Mike Vincent's Blog : PDC

PDC Birds of a Feather Follow-up

mikev — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:42:00 GMT

I'm a month late following up on PDC but it was a real success in my opinion. I had a great time starting off with Monday's pre-conference hosting an MVP table at the lunch break to discuss the new Visual Studio configurations and deeper integration of ALM. On Tuesday, David Starr and I hosted a Birds of a Feather session "Agile Tales of Triumph, Tribulation, Tools and Teams". The discussion was great and carried over to the adjoining public area afterwards. We literally could have gone all day! Like many of the BOF sessions we had an overflow crowd and some people were turned away because of room capacity. Overall, the BOF sessions were a big success. Thanks to Stuart Celarier, Chris Pels, and Bob Goodearl for a fantastic organizing job.

LA Code Camp, November 21 and 22

mikev — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:14:00 GMT

The LA Code will be November 21 and 22, the weekend right after PDC 09 at the USC campus. Several teams from Microsoft including Team System, Languages (C# and VB.NET) and ASP.NET plan to be presenting sessions. I’m to entice some from the Windows Azure team to join in as well. This will be a great opportunity to catch some of the latest info on just released and soon to be released development tools. You can get more information at http://www.SoCalCodeCamp.com and http://www.lacodecamp.com. Sign up and if you also want to present a session, sign up for that as well. Hope to see you there.

Keeping the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC from PDC 2008 running

mikev — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:35:00 GMT

The Virtual PC image for Visual Studio 2010 CTP provided at PDC 2008 and downloadable from here has an expiration of 1/1/2009. However, you can keep using it if you follow the guidance provided by Brian Keller. Here's a summary.

There are several moving expiration parts you'll have to contend with

Activation Toast - you'll get a "toast" from time to time asking you to activate Windows. Workaround: Ignore of click the "X" to dismiss it.
Activate Windows Now - When you boot the VPS image you'll receive a modal dialog for Windows Activation. Workaround: Click on "Activate Later."
Word Excel Activation - The trial versions only work 20 times, after whichmost functionality will stop working. Workaround: The first 20 times you can click "Cancel" to dismiss the activation dialog. After that you'll have to revert to a fresh copy of the VPC image.
Project Activation - The trial version will work 25 times. Workaround: After 25 times you'll have to revert to a fresh copy of the VPC image.
Visual Studio 2010 CTP Expiration - After 1/1/2009 you can no longer launch the Visual Studio 2009 CTP. Workaround: You'll need to roll back the system clock in the VPC to an earlier date. Caution, don't roll back to earlier than your last interaction with TFS because it will get confused. It's better to revert to a fresh copy of the VPC image and immediately turn off Date/Time synchronization, then roll back to an earlier date.

And, Jeff Beehler's Blog tells you how to turn off the synchronization of the VPC and the host OS. By turning off the synchronization, the time in the VPC moves forward on for the actual time the VPC is being used. That gives you about 2 months of actual run time.

Here are the changes necessary for the .VMC file (specific to a particular VPC and not a system-wide setting):

<integration>
    <microsoft>
        <mouse>
            <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
        </mouse>
        <components>
            <host_time_sync>
                <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
            </host_time_sync>
        </components>

Bunch of other stuff that I am skipping over to save space...
    </microsoft>
</integration>

Thanks to Brian and Jeff.

PDC Follow-up

mikev — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:10:00 GMT

PDC 2008 finished up last Thursday. I had a very productive time, both attending sessions and networking. Here are some of the session highlights:

Keynote on Day 1 - Windows Azure announcement by Ray Ozzie. The cloud is coming. With Windows Azure, Microsoft is beginning a new chapter of significant change where we will see more organizations using both on-premises and cloud based resources. We’re going to see really expanded SOA resources and will need to sharpen our distributed systems skills and apply some new principles to our development to best take advantage of Windows Azure.
A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System 2010 by Cameron Skinner. A lot of great focus on Test and Architecture. Test case management, dealing with “it works on my box” with some really awesome recording capabilities to provide context with the new test runner. The Architecture Explorer allows easy visualization of code, UML diagrams are now first class citizens, and the Layer diagram lets you see and test multi-tier relationships.

NET Framework 4.0 – The Future of C# - Anders Hejlsberg. Declarative, dynamic, concurrent – the classic taxonomies are increasingly overlapping. We’re moving from imperative to declarative programming. Language innovations will fall into four broad categories:
- Dynamically typed objects
- Optional and named parameters
- Improved COM interoperability
- Co- and Contra-variance
Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET – Jim Hugunin. The DLR adds a shared dynamic type system, a standard hosting model and support for generating fast dynamic code on top of the CLR. Expressions trees, dynamic dispatch, and call site caching are the key features of the DLR. The DLR is open source to provide language access under MSPL plus availability in the commercial .NET stack.
Iron Ruby: The Right Language for the Right Job – John Lam. IronRuby is a new dynamically-typed language for Microsoft .NET that offers more runtime flexibility at the expense of compile-time verification. John provided an introduction to Iron Ruby that demonstrated the interactive benefits. He leveraged a micro-framework named Sinatra to demonstrate several examples.
A Lap Around “Oslo” – Vijaye Raji and Douglas Purdy. "Oslo" is the family of new technologies that enable model-driven development and execution of services and applications. So, “Oslo” is the platform for model driven applications. M (as in MVC - the language) is a textual language for building models and DSL’s. “Quadrant” is the tool for interacting with models and DSL’s. The Repository is the database for storing and sharing models.

