For those who have read my previous 3 days of quick reports on Tech.Ed, I think I might need to explain who I am and why I attended Tech.Ed 2008. I use Windows on the desktop (ahem… it’s a work computer!) but I was trained in a university which taught programming on *nix system (UNSW). I had my very first professional gig as C/C++ programmer on SCO OpenServer. I’ve used Linux for 13 years and Vim has been my text editor of choice over the last 10 years. Coding for a *nix/Linux system is just so much more natural to me.

But then a start up that I was part of (and still is) got bought out by another ISV around a few years ago, and these guys use pretty much Microsoft stack all the way through. So my team (Linux loving, mostly UNSW grads) started living a “double life” at work — almost all developers worked on Linux, but we have to build and deploy our software on Win2k3 boxes. And now they’ve just sent me to a convention focusing on the technology that I’ve been trying very hard to avoid…

Okay. Back to Microsoft.

It’s a company that everyone likes to bash. Obviously when I say “everyone”, I am talking about those who read Slashdot or those who read TechCrunch (note — two very different crowd). To them, all the open source projects and new web start ups are pronouncing the defeat of Microsoft. MSFT is in trouble because Windows Vista does not sell. They are in trouble because Firefox/OpenOffice.org/Google Chrome are taking up more shares in the market. Google Docs is so much better than Office 2007 (yeah right). Zune is crap. Jerry Seinfeld + Bill Gates is worse. Etc.

But one of the most important messages I received in the Tech.Ed this year was — Microsoft is much more than just a software company. While it has also quickly transformed itself into a service company (like Google and Yahoo) and an infrastructure company (like Amazon WS), it is also a well established solution company (think IBM, Accenture, etc). They implement end to end solutions for enterprises with multi-million dollar budget. For those who triumph over the fact that he uses Linux, Firefox and OO.o instead of Microsoft equivalent — just think about how much tax you have paid to the government, who spent big chunk of the budget on IT projects, many were designed by Microsoft certified architects using Microsoft development tools, deployed on the Microsoft operating systems…

And the scary thing is — how many other solution companies can provide the entire stack — from operating system, virtualisation, database, web/messaging servers, development tools, deployment tools, programming languages, web browsers, RIA runtime and the whole lot? Sun, maybe, although most won’t consider their own database system of “enterprise grade”. Not to mention Sun seriously needs a health check. In Anna Liu’s presentation on Wednesday where she showed a slide of a big application stack — there’s a Microsoft product for almost everything. For Microsoft certified professional developers, they probably won’t think twice in choosing the right component, because MSFT have already done all the thinking + implementation for them. Talking about vendor lock in…

With so much invested in development stack and infrastructure, developers and architects who have sold their soul to Microsoft platform, are actually one of MSFT’s biggest assets. And with 3,000+ attendance at Tech.Ed 2008, this community is definitely not small size. These are the developers who are part of multi-million dollar projects in government, education, banks, etc. It’s more than just Microsoft defending themselves from non-Microsoft products. These developers too have been advocating for their SQL Server, for their IIS and for their VisualStudio — not just because of their loyalty but the entire Microsoft development stack is what brings food on the table for them. Obviously they will stick up for their favourite company in Redmond!

And the Two-Point-Oh people can continue with their yada yada yada. Big corporates are usually immune to them — at least here in Australia.

Or maybe it is just Australia, which I found is very Microsoft’ised in comparison with many Asia and Europe countries, where some government will explicitly go the open source route to reduce vendor lock in.

Anyway. Sorry about my disturbing brain dump. The rule of the game is more than the mind share of Internet and office suite users, but the mind share of software developers. Not just those in the start ups but also numerous developers/architects in big corps who might rarely raise their opinion on blogs but are solely responsible in picking the tools for their next million dollar project.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Microsoft, having software products for the entire stack just make mind-share grabbing quite a bit easier.

Software Life Cycle for Business Apps

Sessions today turn out to be actually pretty good (see how brainwashed I am). My day started 10 minutes late again, and the first session I went to, “Managing the Development of Complex Line of Business Application”, was pretty helpful. Only Microsoft product mentioned was Microsoft Team Foundation Server which does not really apply to us as our Subversion, Wiki, Trac, and Mantis stack has pretty much covered everything. Interesting advice on managing projects in an iterative/agile environment and the emphasis on how important tests are (although we have already been doing them for years).

