jb's Blog

Architects Forum - Cloud Computing

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:07:00

A couple of weeks ago I gave some presentations at the most recent Microsoft Architects Forums in WLG, AKL and CHC. The talk was on the emerging offerings in the cloud computing space and from all accounts, this is a topic which is hot on peoples minds given the level of banter we ended up having at the end of the sessions :)

For those who came along and wanted to get a copy of the slides, I now have these available for down - grab them here.

And for those who didnt make it along.. Mark Carroll is going to be running some more forums in the New Year - so get in contact with him if you are interested in coming.

Or..

.. if you are a developer in the North Island you are probably already taking part in the Unplugged events touring round the country this week - if not, check it out! :)

SQL 2008 Training Followup

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:29:00

Last week I was in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch running some day long sessions covering off what is new across SQL Server 2008 and drilling down into some of the new features.

The sessions were a lot of fun - a big thank you to everyone who attended. The feedback you have given so far has been awesome, and both Darryl and I are really pleased that it hit the spot and that there was a great community vibe in each location - hope you are all planning to attend the upcoming PASS Community event or a user group near you soon!

I have a few posts to put up following on from those events, but the first one is just making the slides available for you all to grab. I have split the sessions up into the 5 sessions we ran on the day and have zipped them for you.

Grab them here:

More to follow soon..

Cool Tech Microsoft Research!

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 04:46:00

The day 3 keynote was interesting - talk about a game of two halves. The first half saw many in the audience and the press room literally falling asleep - I feel for Rick, he is a super smart guy, and a really good presenter too, but I think he freaked everyone out a bit with a 45 minute history lesson on MSR :) But then the demo's started...oh the demos :)

Check out this presspass page to see what we saw. You can also watch an on demand version of the keynote.

The two highlights for me were Boku, a game / programming language for teaching kids (or adults!!) how to program by teaching them concepts in an XBOX game environment.

And then one of the most awesome pieces of tech I have seen in a long time was the next generation Surface hardware called "Second Light". Basically it takes a Surface computer, but the cameras now start scanning through the projection screen and look for objects to interact with outside the unit. This means you can interact physically with the device, not just by touch. And not only that, but using some interesting trickery they can also project on to surfaces outside of the device. They showed an example using a piece of LCD paper, which they held over the unit which was displaying a view of the Milky Way. On the unit was the star view, on the paper was a overlay of the constallations for the region you could see through the paper. Oh.. and of course, you could *touch* the paper as well :) So its like having a second surface. To me this really seems to start to open the flood gates towards more VR like human interaction.

You have to see if for yourself.

Two new languages to learn

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 04:29:00

This must be the first time I am happy about the fact that its a 12 hour plane flight back to New Zealand! I have a bit of work to do on the plane, but also a bit of learning to do. Yesterday I spent a bit of time wandering around the expo hall and through the marketplace picking up some resources around two new languages I am keen to get to grips with over the next few months.

Firstly I am keen to get started with F#. I have been watching this passively for a while since it was incubated through MSR and last year Andrew started picking it up as part of his TechEd prep. It was at that point it was mentioned that it was going to really start gaining some traction in the VS.NET world, which makes it a litle more accessible for people like myself :)

With Visual Studio 2010, F# becomes a mainstream .NET language, with full integration into the IDE and the full support and backing of Microsoft. If you havnt heard of F# before, it is a multi-paradigm functional language for the CLR. Check it out on MSDN. For my own interests I picked up a copy of Expert F#.

The second language of interest is M. This is the new modelling language for describing domain models and textual DSL's which comes as part of "Oslo". This stuff is somewhat early days, but its a bit like when we saw Indigo (WCF) back at the 2003 PDC, some way to go, but the concepts are all there and clearly well thought out stuff. Oslo is Microsofts big push into the Model Driven Development space. Underpinning it is M for actually describing everything. Over the top of it comes a bunch of tooling (some which we have previews for, and some which is in the future) for building, validating and code-gen'ing models for use in software systems. While I think MDD is more interesting for those building larger more complex systems, it sort of speaks to the gradual move away from imperative development to a more abstract declarative development to allow far more rapid delivery of larger scale systems. However that said, the thing that interests me now with M is the ability to write DSL's - so Im keen to learn it on that basis first :) I picked up an early copy of the M Language Spec book to help with this. You can read more about Oslo on MSDN.

Velocity CTP2 now available

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:33:00

At TechEd this year I gave a session on Distributed Caching and drilled in to a bit of detail around a product Microsoft is currently developing called Project "Velocity". I also mentioned that CTP2 was going to be released at the PDC - and it has!

