Microsoft PDC10

One of my workmates summed up my first visit to Redmond when he informed everyone I was going on holiday to my “spiritual home”.

Since then I’ve been out to visit Microsoft’s Redmond campus a couple of times.  It’s a great experience, it’s a large centre, but in no way on the same scale as the Orlando or LA Convention Centers.  Think more MIX size (actually a little smaller I would guess).  So its going to be a ‘mini PDC’ in more ways than one.  That’s not to say that the campus isn’t large, in fact it is like a sprawling mini town in its own right with lots of interesting things to find and plenty of techie history along the way. 

I was very lucky and got a tour of the campus from Jeremy Kelly after chatting on Channel 9 (http://Channel9.msdn.com).  He also arranged an informal meet with other “Niners” at one of the many Canteens on Campus.  Before I left he showed me around the ‘nerve center for Visual Studio and as we walked, we stumbled upon some history in the shape of plaques in the pavement commemorating significant releases  (I later returned intending to take some more photos of this spot but couldn’t find it!).

 

 

 

 

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

PDC09 – Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 beta !  This was the big day 2 news!.

Tim Heur has a good overview of the new features here:

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

If you want to get stuck in you can download the bits here:

And there are some great training videos already published on Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/

and on Silverlight.Net:

http://silverlight.net/learn/

Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4 Conversion.

 

After installing the bits via the link above I proceeded to open my own Silverlight application (http://FromTheMalverns.com)

Woah! – No obvious issues – very cool & it ran first time under the Silverlight 4 beta.! OK so next step is to add some of the new features which I will do in the coming days (Maybe after I get some post PDC09 sleep!).

NB In the meantime I will be continuing to develop http://FromTheMalverns in Silverlight3 until such time that there is a real Silverlight4 release!

PDC09 Win7 Boot Camp

First we got an overview of the key kernel changes in Windows 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7)  wonder if there will be any VHDs geared towards the Native VHD functionality in tomorrows PDC conference bags?.  Then we got a cool? demo of a ‘hello world’ message running on a 96 processor system!

Arun Kishan then went into more detail about some of the kernel changes (Processor mgt, Thread Scheduling, Core Scalability Improvements, Energy Efficiency, Logical Processor enhancements etc.) I’m not going to go into the details!