F# — for the Love of Programming

Two DEV talks were the highlights today for me. In the morning I went to “F#: For the Love of Programming” presented by Joel Pobar. The session pretty much covers the basics of F# (basic syntax, pattern matching, etc) and touched a little bit on why you want to learn functional programming. The emphasis has been on concurrency and multi-core programming — although I didn’t think the “why it’s better than imperative programming” has been explained properly. Well, the title was “For the Love of Programming” so I at least expected some imperative/OO bashing but I got none :) As an amateur OCaml programmer it is also nice to see the syntactic sugar Microsoft has given to F# (death to ever so confusing trailing semicolumns). With the access to all existing .NET libraries (battery included!) I think F# is really going to open up developers on the MS platform to a new world. TODO :: “F#”

Parallel Extensions for .NET

Second DEV talk I went to today was on Parallel Extensions for .NET, presented by Joe Duffy, who is another functional language geek. Parallel Extensions on the other hand is a reusable library for .NET that can be used by all .NET languages. I don’t think the extension brings in any new concept in concurrent programming, but rather it’s a library that your average C# developer can use to make use the multiple cores. But if you have shared state — the problem persists and I didn’t see alternatives like STM or Actor model getting mentioned. But indeed massive parallel computing will be the norm in the future, and how to get the average developers to start coding for that platform is not going to be an easy puzzle to solve.

High Availability with Hyper-V

Last talk I went to was on Hyper-V and HA. Nothing interesting except you can now click click click and do a quick migration of your VM between hosts.

Locknote

The last thing in the programme was the locknote, presented by Miha Kralj, a senior Architect at Microsoft, on the IT for the next 10 years. Very entertaining and quite a thought provoking talk (much better than the keynote may I say). So how’s Microsoft’s version of the future of IT? Cloud computing. Utility computing. Service oriented architecture. And it will be very different. Time to do some heath check on your current sacred cash cow, because it won’t be there in 10 years. Not sure what has Microsoft and Google have planned for theirs (Office and AdWords/AdSense).

So that’s it. I survived! I don’t think I have learn much that is really technical, but I think I do learn quite a bit about Microsoft’s stack of development platform. Actually I think I have a new understanding about “Microsoft” itself. I’ll blog about that tomorrow.

Silverlight 2 for Developers

I was 10 minutes late when I got there. “Silvelight 2 for developers” Hmm sounds interesting. It was about techniques in building de-coupled Silverlight 2 application in C# (btw, Silverlight 2 wasn’t even out yet). As someone who (1) does not know C# (2) not much idea about .NET runtime (3) have never built a Silverlight app before (4) blogged until 1am in the previous morning, I struggled to keep myself awake. Great techniques, but would be more useful if I am actually a C# developer. Next!

Silverlight for Mobile Apps

Then I went to “Introducing Silverlight for mobile applications” and actually got more usability advice than the usability session from yesterday. Amit and Neil are good presenters. As of Silverlight for mobile, I don’t think it is even ready (not until a version that can run managed code anyway). Meanwhile, there are already Flash Lite and J2ME. Next!

Reactive Programming

Reactive Programming is the title of the session I went along next. However, instead of explaining the programming paradigm and digging deep into language design, we went straight to C#, WPF, INotifyPropertyChange and all their voodoo magic. Actually the entire presentation is pretty much implementation specific, which certainly makes it less interesting than just discussing the languages themselves and maybe imperative vs. functional reactive programming. Next!

Layout Engine in Internet Explorer 8

After lunch I went to “Cross-Browser layout with MS IE 8″. Argh. Now I appreciate my browsers more (and they are not Internet Explorer).

Microsoft’s Application Platform in the Clouds

Then “Extending the Application Platform with Cloud Services”. Does that excite you, solution architects? Surely it does! Until the presenter revealed that the presentation is going to be exclusively about BizTalk and SQLServer Data Service. So we looked at the code example to call BizTalk — I think you can pretty much build the same service bus thing with Amazon SQS or a high-available XMPP server. SQLServer Data Service (SSDS) has nothing to do with SQL, but a big tuple bag of key/value pairs with LINQ-like querying syntax. Just like Amazon SimpleDB or Google BigTable. Next!

