Windows 7

I just installed Windows 7 on my beloved Dell. After having run Win 7 on my home computer for about a month now i felt that the time had come to try it out in some serious scenarios.

To start with it felt really nice. A warm fuzzy feeling as I pimped the colors and background of my spanking new Win 7. And even the sound card worked (the tag-team Vista + Dell had previously disabled the soundcard). I felt happy. That's when the problems started...

I tried to install Daemon tools. After having rebooted, installed, rebooted, installed and rebooted i started to see a pattern. Apparently Daemon Tools won't install on Win 7. No matter what combo of priveliges and compatability modes I gave the program it always ended up in the same loop. I guess a few minutes of googling beforehand would have told me as much. It just won't work. Instead I had to use Virtual CloneDrive (which actually works nicely and I kinda like the UI more than the Daemon UI).

Next stop was the 3G mobile modem. I have the external Huawei 7.2 USB modem from 3 that worked nicely in Vista. The program 3Connect installed ok directly from the modem but after that nothing, not a thing happens when you run the program. No amount of googling could help me there.

Now a bit more frustrated I moved on to install the tools-of-the-trade - Visual Studio 2008. After having blue screened the third time I gave up. It simply won't install, just crashes.

I think I have to go back to Vista... I feel a bit sad...

Channel 9 guy

You better watch out Channel 9 guy, there is a drop-kick waiting for you out there

What is "M"?

After the first session on Oslo some of the details behind what Oslo and what M is became clearer. But not by much I have to say. It is still slightly hard to see what the grand vision is, when is it applicable to use "M" and when should I "code as usual"?



Lets start by going through what Oslo is:

• "M" - the modelling language for creating DSLs (Domain Specific Languages)


• "Quadrant" - the visual modelling tool for working with models & DSLs


• Repository - a sql server where all the models (and data for models) go

Ok, still doesn't really give me an understanding of what it is. What it is not is:

• it is NOT - a new object oriented language


• it is NOT - a replacement for T-SQL

Primarilly it is used for modelling data, working with the data model on a conceptual level, without having to worry about the implementation specifics. It is a high-high-level abstraction . It is to c# what c# is to the CLR. That's about how high-level it is.

So, with the assumption that it is used for modelling data it feels a little better, within grasp so to speak. But that is not the full truth, M is for modelling any domain, and domains ar not limited to industry verticals or that type of domain and the entity representation for that, but any domain can be modelled. Such as WCF services :). Now this is where it gets tricky, do I model my WCF services in "M"? Yes, you can. Microsoft has created a MGrammar specifically for that. And there will be other areas that can be described using "M": ASP.NET, WPF and so on... get it?

Don Box and Chris Andersson

Keynotes #2 and #3

Introducing Windows 7



After yesterdays focus on the enterprise offerings with Windows Azure todays first keynote was focused on the user experience, the front end, the consumer and a first peek at Windows 7 was given.



The focus of the Windows 7 endeavor is to enable developers to create applications that spans both the PC, the web and the mobile devices. The new Windows 7 combined with the Windows Live platform and the Live Services will bring together functionality in devices and connect the user to their network (social and physical).

The first peek at Windows 7

Most of the features that where presented had to do with improving the user experience when working with Windows, stuff that a lot of users have reported as annoying or 'it should have been this way to begin with' seem to have been fixed in this version of Windows. Among the most noticeable of these are the changes to the taskbar (fully customizeable and with better thumbnails and recent items list and tasks direkctly without opening the actual applications) and to the notifications area (all notifications can now be disabled!).

Among the more interesting features is the ability to easily connect to different devices, home networks and people. Something that Microsoft themselves admitted was notiriously difficult or at leas troublesome in prior versions of Windows.

Other features includes multitouch features for devices that have that enabled (a number of newer not to expensive home pc's are starting to include touch).

For the developers something really cool was anounced: the ability to directly from disk manager create and manage virtual hard drives. Not only that but you can mount them and even boot from them! Now this allows for some really nice scenarios for developers, especialy developers that work a lot with virtual images (such as in MOSS development).

The first pre-beta will be included in the goods, so dell-willing, I will be able to play around with it sometime this week.

Ray Ozzie announces the future of Microsoft Services and Software

During the first keynote today that was given by Ray Ozzie, Chief Architect at Microsoft, the now future for Microsoft was announced. A new operating system intended for the Cloud was presented. The new name, which had been held secret until the keynote was also revealed:

Windows Azure

As I mentioned, this will be an operating system intended for the Cloud where corporations can host custom developed Services that are backed by massive distributed data centers. On this platform a number of different services will be available, such as:

• .NET Services
• ASP.NET Services
• SQL Services (reporting, analysis)
• Live Services
• SharePoint Services
• Dynamics CRM Services

and probably more to come. This will all be backed by a distributed Cloud data storage that any of these services, including self developed services, can access.

This is fundamentaly a hosting service that Microsoft offers, but it is also a lot more. It will simplify deploying, monitoring and maintining software services for companies. It is not just an hosting alternative offered by Microsoft but instead something that could potentially change how corporations develop their solutions.

The biggest questions at this point is how this will be met by the market. I am sure that many companies will have concerns on how safe and secure their data or code is when it is "in the Cloud" and how do we build future solutions that leverage the Cloud and Azure while still being able to connect to existing back-end systems and legacy systems without having to compromise the integrity of the internal networks and architecture. Hopefully some of the future sessions here will reveal more on how this is intended to work.

Pre-con: Working with WCF – Demonstration and Perspectives

Juval Lowy on WCF and the death of .NET

Among the various pre-conference sessions the most interesting seemed to be the WCF one. In fact it turned out to be an animated introduction to WCF with the message:

.NET is dead! WCF is the new .NET

Now, this might seem a bit upsetting to most developers. Why would, this animated and quite entertaining man, Juval Lowy, say something like this? Well, quite simply he wants to point out that there exists major pitfalls in building applications on just the .NET platform. In fact, most of the code we produce aim to solve the plumbing in our architecture. Plumbing between layers, plumbing between systems, plumbing between technologies and so on... A figure of 95% plumbing and 5% business logic was mentioned.

What WCF does it removes the plumbing. At least the need for the developer to him- or herself code the plumbing. In WCF the plumbing is already provided, it is standardized and extensible at the same time. The WCF contains all the plumbing for realiability, security, connectivity and so on that you in reality never have the time to finish in customer projects. Why? Simply because the customers almost never pays for this, it is simply assumed that it is there, but actually coding it is far more time consuming than the actual solution.

All in all, WCF provides three major points that no prior platform or product (both Microsoft and non-microsoft) provides:

• Interopability


• Productivity


• Extensibility

Because the WCF framework (yes, framework) communication is based on messages and those messages are based on common standards (such as the WS-* standards) it provides full interoperability with other systems and solutions (e.g. Java, COM).

Since all the required plumbing is provided the boost in productivity is enormous. Most errors in developed applications are in the actual plumbing, not in the actual business logic so also in the maintenance phase there is a productivity boost.

WCF is built on the .NET 2.0 framework and each part is extensible and changeable.

Now, with all this being said it definately points to a major direction from MS on how applications and solutions should be built. I think we can expect more along these lines during the rest of the conference as this is all a part of what for instance Oslo provides.