Architecting Services for Windows Azure – Yousef Khalidi. From design to deployment, building a scalable, highly available service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session discussed the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how the Microsoft cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service. This session showed how automation is used to free the developer from dealing with many hardware and networking issues. The session also covered how the cloud services platform is architected to enable a pay-for-use dynamic model.
Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with Visual Studio 2010 – Daniel Moth. As Moore’s law continues to mature, processor speeds have leveled out but we’re getting more processors. Our software needs to harness this paradigm change. New .NET APIs, including the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). Also, new features in the debugger will help us to quickly identify concurrency issues and visualize the internal state of our applications.

The Future of Unit Testing, Panel Discussion. Unit testing means different things to different people. To Agile developers, it enables Test Driven Development. To researchers, it enables test generation from static and dynamic analysis. To others, it's a means to test protocols, APIs, and other functionality below the presentation layer. Others still see it as a means to do conformance testing. This panel discussion could have gone on for hours but was great even for the limited time available.
Architecture Without Big Design Up Front – Peter Provost. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), code-name "Rosario" Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. The session showed how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of our code. We saw how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft – Stephanie Saad. This session gave us a detailed look at the present and future of Team Foundation Server (TFS). With close to 14,000 users, 2,000 projects, 33 million files, and over 2 million work items, Microsoft runs one of the largest known installations of TFS. Stephanie talked about internal best practices for version control, branching and merging, work item tracking, metrics, reporting, testing, and integrations with TFS.

In addition to the sessions, networking was great. I had an opportunity to meet up with many of my community and Microsoft friends plus meet a lot of new people. I got to spend some time each day with the VSTS team and really appreciated the opportunity to get to know them better and see what kinds of issues PDC attendees wanted to discuss. Huddled with Doug Seven to work out some details on a new forthcoming VSTS INETA program. Wednesday included a chance to hand out with Scott Guthrie at his open spaces session.

Sunday evening included Party with Palermo. Monday evening was multi-tasking two dinners - the C# and VB team dinner (socialized before everyone sat down to eat) was a great get together (a big thanks to Charlie Calvert and Lisa Feigenbaum for making this happen) of community and the development teams including Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Beth Massi, Alan Greiver (YAG). It was then down the street to Roy's for a great dinner with many of the community and DPE folks and community influentials. Tuesday was a jam packed evening including dinner with the VSTS team and the Universal Studios evening hanging out with the Accentient crew and some of the VSTS team. Wendesday was the http://underground.socalcodecamp.com, a really cool event.

LA Code Camp a Success

mikev — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:15:00 GMT

The first LA Code Camp held Oct 25 and 26 at USC was a success. It's been about 5 years since I was last on the campus (USC was a major client for a few years) and there are new buildings sprouting everywhere. I met up with Harry Pierson (Iron Python PM) on Saturday morning, one of several Microsoft people down early for PDC and really helping to add some great content. Other included Charlie Calvert (C# PM), Chuck Sterling and Grant Holiday (VSTS, both from Down Under). Harry was down early to make sure everything he was responsible for at PDC was running well and did his Pumping Iron presentation. The Iron Python team just got Iron Python 2.0 Release Candidate 1 out so I did a quick code update to make sure my examples ran on the updated code base. Grant and Chuck did A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System 2010 which was a great PDC preview on VSTS and a bit of polish on earlier Rosario previews. My session Sunday morning Dynamic Languages and the DLR was kind of a bust because the projector in the class room would randomly shut itself off after a couple of minutes. I finally had to move to a table and present straight from my notebook but by then the time was way short.

Overall, the Code Camp was good. The Geek Dinner Saturday night ran smoothly and participation was good, although I was hoping to see a few more. A big thanks to the organization team and sponsors.

Countdown to PDC

mikev — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:38:00 GMT

PDC is almost here. And, as a warm-up, we have the LA Code Camp Saturday and Sunday at USC. There will be over 80 presentations from our local talent, several “out of towners”, and some of the Microsoft product team members down for PDC.

For PDC, I’m looking forward to some deep involvement in Visual Studio 10 and VSTS, previously code named Rosario.

Here’s what Dr Dobbs has to say

Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework

Includes ALM enhancements

Microsoft has provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. This includes an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named "Rosario") will help "democratize" ALM with a unique solution that brings all the members of a development organization into the application development lifecycle, and removes many of the existing barriers to integration.

"With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. "These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application lifecycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months."

