Today at the PDC conference, Scott Guthrie announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Beta. Scott announced some amazing new features as part of Silverlight 4 including webcam support, printing support, clipboard access, right-click and mouse wheel control, implicit styles, drop/drop, HTML rendering, commanding, and on and on.
My good friend, Tim Heuer, provides a comprehensive article on the announcements around Silverlight 4 including a feature review with links to videos and sample code as well as a list of all the bits you need to get up and running with Silverlight 4.
PDC2009, Silverlight
The Day 2 Keynotes at PDC 2009 didn’t disappoint. Scott Guthrie announced Silverlight 4 and Steven Sinofsky gave every attendee a Windows 7 laptop to go and build great Windows 7 applications on. I tried to capture the notes and announcements as best as I could. The laptop battery couldn’t make it all the way through so I pulled out the trusty (and analog) Moleskin to capture the rest of the keynote. Here’s how it went down…
Steven Sinofsky, Windows 7
- “going from writing a checkers game in College to checking in code for a Billion people”
- Developing Windows 7
- How Microsoft collected vast amounts of feedback and data that make Windows 7 a high quality product
- over 80% of windows (beta testers) opt into telemetry that helps build a better product.
- Hardware and Device diagnostics;
- Software Quality Monitor (SQM)
- Windows Error Reporting (“Watson”)
- Some data from Telemetry
- 1,729,890 sent feedback reports
- 882,612, Unique apps were run
- 10,427,189 aggregate windows error reports
- 4,753 Code changes driven by Windows Error Reporting
- 514,253,176 Start menu clicked (past 6 months)
- 46,447,783 Times Aero Snap and Shake used in the last 6 months
- 55% of beta users were using standard 1024×768 resolution
- Opportunities for developers to light up on Windows 7
- Ribbon User Interface
- Multi-touch, Ink, Speech
- Jump Lists, Progress Bars
- Libraries, DirectX Family
- High Def Audio/Video
- Sensors
- Device Storage
- Coolest Hallway at Microsoft = the Planning and Ecosystem Team
- Hardware and Device liaisons between MS and OEM’s
- Tips and guidance of how developers should take advantage of Windows 7 features to not effect overall Windows performance
- Sony moved their software out of the boot path and increased startup time of their laptops by 30%
- Don’t put your software in the boot path, give customers the control of when to use the software
- FREE LAPTOP FOR ALL PDC Attendees!
- Internet Explorer
- 3 Weeks into IE9 project
- Gone from passing 24/100 Acid3 tests to 32/100 in 3 weeks; we’re working on it and making great strides
- IE9 Focused on …
- Standards Progress (HTML 5),
- Performance Improvements (JavaScript),
- Ecosystem Innovations (Hardware Accelerated Graphics and Text)
- IE9 will take advantage of the DirectX family to render
- much more clarity and performance
- web devs and authors don’t need to do anything!
- Call to action:
- Integrate with Windows 7 Desktop
- Develop for 64-bit
- Focus on fundamentals in your code; don’t get in the way of the boot path, watch your timers, etc.
- Build on new APIs in Windows 7
- Internet Explorer 9 videos up on Channel9
Scott Guthrie
- Silverlight, what we’ve done and where we’re going
- We’ve shipped Silverlight 3, Expression Blend 3 w/Sketchflow
- Sunday Night Football
- This winter, VS Fashion Show and Winter Olympics
- Used on 10,000’s sites all over the world to take advantage of the rich media features of Silverlight
- Summer – 33% of world’s connected devices; Today = 45% and growing rapidly
- Silverlight 4
- Major new release for us
- Focusing on … continue to define media on the web, business applications and going beyond the browser
- Media
- Access to Webcams and Microphones on the machine
- Multicast streaming
- Output protection
- Offline DRM; allows business with protected content opportunity for many new potential scenarios
- On the server-side: IIS Smooth Streaming
- analyze network and cpu conditions and adaptively change bit rate on the fly
- IIS Media Services, supporting Apple iPhone media streaming format
- Business Applications
- Printing, Rich Text, Clipboard Access, Right Click, Mouse Wheel
- Implicit styles, drag/drop, Bidi & RTL (Globalization), HTML, Commanding and MVVM, Additional Controls
- Data & Networking
- Share assemblies Across SL and .NET 4
- Data Binding improvements
- UDP Multicast support; Peer-to-Peer networking
- REST Enhancements
- WCF Improvements; TCP Channel support
- WCF RIA Services;
- Visual Studio 2010
- WYSIWIG Design Service
- XAML Intellisense Improvements
- Data Binding, Layout, Styles
- WCF RIA Services Integration
- Beyond the Browser
- New Sandboxed features
- Windows API; resizing, moving, more control
- Notification Popups
- HTML Support
- Demo of Web page hosting Flash player running inside of a Silverlight application
- Drop Target support
- New Trust capabilities to run outside of Sandbox
- Supported on Windows and Mac
- Custom Window chrome
- Local FileSystem access
- Cross-site Network support
- Hardware Device integration support
- COM Access
- Can integrate with COM based interfaces such as Outlook and Windows API’s
- Performance
- Silverlight 4 Twice as fast as Silverlight 3
- 30% faster at startup
- New profiling support
- Still 10 seconds to download and ~5MB download
- Facebook Reference sample to be made available
- Silverlight features were put to a public vote
- 70% of features voted on are in Silverlight 4
- 9 of the top 10 features requested are in Silverlight 4
- Schedule
Kurt DelBene
- SharePoint development very profitable business
- Contributing $5-6Bil to the Software Sales industry
- 1000’s of great sites on the web are driven by SharePoint
- Announcing: Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Public Beta available today!
