Joe White’s Blog

Bill Gates keynote

This is Bill’s last public appearance as a full-time Microsoft employee.

Video: Bill Gates’ Last Full Day

Technology Megatrends

• Hardware performance: Moore’s Law, multi-core
• Ubiquitous broadband, RPC
• Unlimited storage
• Mobility & new devices
• Natural user interface: touch screen, speech recognition
• High fidelity displays

Opportunities for Developers

• Presentation
• Business Logic
• Data
• Services

PRESENTATION

Silverlight demo (S. Somasegar)

• Crossfader: social networking media sharing site
• Silverlight is a true subset of WPF, so Silverlight controls can be reused in WPF
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 should be delivered by the end of this week, with a Go-Live license

BUSINESS LOGIC

Modeling demo (Brian Harry)

• View > Architecture Explorer: class diagram (design as it actually is)
• Architecture Layer diagram (design as it was meant to be: diagram of layers; can be validated against actual code by right-clicking in designer; can be a check-in policy)
• Upcoming release of VSTS for Database Professionals: can maintain DB2 databases from Visual Studio
• Database refactorings: rename field in database, renames in code (available today)
• Codename “Oslo”: modeling tools, modeling language, model repository

DATA

SQL Server 2008 demo (Dave Campbell)

• Spatial data
• File integration: VARBINARY has an attribute saying “store it as a file stream”; still gets backed up
• Full timezone support: can store timestamps along with the timezone
• Available in the next month or two

SERVICES

FUTURE OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

• Design
• Analysis & design tools
• Next generation declarative languages
• Execution
• Process aware engines/platforms
• Self-aware system management

Microsoft Robotics demo (Tandy Trower)

• Robotics are expensive and require specialty maintainers
• Just emerging at the personal level — about where PCs were in the early 1980s
• Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio: development for robots, including simulation
• Self-balancing robot with dextrous arms and a picture of Steve Ballmer’s face
• RoboChamps competition: program simulated robots, win real robots (www.robochamps.com)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under .NET, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.