gripes about contacts to air, but they really stem from the fact that I love what they have done to the Contacts view.  There has been some great work done there.  Not all the integration is available to us at this point I am assuming because in blog postings about the upgrade from the Hotmail team I could see People showing up on their Wave 3 header and that doesn’t show up on mine (although People does show up on the Contacts page as the “title” for that page.  You have a better breakdown of all your contacts versus who is a Messenger contact.  You get to see their profile pictures and when you click on it you can send them a Spaces message, IM them, email them, or view their contact information.  When I try to IM them Live Messenger comes up from what has been written I would expect a Web version of Messenger would be displayed for you to chat with the contact if Live Messenger wasn’t installed on the system.

The Contact Info page is awesome in my opinion.  I love the Recent email listing sitting at the bottom.  The ability to quickly fire off an email to them embedded inline in the Contact page works really well for me (from a UI layout perspective that is – I never doubted that it would actually send an email to the person).  I went to my Gmail account to compare the UIs quickly.  Visually Hotmail was much cleaner to me – looks more polished as well.  All in all a much better UI look than Gmail IMO.  Back to the Contact page I LOVE that I can see a contacts permissions across Windows Live properties.  I can tell what Calendar permissions they have, what Skydrive folders they have access to (can wait for Skydrive and Live Mesh to have some integration story), and Profile information of mine they have access to as well as the same information about what I have access to of theirs.  It surprises me that I can’t edit those permissions from that screen – that enhancement would be Request #1.  Request #2 is that I would like to be able to sort my contact list in other ways than by name.  The main one that come to mind is by Status (Available, Offline, etc…).  There seems to be no effective way to see easily who is Online for example without selecting the Messenger Contacts option (since that is above the Category section it would seem to be considered something different than a Category) and then scanning the list which isn’t easy or effective.  Once again well done on the Contacts interface I love it.

Calendar

The Calendar Wave 3 upgrade rolled out a couple of weeks ago or so.  I talked briefly about it or referred to it is a more appropriate description in my previous post on the Wave 3 Clients.  I love the interface.  Clean and focused.  I love that To-Dos have made their appearance and with them being connected to a Calendar that concept of a shared task list etc… is really nice and MS has definitely one upped Google in this space.  With the subscription to ICS files worked out etc… my wife and I have started using this heavily.  We sync them to Outlook and update them in Outlook using Outlook Connector and that works wonderfully as well.  Calendar has made huge strides and now stands as a worthy competitor to Google Calendar.  That said I do have a few requests of course!

First – a way to search through your calendar – neither the online edition or the Live Mail Client exposed a way to search for future appointments.  Google Calendar has this and it is very handy – definitely a must have.  Second is To-Dos syncing down to the various Clients (Outlook or Live Mail).  I was disappointed that Live Mail didn’t have this with Wave 3.  I realize that there is a level of difficulty in matching Client capabilities with Server capabilities, but if the Clients are always going lag the Servers in functionality that is going to be a big disappointment.  Especially if new releases have the long lead times that Wave 3 has had.  Lastly, Recurring To-Dos!  I was surprised since we can add recurring events that recurring tasks weren’t available.  I use them heavily with Outlook and could never replace my To-Do tools without having recurring tasks.  You would also have to have that if you wanted to support a sync scenario with Windows Mobile.  I suppose that is truly my last request.  Windows Live for mobile has worked great for my email and contacts.  Obviously the last two pieces are Tasks and Calendar items.  Calendar is probably to the point where it may be possible to add that syncing capability.  Tasks/To-do synchronization with Windows Mobile will have to wait until we get recurring tasks.  I am not sure why I see a banner add on my Calendar.  I have a Hotmail Plus subscription and so I don’t see it on the Hotmail screen or on my Spaces site, but do see it on Calendar – that would seem to be a bug as I would expect it not to be there – am I wrong on that?

Additional requests aside I am very pleased with the server upgrades to Windows Live (much more so than the Client upgrades frankly).  I am very excited and hopefully to see similar good things with the upgrades to Spaces, Photos, etc… 

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Yep – BYU Football season is here.  That means Saturdays are pretty busy, but we love it.  Add E’s soccer games on top of that and we are struggling to find time with the yard.  Notice the new video board in the north stands in the picture below.  Before this year we always had to turn around and kink our next to see the replay board.  Not anymore!

E is great at the games.  She loves Cosmo and the cheerleaders and even watches the game every once in a while.  Especially during the touchdowns and fight song!  But we do find we have to humor her with a snow cone once a game to reward her for letting her father satisfy his addiction to BYU Football.  I really love having Noel and E with me at the games.  It is a fun to have the family together there.  We enjoy meeting Mark and Stacey and Kevin at halftimes as well.  Normally we are celebrating the Cougars destruction of the opponent by that time (we hope that keeps up) – I think the halftime scores have been 27-3, 42-0, and 20-0 if I remember right.  Go Cougs!

I have been meaning to post these pictures for a while.  E is playing soccer this year with a team in the neighborhood.  It has been fun to go out and watch her.  I have to be careful and not “encourage” her too loudly.  She is adorable in her soccer outfit.  The first game she was a little enamored with her shin guards and played with them when she should have been playing soccer.  One time the ball came up and hit her shin guards as she was looking down at them/adjusting them.