Yesterday evening, we had the Attendee Party which was being held at the Universal Studios theme park.
The whole park was decorated Halloween style, which made it a cool, spooky environment.

So, finally today we could pick up the 160GB USB2 Hard Drive which contains all the fancy bits and stuff that are covered on this PDC.

Here I’ve got a screenshot so you can see what’s on it. I’ve highlighted the two VHD’s that are on there:

The final session of today was by Don Box an d David Langworthy called “Oslo the Language”.

In contrast with the previous session which was more about Oslo itself, this session zoomed in on the new language being used called “M”.

So what is “M”?

And what is not  “M”?

I later on picked up the Language Specification book at the EXPO.

This was a crowded session, the volume was way to loud so it has cost me some hearing ability, but the session nevertheless was great!

So what is a model?

And how did the Model Drive platform evolve?

And Why is Oslo happening? what is in it for us?

And finally, what is Oslo?

This gave me a nice Intro of Oslo. Oslo lets you create your own Models, and let you process those model by your DSL’s and run them in the Run-Time of your choice:

So here is a really simple example of the use of  Oslo:

 
On the left, you see your Model. A textual representation of your Data.

In the centre you can see the DSL. This will process the Model and generate what is on the…

On the Right you see the structured output of the DSL. This structured output can then easily be processed and stored in the Repository.

So what DSL for what runtime’s are already there? Lots of them so was said, but here a couple of examples:

And here is an example of using the MService DSL within Visual Studio to create WCF services:

Immediately after the key note, I ran to the lunch session of Nicholas Allen.

I’m a close follower of his blog, because the guy knows so much about the inner workings of WCF. I’ve used his info lots of times when writing WCF stuff.

This talk was all about performance. About what bottlenecks there are at which level, and how to mitigate them.

He explained this by using a Push Pull principle. All communication flowing over the WCF stack will have several parts pushing or pulling data. Performance has a lot to do with optimizing the manner these parts interact.

When mapping this principle on WCF you can see parts that push and then parts that pull. Whenever a switch between the two takes place, you have an interesting performance case. Because at that point, message pumping and/or buffering will take place.

All these points have all sorts of configurable performance knobs to tweak and tune. The above gives us a much clearer insight of what you are indeed tweaking/tuning so you can understand what the knob does and what consequence it may have.

So when looking at the message pump of the server side part of a binding, you will see the following:

When zooming in a bit more, you soon get a lot of detail (and you might get lost!):

An important lesson you can take out of this last screenshot, is the fact that you can see that binding to a thread takes place in the 6th part of the pump. All that is before that is a potential performance issue.  So watch out with your authentication providers and message inspectors!!

So the next keynote was due, and Ray Ozzie took the stage and elaborated on Windows 7. Again, Edward, Steef-Jan and Rutger joined me there and as you can see, it seems we have a good time :)

Then. we were shown some new stuff within Windows 7. The build that was shown was:

The new taskbar. Notice the preview of instances of the application you hover over
A Libraries feature. This spans all the defined machines in your network, so you can now finally have one view over all your media files that are on all your different machines on your LAN.
All Windows 7 machines in your LAN can easily share files and printers. No more complex configuration to do is; the windows 7 instances will detect each other and you can setup what to share. Also, Windows 7 will natively switch LAN and Printer settings when working on different locations like Home or Work
Devices and Printers are now assembled in one view.
Windows 7 has native Touch computing support
Disk Manager can be used to attach VHD’s!!

Then, Scott Guthrie took the stage and told us about developing with .NET 4.0

And the to-be-finished WPF GUI for Visual Studio 2010

He also showed some of the new Extensibility points of Visual Studio 2010. It will become much easier to extend Visual Studio to  your needs:

Then, the next subject was on the agenda. Live Services and the new Live Framework.

This allows us to connect devices, users and applications to each other and share all data between them. Mesh is built upon this, and the possibilities with this framework are endless.

Then Don Box and Chris Anderson did a talk about Azure. They showed us how easy it was to develop services and let client connect to it via the cloud.

This was a popular session, so I went a bit early to get a good seat.
Of course, lots of people want to here what Anders Hejlsberg had to say about C# 4.0

He showed the evolution of C# in time :

And then showed the new language innovations of C# 4.0:

There will be a DLR capable of using a vast set of binders :

Now, when you have to dynamically invoke a method at run-time, you have to do all sorts of nasty code which can be different for each target (C# object, Javascript object).

The new dynamic keyword, statically types a variable to be dynamic. This way, the DLR will kick in, and do dynamic method invocation and convert the result dynamically.

Some more examples:
If you dynamically type the result of a Math.Abs call, the DLR will choose the correct overload at run time

Another new feature in C# 4.0 is named and optional parameters:

AND improved COM interop:

(No more Missings..)

AND some changes in Co- contra variance of generics:

Anders concluded his talk, with a glimpse of the future. He’s showed a preview of a managed c# compiler which should allow Meta data programming, a language model, DSL embedding and dynamic eval of code:

He gave a funny demo of this with a self-written C# command line tool which evaluates code and runs it :

I went to listen to Jacob Avital. He told us about Dublin – The Windows Application Server Extensions

Its all about connecting applications to the .NET Services ISB. The connecting bits are of course made in WCF and they proved a pattern which implements a pub/sub model via the ISB.
The connected app will send a message to the ISB (which contains security via the Access Control Service (Azure!)) and the ISB will multicast this to all subscribed apps.  These apps can send a response which will send a P2P message via the ISB to the cloud app.

Dublin provided a WCF binding to use on the Cloud Aware App: the NetEventRelayBinding:

The subscribed app should use the NetTCPRelayBinding:

You can also use the Azure Access Control API via WCF. This example changes a Access Control rule:

After the Key Note, I went to this session, presented by Cameron Skinner.

He showed a bunch of cool new features within VSTS 2010 and I must say that the crowd was enthusiastic. They couldn’t resist welcoming each of these new features with a big hand of applause :)

So here is some info Cameron shared with us:

Improved testing of Web Apps by the new test runner:

Rich text editing within VSTS:), video recordings of the steps the Tester performed when encountering a bug. 
So no more ‘can’t reproduce!’

And even more,  they save the state of the applications the tester is testing, so a developer can re-instantiate this state and reproduce the bug as if he’s running it on the tester’s machine!

This includes jumping into the threads, and stack traces as if the code is really running on the tester’s machine:

Also new, you can see the ‘impacted tests’, so when you’ve changed code, you can immediately see which tests you should run first:

A talked a bit about Gated Checkin’s. A new feature that goes a bit further with continues integration.

Finally, today time was there. The real start of the PDC 2008! A Microsoft employee told me that the PDC seems to be sold out and that there is a total of 6000 people attending the PDC. So all this people flowed into Hall A to listen to the same story/vision/strategy that Microsoft wants to share with us.

Hall A – Centre Screen

A subset of attendees

So while we were waiting for the start of the key note, lots of people used the live twittering that's visible on the big screens.

Ray Ozzie kicked off, and talked about cloud computing, its requirements and challenges and than revealed Microsoft’s answer to the ‘next generation of computing’ : Windows Azure Its the answer to Microsoft’s DynamicIT strategy. The story was a bit two sided: - Its about creating and hosting applications using the tools and technologies developers are familiar with, and hosting it on a dedicated, optimized ‘Cloud’ environment. - The Azure platform delivers other functionalities (ex. SQL Server, Sharepoint and Exchange)  from the cloud which can be used by your company and applications. Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following: • Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking • Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting • Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control • Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites • Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud Quote from MS’s press release: ”Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios.”