Today you can download the CTP2 bits from here. The new features in CTP2 are reasonably extensive, and are generally the more interesting ones:

High Availability: Starting in CTP2, "Velocity" supports continuous availability of cached data by storing copies of that data on separate cache hosts. By using high availability enabled on a multi-server cluster, your application can retrieve its cached data even if a cache server fails.
Performance and Stress Enhancements: In CTP2 we spent substantial effort on improving the Latency and Thruput of the system as well as the stress and uptime requirements of the distributed cache.
PowerShell Integration: "Velocity" provides additional commands for managing your distributed cache environment.
New Configuration Options: You now have two additional options available for storing cluster details. In addition to XML, cluster configuration settings can also be stored in a SQL Server Compact data file or a SQL Server database.
64-Bit Support: There is now a 64-bit version of the "Velocity" cache service for x64-based computers. Each process can use almost all available memory for caching data.

Remember to read the team blog (where I swiped the above from) where they outline a tentative list of features for V1 and also have confirmed that CTP3 will be made available at MIX09.

C# 4.0 and beyond

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:17:00

The best session I went to yesterday (and it seems to be a view thats widely shared) was Anders talk on the Future of C#. Its always quite amusing watching Anders talk - I imagine he must feel a little strange standing up there waiting to start a presentation with geeks from around the world lining up to get their picture taken with him :) But he really delivers awesome material and in a very clear and interesting way, so its well worth it.

FYI - a large number of the sessions are being made available on Channel 9 (24 hour delay) and this will be one of them - I would seriously recommend you check this out even if you are not a C# developer as he generally outlined a number of interesting directions that will be played out across the wider language stack.

If you want a good synopsis and commentary of the session as a whole - check out Chris's great post on the session.

4.0 looks pretty awesome in itself, with support for dynamic typing and inclusion (finally) of named and optional parameters, both of which combine to solve a massive PITA for .NET developers for a long time which is COM interop scenarios. However I was most interested in Anders thoughts on the general trend for C# and the .NET Framework in general.

Firstly, he shared his view that he believes we are starting to move to a point where from an end developers perspective we are starting to look to draw on benefits from functional programming, dynamic languages and statically typed languages at the same time depending on the problem we are trying to solve - and that languages with a single focus (while good in their domain) are going to be obseleted by languages which can serve all domains - multi faceted I believe he called it at the time. We have been kind of witnessing this build up since .NET 2.0 - the introduction of some functional aspects through LINQ, and the DLR bringing in dynamic typing support although most of us were not really using IronPython :)

Personally I can certainly see a lot of benefit in this - dynamic typing is pretty powerful, and Ive been enjoying it via JavaScript and JQuery lately :) You can also create your own behavior around a dynamic type by subclassing DynamicObject and overriding the handlers for method / property or field access. The classical example shown here was creating a property bag object. Another good use would be simplifying XML access by making it hierarchical through property access e.g. doc.Element.Element[Attribute] rather than having to work the DOM directly.

However the bit which really interested me came towards the end - for about a year now the team has been working on rewriting the C# compiler in managed code, to allow it to be hosted to more easily support meta programming by passing in code blocks as strings (much easier than CodeDom).. Anders set up a simple REPL demo (aka a C# interpreter) and then started coding up a Windows Form and wiring up events on the fly.

Very cool, powerful and scary at the same time - but I think what that does show is how flexible C# (and the CLR languages in general) can become in a not so distant future. If you are interested in checking out some of the 4.0 stuff, you can grab that VS10 VPC I mentioned yesterday, its all installed on there :) You can also grab some code samples to play with from MSDN. You might also note there are some VB 10 samples up there as well :)

Unfortunately no specifics around when the managed code compiler will become available, but you can tell that the team is gagging to release it as soon as its in the proper state.

Windows 7 and Multi-touch

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:06:00

We had a good tour of the new Windows 7 desktop this morning in the keynote as previously mentioned. Without having actually played with it, it looks to be a very sensible update over what we have in Vista on the UX front. Small incremental usability improvements. Under the hood I also have been told there have been some reasonably significant improvements on the perf front which help remove a lot of the I/O killing operations we used to see and also be smarted on the locking front to avoid app hangs and the like.

However the one thing that I think is really cool, and Im hoping it not too long before we see this as a standard tablet feature is multi-touch. Between the iPhone and the Surface I really see some awesome potential for multi-touch to enable some really nice human interaction models with applications. At the RD pre-party we saw some of the apps which Huck's team Interknowledgy had built for the Surface, things like a visualizer for human anatomy for doctors to inspect and a 3d globe using Live Maps which you can play with by hand similar to Google Earth. The Surface team also have built some really nifty things and leverage the object recognition. With the Windows 7 API's and WPF we can start doing the same thing for standard PC applications, which I think is going to be pretty exciting for the same sort of reasons its exciting on the iPhone or Surface today.