- Announcing: Office Mobile Clients for Windows Mobile 6.5 available on Mobile Marketplace today
- Automatic F5 Debugging now available in SharePoint 2010 (big applause)
- For 2010, enabled SharePoint to run on a client OS for easier development
Here are the press releases from today’s announcements:
PDC2009
Wow! PDC 2009 kicked off with a big bang of announcements galore today. Here is my list of notes that I captured from today’s keynote. As you can surmise, I’m not the best note taker in the world. I’ve always suffered this problem all the way back to College. If you have any tips for my on how to take better notes, please send them my way. Anyhow, here’s the diatribe from today…
- Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie
- Building on the Software+Services strategy; How we’ve built on that promise
- 3 Screens and a Cloud
- Win7 opens renewed developer opportunities on the client. that power has been under utilized
- We’ll work to make Internet Explorer the best browser for Windows without compromise
- Loic LeMeur (Seesmic)
- Want Seesmic to be available on every device
- The Silverlight vision really fits into our plan
- Created a prototype w/Silverlight and was really surprised on how fast we could put it together
- Will ship Silverlight version soon
- Shipping today Seesmic for Windows; very smooth, very fast
- Taking advantage of Win7; sensor for location
- #1 request, Seesmic for Windows will be a platform for plug-in development
- Back to Ray
- Azure Launches
- Nov. 17th, Feature complete
- Jan. 1st, Production
- Feb. 1st, customer billing begins
- Features that go live today:
- Single Sign-on
- Project templates out-of-box in Visual Studio 2010
- Multiple sizes of VMs
- FastCGI (Zend Framework, MySQL, Java, php, eclipse)
- XDrive, Azure Storage blobs that are mountable as NTFS drives
- SQL Azure, true database a service, simply create a new database when you need a new one (don’t need to think about memory, disaster recovery, etc. It’s all automatic); Support for ADO.NET, ODBC, JDBC
- A handful of companies will go-live today…
- Announcing: Microsoft PinPoint, unified catalog of business apps and services targeted at developers and IT. Utilize our Platform as a Service to grow your business.
- Announcing: Codename “Dallas”, open catalog and marketplace for Data. Commercial and Public data. Uniformed way to discover data, Uniformed licensing; data as a service, Catalyze a whole new way of remixing and presenting data
- Taking the friction out of discovering, exploring and using data
- Some public data sources, some commercial: Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, infoUSA, NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ
- Subscriptions to data consumption
- Explore the dataset, REST-based data consumption
- Import into Excel through PowerPivot
- OpenData protocol, (ADO.NET Data Services = OData); Build a service proxy from Dallas
- Apps and innovation around public data
- Inconsistency in data formats (CSV, XML, etc.); “Dallas” brings consistency to the data format
- Vivek Kundra, CIO, U.S. Federal Govt
- NASA Pathfinder Innovation Challenge
- Data that has been democratized; slice and dice, cube the Martian rover data; on Windows Azure
- Challenge developers to innovate and open up services to the thousands of government data feeds; Data on education, healthcare, energy, jobs
- Explore building new apps with public domain data and content
- Bob Muglia
- Bing created a solution called “Autopilot”
- manage operations with minimal human intervention
- foundation for work to manage Azure data centers
- Don and Chris show
- C++ code running in the cloud
- Kelly Blue Book, running on Azure
- Announcing: “Project Sydney”, connect your on-premise servers to Azure-based instances
- Announcing: Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1
- a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud
- a platform for building scale-out middle-tier services; WCF, WF, database cache, automatic failover and scale-out
- hosting (“Dublin”) and caching (“Velocity”) technologies
- .NET Services is now “AppFabric Service Bus” and “AppFabric Access Control”
- Announcing: ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta 1
Here is the press releases from today’s announcements:
PDC2009
