March, 2011

I spent the entire week last week enjoying some good weather and southern hospitality in the Carolinas. On Tuesday Mar 15 I had the pleasure of being invited to present at the Charlotte Enterprise Developers Guild organized by Bill Jones (special thanks to SystemTec for sponsoring the evening). On arrival I found the best dressed group of developers I have seen in a long time and felt compelled to apologize for my jeans and Converse. They sure keep it classy down South – something us Northwesterners could probably stand to learn from.

The focus of the talk (and subsequent discussion) was Java and PHP on Windows Azure. I was pleased to learn that the group consisted of a healthy mix of developers writing Java code, PHP code, and .NET code. In fact, close to 50% of the folks in the room indicated that they use multiple runtimes in their local data centers and are used to interacting with multiple codebases consisting of different languages. We had a great conversation about what it means to move to the Cloud and the approach Microsoft is taking to building an open an interoperable platform that will provide a robust general purpose platform for languages and runtimes far beyond .NET. I got a lot of great feedback on the Eclipse and ANT tooling that was recently announced and have opened some new discussions on additional work we are exploring enable additional Java developer workflows / build systems including Apache Maven. Stay tuned on this!

I also had the pleasure of attending the 4th Annual POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina where Microsoft was a sponsor. The speaker lineup was great and there were a number of interesting sessions on the agenda particularly related to open source in mobile applications which seemed to be the hot topic of the event. I was pleased to finally meet such OSS icons as Jim Jagielski of the Apache Software Foundation, and attend a number of great sessions by other well known OSS advocates including William “whurley” Hurley, Bob Sutor of IBM and Jon “maddog” Hall.

My colleague Gianugo Rabellino had the opportunity to present a keynote at the event and took the opportunity to showcase a lot of open source work that is underway both in Microsoft and the Windows ecosystem. He described the change underway in Microsoft toward greater openness and discussed the future of collaboration between Microsoft and the the many Open Source communities on objectives we all share as technologists.

My best booth award (from a coolness factor point of view) goes to my new friends at RepRap.org who are working on building self replicating open source 3D printers. This is a sweet mashup of open source software, open hardware design, commodity component architecture and pure geekitude. We had a great debate about the future of self replication and when we were done my head hurt but it was a blast.

The conference had around 500 attendees and I even somehow became the mayor on Foursquare despite only checking in twice. It was a great time and I look forward to seeing what is in store next year at POSSCON 2012.

Craig Kitterman
Sr. Technical Ambassador
@craigkitterman
http://craig.kitterman.net

For those of you who love .Net and have an interest in Web standards and Interoperability at Microsoft, then listening to the interview with Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, with .NET Rocks!,  is a must.

.NET Rocks! is an internet audio talk show for those interested in developing on the .Net platform, and the interview with Paoli is part of a six-part series titled, "Ignite Your Coding: Web Development Series."

In the interview, Paoli draws upon his experience as a co-creator of the XML 1.0 standard to discuss XML, web standards, and the role of interoperability within Microsoft.

The interview, which can be found here, is hosted by Richard Campbell , Microsoft Regional Director and Carl Franklin, MSDN Regional Director for Connecticut.

Enjoy!

by Peter Galli on March 11, 2011 01:23pm

Today the Interoperability team here at Microsoft updated the the WebSockets prototype on our HTML5 Labs site, which brings the implementation in line with the recently released WebSockets 06 Protocol Specification. 

We have extended our interoperability testing so that now, along with LibWebSockets, interoperability was tested with Jetty, an open-source project providing an HTTP server, HTTP client, and javax.servlet container, developed by the Eclipse community, and code was tested with a Firefox Mindfield version with an implementation of the 06 Protocol Specification.

WebSockets interoperability was tested between our HTML5 Labs prototype client and Jetty server, which recently added support for the 06 version of the spec (you can find the Jetty code here.)

WebSockets interoperability was also tested with a test Firefox build that supports the 06 protocol specification. A chat demo page is hosted on Azure, which can be opened in Firefox and will use native browser WebSocket instead of the Silverlight-based one.

WebSockets is a technology designed to simplify much of the complexity around bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels, over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket. It can be implemented in web browsers, web servers as well as used by any client or server application.

This fourth update of our WebSocket prototype brings ping-pong support: automatic client to server ping every 50 seconds. It also now supports the binary and fragment frames feature defined in the WebSocket protocol specification, but they are not yet exposed to javascript because the W3C API working group is still working on defining a set of APIs that can work with binary data.

Read Claudio Caldato's blog post for all the details on this.

by Peter Galli on March 10, 2011 05:20pm

As All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley reported yesterday, Microsoft has posted to CodePlex, our Open Source project hosting site, a test build of Python Tools for Visual Studio, a free, Open Source plug-in for Visual Studio 2010.

The Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is a free and open source plug-in for Visual Studio 2010, licensed under Apache 2.0 and developed by Microsoft's Technical Computing Group. It enables developers to use all the major productivity features of Visual Studio to build Python code using either CPython or IronPython.

It adds new features such as using High Performance Computing clusters to scale code. Together with one of the standard distros, it can be used to turn Visual Studio into a powerful Technical Computing IDE.

But it is important to note that PTVS is not a Python distribution; it works with an existing Python/IronPython installation to provide an integrated editing and debugging experience.

The first beta was delivered in conjunction with PyCon, which kicked off on March 7, and includes support for core IDE features and debugging and profiling. The second beta, due this summer, will add support for Cloud Computing (the ability to run compute-intensive Python code in Windows Azure); and support for Dryad (large-scale, data intensive parallel programming using Python code), Foley reports.

by Gianugo Rabellino on March 08, 2011 09:38am

Recently there were a number of discussions about the wording of the Windows Phone Marketplace Application Provider Agreement, in particular around Excluded Licenses. At that time we clarified that it is possible to publish Open Source applications in the marketplace as long as they are published under a "permissive" license such as Apache or BSD.

I am now happy to announce a development on that front, which underscores that we are not just listening to the community and reviewing the current agreement, but also trying to respond with more clarity. Today the Windows Phone team announced the following:

"We understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses.  The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License.  We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses, and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses."

Thanks,

Gianugo