IronPython and Other .NET Dynamic Languages

The final show today was the highlight — “Pumping Iron: Dynamic Languages on .NET” where Harry Pierson talked about the benefit of dynamic typing languages and why they are useful to .NET users. Great presentation, and great arguments on why the lack of compile time checking is NOT really an issue. IronPython was used in the code example, which is something I am a bit familiar with. There will be a F# talk tomorrow (Microsoft’s O’Caml implementation for .NET) — looking forward to that.

So here we go. Left house at 7:40am and arrived at the Sydney Exhibition Centre at 8:15am to queue up for registration. Got my show bag — a nice Targus bag — and my name tag with an RFID on it (which I later find out doesn’t always work).

Keynote kicked in at 8:30am and I already felt sleepy 20 minutes through. Well. I wasn’t expecting Steve Jobs. I thought there should be at least some developer rock ‘n’ roll but I was disappointed that there wasn’t any. Amit did his job — so did I (trying to stay awake).

After keynote you can then start going to the sessions. First one I went to was on “Software + Service” by Anna Liu. Interesting break down of software/deployment components stack by stack. But Software + Service? They say it is more than software as a service (SaaS) but maybe I just can’t see the difference. That reminds me a similar presentation I went to back in 2000 when everyone raved about being an application service provider (ASP) — same thing! Might as well bring back the old main frames where all software is centrally deployed, administered and executed. Nothing new under the sun.

Also went to a few “usability” presentations by Shane Morris and Susan Wolfe. A Silverlight presentation. A VSTO presentation that I have completely no idea (but have no idea where else to go and two of my colleagues are going to that one). They are all “interesting” talks, but I can’t say I’ve learnt anything new. Maybe I am just repelling whatever is fed to me… Hopefully tomorrow’s sessions are going to be better.

Here’s one of my colleagues playing with the big ass table. Cool technology. All UI done in WPF. It does take some practise to get use to the inputting method. There are other exhibitors there showing their products and I managed to get a beanie from Citrix. Looking forward to more freebies on Friday…

Servers bores the adults working in the boring office.

Although many servers live in data centres…

But the Windows Home Server is fun!

Hopefully more fun than that dreadful Windows Vista!

Daddy loves mommy so daddy bought a Windows Home Server for mommy as a special gift.

Would you expect mommy’s response be, “Thank you a Windows Home Server! Something I always wanted!” I think not!

Windows Home Server is powerful that it is easy to install, shares files with all the other computers at home, shares files with your grandpa, grandma and uncle that “smell like bark”, and lets you access your files from school. Even if your lappy gets completely destroyed by your dog, its files are safe as they were backed up by the Windows Home Server.

Sounds just like my Linux Home Server, which has been running at home behind my desk for the last 7-8 years.

You might get teased and laughed at because you have a Windows Home Server at home, but the truth is they are just jealous of the blink blink lights.

You get teased and laughed at because your private diary and funny home video stored on your Windows Home Server has been copied and pasted all over YouTube, as a 0-day security exploit exposed the entire hard disk to the Internet.

Daddy, mommy, you and the Windows Home Server — everyone lives happily ever after. The end.

… Until the hard disk crashes its head and everything is gone. Well, they should have bought JungleDisk for WHS so the data got backed up to a “real server” in the data centre.

• Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
• Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Well, as I am reading large amount of text every single day on computers, Microsoft’s Clear Type seems to be easier on my eyes.

Conclusion? UCE is nothing more than a gimmick that attracts Christians to Ubuntu Linux. People will say, “hey I will use it because it labels Christian!” However, as UCE requires Ubuntu pre-installed — by the time you can start installing UCE you are already 99% there.

However Dan’s article raised another discussion — how should Christians relate to Microsoft, open source and Linux? Some people think Christians should avoid Microsoft at all cost as Bill Gates has 666 all over his forehead. And this linked bug item reckons “This (Microsoft Windows) is a waste of money for Christian communities, as well as a clash with Christian values”.

Is that the case?

My opinion is, if you, a committed Christian, can stand open source software, then use it! It saves you money, and gives you freedom to play around with the source code, if that’s your thing. Otherwise, do your duty and “render to Gates (or Jobs) the things that are Gates’”, pay for that copy of Windows (or Mac OS X) and use it with clean conscience. It just paid for the family meal of a hard working middle-class Windows developer in Redmond. Using Ubuntu obviously does not make you holier, and using Windows is not an unforgivable sin.

