Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog : PDC 2008

Microsoft Participation at ApacheCon 2008

grantkd — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:58:00 GMT

Last week, Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, presented a keynote at ApacheCon 2008. In his presentation, he updated Apache community members on several milestones recently reached by Microsoft as part of the Company’s efforts to architect for participation in the open source community.

Ramji further outlined the benefits that the newly announced “M” programming language will deliver to open source developers. Microsoft unveiled M Language recently at PDC 2008, highlighting the “Oslo” set of modeling technologies, and the commitment Microsoft has made to include the “M” programming language under the Open Specification Promise. In his speech, Sam said that he expects “M to do for languages what open source has done for development”, and encouraged the Apache community to learn more about it.

Another highlight was related to Microsoft’s recent decision to join the AMQP Working Group at the request of its members. Ramji outlined Microsoft’s intent to also participate in the Apache Qpid project, a widely adopted open source implementation of the AMQP specification that addresses the customer need for choice and improved messaging interoperability.

He also told the audience that the Microsoft Network Monitor - a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer - will transition to an open source model, on CodePlex. It will host the development of parsers for public protocols and for protocols described in the Open Protocol Specifications for Windows.

For more information, please visit:

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/11/06/apachecon-keynote.aspx

Oslo at PDC 2008

grantkd — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Oslo, a set of technical investments that simplify designing, building, managing, and scaling service-oriented and composite applications, is the focus of several PDC sessions this year. Visit this site to learn more about the Oslo modeling platform and what it will do for application development. For an entertaining version of the history of modeling, and to hear industry influencers weigh in on Oslo and what it will mean for developers, click here.

PDC 2008- Microsoft Research Demonstrates Software-driven Technology Breakthroughs

grantkd — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

On stage at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2008 today, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, showed developers how Microsoft is marshalling the power of software to help solve some of the toughest technological and societal challenges. Rashid highlighted initiatives spearheaded by the more than 800 researchers in Microsoft Research's six global labs and taking place across Microsoft that are helping to improve society and redefine the computing experience:

Tiny devices, big impact

The scarcity of energy resources and concerns about climate change are creating new challenges and opportunities for computing. With the advent of large datacenters to underpin cloud-based computing services, energy-efficient computing is becoming increasingly important. Using technology developed by Microsoft Research, Microsoft is deploying tiny sensors throughout its datacenters to capture data that will allow it to better regulate energy consumption across the facilities and reduce their carbon footprint.

WorldWide Telescope

Developed by Microsoft Research, WorldWide Telescope is a "web browser for the sky", bringing together images from the best ground and space-based telescopes to enable people to navigate and explore the cosmos from their PC screen. The new features can be viewed at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ .

Boku: turning programming into kids' stuff

Boku is a fun, intellectually-stimulating game, developed by Microsoft Research that introduces kids to programming while they play. You can learn more about Boku here.

DryadLINQ

Developed by a team from Microsoft Research, DryadLINQ is a powerful programming environment that enables ordinary programmers to write large-scale data parallel applications to run on large PC clusters. More about the DryadLINQ project is available here.

SecondLight: a magic lens that goes beyond the surface

The brainchild of Microsoft Researchers, SecondLight is a rear projection-vision surface technology that extends and enriches Surface through the ability to project images both through and beyond the surface display, to a translucent piece of plastic for instance. With SecondLight, the translucent piece of plastic can also function as a "magic lens" that when passed over an image displayed on the primary surface - a car, for instance - provides a view of the "inner workings" behind the image. A video demo of SecondLight is available here.

The Microsoft CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008

The Microsoft® CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 delivers a set of .NET and Compact Framework class libraries and tools that enable developers to better deal with the inherent complexities of creating loosely-coupled concurrent and distributed applications. More information about the Microsoft CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 is available here.

Microsoft Surface SDK

Microsoft Surface is a surface computing platform that opens up a new chapter in the way people interact with computers by enabling them to access digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. More information about Surface is available here.

RoboChamps

RoboChamps is a new simulated robotics programming competition that will bring robotics to a broader audience by overcoming the prohibitive cost, lack of access, and specialist knowledge associated with physical robots. Visit the RoboChamps website to learn more.

PDC 2008- Microsoft Delivers Pre-Beta Release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to Developers

grantkd — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Today at its Professional Developer Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Microsoft Corp. rallied software developers by sharing the first full public demo of Windows 7. Windows 7 extends developers' investments in Windows Vista and encourages the creation of new applications and services for the Windows platform. The company also delivered a pre-beta build of Windows 7 to PDC attendees and announced plans to release a full Windows 7 beta early next year.

Microsoft also demonstrated, for the first time, its new Web applications for Office, which are lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are used from within standard Web browsers. The company showed how anyone can use all of the Web, phone, and PC versions of Office to edit the same rich document, switching among them seamlessly with lossless file compatibility.

For more information about PDC 2008 check out PressPass and the Virtual Pressroom.

PDC 2008- Microsoft announces its Azure Services Platform

grantkd — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Today, during a keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC 2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.'s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform's role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.

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 Data 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 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud.

For more information about today's news check out the below resources: