PDC 2008 just concluded and there is just too much to talk about (or blog about).  That will happen over a course of time, since I am simply not the kind who blogs reguarly.

I am a big fan of MJF and the tenacity with which she covers Microsoft.  Back in the days when Microsoft Watch was synonymous with MJF (it still is when I mention the name MJF to many people), "watching Microsoft like a hawk" used to really kick me!  I wasn't a Microsoft employee then and MJF was at one time the only way to keep a deep insight on Microsoft.  Of course, that has changed since I am with Microsoft because I have faaaaar more insight that MJF with all her "sources" is able to gather. (Not showing off, just saying that as a regular MSFT employee, you can get a lot more detail into where the company's focused, what we're doing and what will show up when).

I was at the company store at PDC 2008 and was looking at MJF's book "Microsoft 2.0" - almost bought it, but decided I'd buy it back in India.  I did skim through the foreword, which interestingly is written by Mini-MSFT, and one like there (the introductory line actually) gave a kick!  It went to say what does the word "Microsoft" mean to you - how has it changed your life, what do you think of when you hear it, what goes through your mind, etc..

To me, it is a LOOOT of things.. I probably will have to pen that in a multi-part series someday!!  However, this recent post on MJF's blog is ONE of the many reasons I love Microsoft.  This is Microsoft, this is what I adore - this is why I love being in this company more than anything else in this world.  This is also reason why I am part of a company that TRULY belives in changing the world!

Microosft PDC is underway and the keynote address is going on.  I am sitting in the audience and am listening to the tons of announcements and products being unveiled.  Windows Azure is the core of our cloud computing platform that just got announced.

More on all this later – I am not so much into live blogging and missing out on all the cool demos being shown here!!  But you can head over to www.microsoftpdc.com and to http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud, http://www.microsoft.com/azure and http://www.azure.com to keep track of everything.

Do login again to PDC keynote tomorrow – there is another keynote with all of the client platform.

(Note: some of the links might take a while to get working since they are just getting provisioned)

Microsoft announced that Silverlight 2 is now releasing out of BETA and all the development tools and runtime updates will be available for download shortly. 

A new announcement is providing support for the Eclipse IDE, hence allowing Java developers and other Eclipse developers to stay within their familiar development environment while developing with Silverlight 2.  This has been done in collaboration with Soyatec, an international software company and a major Eclipse solutions provider.

The Eclipse tools website (with screenshots) is available at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/ 

If you have still been having your application on Silverlight 2 BETA 2, this is the time to upgrade your application.  There are a bunch of breaking changes and it is important to know that visitors who will auto-update to the latest version of the Silverlight plug-in will end up having a broken experience if your website is still using BETA 2.  Take a look at the breaking changes document and Tim Heuer’s excellent post on what steps developers should take to upgrade their applications.

The official Microsoft PressPass article with more details on the plug-in deployment statistics and features is available here.

Have fun developing!

If you already know about Photosynth, skip to the next paragraph.  Photosynth is a phenomenal concept born out of Washington University Microsoft Research with more than 10 years of research.  It is a fantastic way to pick tons of photographs of a monument, building, object, room or anything else and creates a 3D fly-through experience of browsing the photos.  Of course, these photographs can be taken by different people, through different cameras, at different seasons, different times of the day, with different people in front, etc.  For details of the technology working, see Photo-Tourism at Washington Edu.

Photosynth has been in technical preview for a couple of years (or more) now.  The preview allowed people to view "synths" created and published by the Photosynth team, but no way to create their own synths.  The team has just released an all-new viewing experience as well as a full-fledged tool to create synths of your own and share it with the world.

The tool and experiences can be found at the brand new Photosynth community site at www.photosynth.net

Here's a synth (yes, you can embed them now) of the Taj Mahal:

And here's something that struck me as funny - an innovative use of Photosynth - now this is what happens when you put stuff out to community, the possibilities seem endless:

And the work is not done yet!  At SIGGRAPH 2008, the team demonstrated some new work titled "Finding Paths through the World's Photos".  It showcases a unique blend of bringing your own photographs along with community photographs to create experiences that are unparalleled.  Check out the demo in this video:

All of the ongoing work can be followed at http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

The Live Mesh team has now opened up the Live Mesh service to more countries, including India!!!  This means that you can now sign-up for the Live Mesh Technical Preview with an Indian-registered account without having to be wait-listed. 

Go ahead to www.mesh.com and get your devices meshed!!

Official Announcement: Live Mesh Expansion

Silverlight 2 BETA 2 released on Friday and is the best release of Silverlight so far!  It is packed with features, with many much-awaited features like DRM coming into play!

On the media end, SL 2 BETA 2 supports server-side playlists, DRM and adaptive streaming (that was announced at MIX).  I intend to post more technical details on these in upcoming posts.

One of the good things for developers is that many of the base Silverlight controls have been moved into the runtime, hence not requiring that additional piece of download when the app loads.  That would make app loading really fast and app size really small!!  That addition into the runtime has not increased the runtime size which is still around 4.3 MB for Windows.

A full-fledged post with all features is at ScottGu's blog here.  This is a must-read for anybody who is interested in Silverlight!  It covers the comprehensive list of features we've released in Silverlight 2 BETA 2 and in Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview.

Download Silverlight and Expression with the SDK/VS Tools here.

This was announced at MIX 08 and the product team has put its first BETA out already! 

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the superset of Silverlight used for building rich desktop experiences, has its third major update.   The .NET Framework team today released the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1, both as BETA and downloadable for free - offering a ton of features in ASP.NET, AJAX, Visual Studio, VB.NET and C#. 

Scott covers it all in his marathon post here and Tim Sneath does a detailed write-up of the WPF features here. I thought I will highlight the key things that excited me (and had been waiting to talk about!):

Graphics Enhancements in WPF

Hardware accelerated Shadow and Blur effects: Pixel Shader effects that allow designers/developers on WPF to just add a line of code to get shadow and blur effects.  The best part is that these automatically run hardware-accelerated. Best part: The effects model is designed in a way that developers can create their own re-usable effects.  A detailed write-up of the effects model and a tutorial on creating your own effects is available here.

Improvements in Text Rendering, Animations, 2D Graphics and Startup:  A whole lot of performance enhancements have been made, specially around text rendering in 3D scenes and with regular 2D animations.  Performance has also been significantly enhanced for the cold startup time (when you load a WPF application for the first time).

HLSL and DirectX integration: DirectX developers can use HLSL and Direct3D integration in WPF, allowing for DirectX scenes to be rendered on WPF controls!  This is huge for companies and developers that already have existing investments in DirectX and want to port any of it to WPF.

New Controls:  WPF will have three new controls that are bound to be popular with developers instantaneously.  A really rich DataGrid control that provides the most often used tabular data view, a WebBrowser control that will let you host browser-based applications in a WPF window and (hold your breath) the Office Ribbon control with full adherence to the Ribbon-UI guidelines!!  That will enable developers to just build Ribbon-menu based applications with the least effort!

Deployment

OK, now the bigger part!  One of the bane of WPF applications was the necessity of a huge .NET Framework installed on the system.  The .NET Framework 3.5 redistributable is 197MB making it very hard to bootstrap to a WPF application that is being installed. 

Introducing the .NET Framework Client Profile.  This is a much smaller version of the runtime (expected to be only around 26MB!!!) that does not contain several of the server components (for example: ASP.NET) and only includes the assemblies required for client applications, namely - the .NET Framework core, WPF, WCF and Windows Forms.   This also comes with a bootstrapper (~200KB) which can be included into your client applications.  The bootstrapper will check for .NET Framework availability and then download the .NET Framework Client Profile setup package if it found that .NET Framework is not installed already.    The bootstrapper is also smartly written to look at only incremental components - for instance, if you already had .NET 3.0 and your application required .NET 3.5, it would only download the incremental components, hence reducing the download size much further.  Note that you will have to explicitly configure your application to require only the client runtime components while building the application.

Remember that since most Windows XP systems already have .NET 2.0 or higher, this should significantly reduce the download size for .NET Framework.  This is probably the best update for WPF since its first release!!!

BETA 1 Notes

Much as I want to try all the great stuff immediately, remember that there are some incompatibilities of Visual Studio SP1 with the Silverlight 2 BETA Tools for Visual Studio.  This will cause your Visual Studio Silverlight development experience to break.  A new version of the Silverlight Tools will be released soon (see Scott's blog for more information).

Also remember that this is the BETA and not all features mentioned above (like Ribbon UI) are immediately available.  See Scott's blog for details.   But hey, we've made the announcements.  And Scott's team has been pretty kick-ass in shipping stuff really fast!

Mrinal convinced Vineet and I to become Twitter-ers at the recent Barcamp we'd attended.

Mrinal also told me that twhirl was the best Twitter client around.  I did try using Witty and it seems to be a little buggy at the moment.  I have since decided that the world needs a better WPF Twitter client and intend to write one when I find time.  In the meanwhile, it is actually quite painful to use twitter.com itself to keep track of all the people I am trying to follow on Twitter.

So I gave in and decided to also give twhirl a try (and in the process also see what things a twitter client should have). Now, twhirl needs Adobe AIR runtime to be installed and the integrated installer started off from the twhirl homepage.

It downloads it and then gives me an error that says:

I know Adobe AIR isn't very good with external devices, but then I do have a hard disk available! :)  Time to go the manual install route I guess.