In last Sunday’s Bible study we looked at 2 Corinthians 5, and one of the challenge questions at the end was along the line of “as a new creation, what area of your life needs to be changed?” One thing I asked was, as Christians we should put off downloading pirated software, MP3 and movies. I thought it was obviously, but surprisingly it generated quite a bit of discussion on “who’s at fault” (yeah, the search engine gives me all these results).

At the end, I’ll say the software you obtained legally are “Christian Editions”.

1. Interface looks sleek. Nice shades. No more menu bar (unless you want to be called a classic).
2. Now you can manage IE Add-ons just like how you can manage extensions in Firefox. Except most 3^rd party add-ons are commercial with a price tag.
3. Rendering, as far as I can tell, is very close to IE6. Actually, the better way to say it is, when you look at the rendered result, you can tell that it is Internet Explorer. It might have better CSS support, but I still found exactly the same glitch when rendering certain pages.
4. Tabs, oh tabs! Middle-click to open a link, Ctrl-W to close the tab — just like the others. Now all the modern browsers have tabs. Welcome to the team, IE.
5. RSS/Atom feed support. Nice feed rendering, but it seems to ignore any stylehseet declared in the feed, i.e. FeedBurner’s feeds still show up in IE’s own style. IE7 also lets you subscribe to feeds — just like all the other modern browsers.
6. Toolbar search box. Surprisingly default to Google (hmmm, just like all other browsers). It uses OpenSearch format to define providers, which is nice.
7. Extra security features, i.e. phishing detection. Good stuff. Not much use to me, but I am sure it would save grief of many when it is released.
8. Favourite/bookmark management still sucks. They probably intended to keep them hard to use so users will stick to the preset list of links
9. Memory leaks like crazy. I think the days is numbered where Firefox 1.5 as the memory leak leader. I have to literally close down the browser every hour to keep memory usage sane. I guess that what “beta” is for.

Fortunately due to limited rendering change our web application still works flawlessly on IE7. Now, how do I revert mine back to IE6?

Update: Just killed IE7 again. Closing multiple tags with Developer Toolbar running — hangs. Oh well.

There are five VS expression edition to download — Web Developer, Basic, C#, C++ and J#, ranging from 35-70 Mb if you use its download link. MSDN also provides ISO images if you want to burn them onto CD’s.

Well done, MSFT! Stiff competition huh, from these guys?! Too bad I don’t currently code in any of the languages Visual Studio Express provides, and there is no way MSFT can pry Vim from my cold dead fingers.

Well done Billy!

And we also get Microsoft Gadgets. I was expecting modular widgets that run on desktop like Yahoo’s Konfabulator, Google’s Desktop sidebar or Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard, but it turns out to be web applications described in XML, coded in Javascript, rendered in HTML and plugged right into Live.com and Start.com.

So, other companies are moving back to the desktop, where Microsoft embraces the web? What the?!

Elsewhere on the net:

• Russell Beattie — Microsoft’s Live: Monopoly 4.0. Windows Live is about integreting “live services” between web and desktop applications, and Microsoft is set to dominating not only your desktop, but all your web sites/web services as well.
• Joel Spolsky — Massive Frontal PR is incompatible with Ship Early and Often. Yeah. It is all about PR, and when you have lots of $$$ in the bank, you get PR!
• TechCrunch — Windows Live – More than an AJAX Desktop. Windows Live is cool, especially that AJAX Instant Messenge client that integrates with VoIP and runs inside your browser.
• Tim O’Reilly — Live Software. Microsoft has realised that Internet itself is indeed a platform, and Microsoft is also the one that has power to build an end-to-end integrated experience.
• Robert Scoble — Joel, and others, give us hell for Live.com. Everyone is giving Microsoft a hard time! But more interesting thing is to come — from some undisclosed internal sources deep inside the company, of couse.

Well, there are absolutely too many discussions out there. Basically there are two kinds of responses from existing “Web 2.0″ companies/developers — (1) Welcome! (2) Go away! But one of my favourite is this comment here by Nivi:

Do you know what you get when you spell live backwards?

You get evil.