Here's what Microsoft means by "democratizing" ALM: Much of application development remains siloed throughout the enterprise, leading to decreased productivity and lengthy product development cycles. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft is giving individuals and development organizations an solution that lets them integrate and build and deliver applications. This includes new capabilities that make it easier for all contributors on the software team to participate throughout the lifecycle -- from the core developers and testers to the wider team of project managers, designers, and business analysts. Highlights include:

Modeling tools. With VSTS 2010 Architecture, Microsoft will enable both technical and nontechnical users to create and use models to collaborate and to define business and system functionality graphically. The new version supports both Unified Modeling Language and Domain Specific Language support, so development organizations will have the right tool for right job. The new modeling capabilities in VSTS 2010 are a core part of the larger Microsoft modeling platform, which will also include the "Oslo" repository, tools and language.
Improved efficiency throughout the test cycle. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft has made a significant investment in testing features and dramatically simplifying the tools required to integrate testing across the life cycle. New features include the ability to eliminate nonreproducible bugs, fast setup and deployment of tests to ensure the highest degree of completeness of test, focused test planning and progress tracking, and ensuring that all code changes are properly tested.
Improvements in collaboration capabilities. Microsoft has made major investments in the capabilities and scalability of Team Foundation Server (TFS) including significant improvements that allow teams to configure and adopt any flavor of Agile development processes. Teams can track and trace work more easily with richer linking of work items enabling hierarchical work item relationships. In the source code management system, TFS now provides visualization tools for tracking changes across branches and into the production build. VSTS 2010 also introduces workflow-based builds that catch errors before they have a chance to affect the rest of the team or, worse, enter production. Finally, administrators will find dramatically simpler TFS deployment and management.

In another move to increase integration across the lifecycle, Microsoft also announced that VSTS 2010 will provide a unified VSTS Development and Database product. As a benefit to existing Software Assurance (SA) customers, those who currently own Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition or Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition will receive all the following products starting Oct. 1, 2008, for free:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers
Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals

And, don’t forget The Underground @ PDC Wednesday night at the Edison.

LA Code Camp

mikev — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:23:00 GMT

Coming up October 25 and 26 is the first LA Code Camp. It’ll be held at the USC campus. This is the weekend just before PDC so we may see some of the Microsoft product teams attending. I’m again doing my continuous evolving dynamic languages presentation. Currently there are 47 sessions registered. Plan on joining us for a great weekend of content and community.

New PDC Sessions Added

mikev — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:29:00 GMT

On July 1, a bunch of new sessions were added to the PDC. You can see the full list of sessions that have been published (so far) at the PDC site.

Here are some interesting sessions:

An Introduction to F#
Learn about Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework. F# combines functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, tools, and object model of .Net. Understand how F# asynchronous workflows help tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.

Architecture Without Big Design Up Front

Visual Studio Team System, code-name "Rosario" Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. See how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of your code. Learn how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.

Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in .NET
The CLR has great support for dynamic languages like IronPython. Learn how the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a shared dynamic type system, a standard hosting model, and support for generating fast dynamic code. Hear how these features enable languages that use the DLR to share code with other dynamic and static languages like VB.NET and C#.

Future Directions for Visual Basic
Come learn about the new capabilities in the next version of the language, including: extensions to LINQ, syntax simplifications, and improvements to the IDE. We'll provide insight into the direction of the language, including dynamic binding, meta-programming, and scripting.

The Future of C#
In this talk Microsoft Technical fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg outlines the future of C#. He will describe the many forces that influence and shape the future of programming languages and explain how they fit into C#.

Visual C++: 10 is the New 6
Get more done. The next version of Visual C++ is all about improving developer productivity for large-scale applications. Learn about the IntelliSense and browsing experiences, changes to the project and build system, project-less browsing, collaboration through remote symbol indexing, and custom visualization of symbolic information.

Microsoft Silverlight: Building Business Applications

What if you could develop your solutions with the ease pioneered by Microsoft Office Access, deploy them like an Internet application, and take advantage of the power of Microsoft .NET? Learn about an exciting new technology that is all about making business applications for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) much easier to build. In this session, hear how we've made n-tier application development as simple as traditional 2-tier, provided application level solutions to developers, and how we're doing all of this with the same .NET platform and tools on both the client and server.

Microsoft Silverlight: Developing for Mobile Devices

Silverlight provides on mobile devices the same great capabilities you are familiar with on the desktop, but there are some differences you should understand when targeting mobile devices. This session shows you how to make your Silverlight applications device agnostic as well as how to optimize your designs for multiple targets.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft

Take a detailed look at the present and future of Team Foundation Server (TFS). With close to 14,000 users, 2,000 projects, 33 million files, and over 2 million work items, Microsoft runs one of the largest known installations of TFS. In this session we share our internal best practices for version control, branching and merging, work item tracking, metrics, reporting, testing, and integrations with TFS.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services

In this session we present processes and tools from the upcoming Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" release and Microsoft Research and show how we deliver on quality, scalability, and experience goals for the new class of applications that demand rich UI, service consumption, and frequent release.

Plus, a whole lot on architecting and developing cloud services including Mesh Services and Virtual Earth v next.