The kit they were using in the keynote was an HP Touchsmart desktop (one of those PC built into screen type units).. may have to look at getting a hold of one of these soon I think :)

Office 14

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:57:00

There was a lot of good stuff shown at this mornings keynote, but the highlight for me would have to be what was previewed with Office 14. Windows 7 looks awesome and very stable and I cant wait to install it later today, but I was really blown away with what was previewed with the sneak peek of Office 14 at the end of the keynote.

The demo highlighted in the online capabilities of the Office 14 products (Office for the Web), not in a simple OWA mode, but in a full fidelity client experience. Further to this, they demoed a number of live collaboration features where you could edit Word/Excel and OneNote documents in real time between the desktop and the web. Similar to the positioning of Azure yesterday, Office 14 looks to really blow away Google Apps from even playing in the enterprise space now.

Another theme I was quite impressed with was the commitment to connectivity of sharing and syncing data across devices. This was started with the Live Mesh preview we started seeing earlier this year with Folder sync and Desktop Sharing, but its clear that interop of data and functionality across devices is a critical part of the longer term vision which I really think is awesome and I can't wait to see how we can start leveraging this in real world scenarios not just in the consumer space.

I would really recommend checking out the keynote to see this for yourself. Really exciting and interesting stuff.

UPDATE: There is also now a vid on Channel 9 showing this off :)

VSTS 2010

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:34:00

Just came out of a session on Visual Studio Team System 2010, which looks quite interesting as well as being a fairly substantial release. Not too sure about the audience however, who was clapping away like they were on Sunday morning TV.. anyhow :)

In a nutshell, the main areas of focus have been in the Testing and Architecture space. In particular the testing space seems to have gotten the bulk of the work discussed so far. The architecture improvements focus around better support for standard modelling using UML - so thats nice.

Here are the main things I think you should care about (that we know about so far)

Improved Project Management
Ability to model using UML and produce DSL based diagrams - this builds on the DSL toolkit that we have seen for a while and Ivan showed off recently
Eliminate the "no repro" problem - more on this below
Gated checkin - Essentially a 2 phase commit, similar to the other lifecycle tool offerings
Test Prioritization, Manual Testing, Functional Testing and Test Case Management - in particular the testers themselves have a bunch of plugins now for screen capture or screen video to help walk through test cases, mark them off and have those associated with sections of the video, similar to how you would normally view a Live Meeting presentation

So the one feature I really perked up for was this "no repro problem" - essentially what they seem to be aiming for here is a capture of the local stack and variables at the time of an exception and saving that as an artifact for later replay. This is something I remember we saw a few years ago from a French company, but they were pricing it at around $20K per server, or something equally insane. Not sure what their pricing is now, but this is an amazingly useful feature. Hopefully it can be installed in an agent fashion for simply capturing exception data off servers. I would also be curious on the perf impact, as I built a little sample a while ago based off MDB which did something similar but it utterly killed your perf watching for first chance exceptions :)

If you are interested in some bits - you can now download the latest CTP and run through some of this stuff yourself :)

Windows Azure

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:22:00

So, an interesting announcement in the first keynote, and not unexpectedly all around the cloud space. Ray announced and laid out the plans for Microsoft's new services platform (aka cloud platform) which you will undoubtely now know as Windows Azure. (Formerly known as Red Dog / Strata I believe..)

The platform itself looks reasonably interesting and offers a point of difference from Amazon's EC2 offering where they effectively host virtual machines for you and allow you to scale them out. Microsofts approach is to provide a bit of a higher level of abstraction, providing the base hosting in the Azure platform (so thats what they were building all those datacenters for..) as well as the underlying management. So rather than running individual machines, it effectively operates a giant mainframe of application pools.

On top of the platform are a number of services which developers can leverage. At the base level you have storage and compute - similar to Amazon, all based on the .NET Framework and SQL Server of course. Above that are higher level services for offer the kind of infrastructure (.NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services)

You can check out more details at: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx - quite a bit of info there as well as download links to the SDK bits which you will be wanting to check out :)

Development wise, it seems fairly simple. You create a "cloud" project for either an ASP.NET web app or a worker process (think Windows Service), you then build and debug locally (and you can even simulate the cloud "fabric" locally) and then you package it up and upload it to the cloud platform (cloudapp.net) similar to what you may remember with Silverlight Streaming Services.

So looks pretty interesting, from a local PoV I think this is of high value to start up's looking to avoid cost of capital (similar to what you probably were thinking with Amazon's offering), except its all on Windows and you dont have to worry about setting up and managing your virtual machines. We get to play with the bits soon enough, so we will all see how it feels and more importantly, performs :)