Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

Make way for the future - Microsoft reveal their roadmap for the next 12 to 36 months.

Along with a handful of other New Zealanders, Chris Auld and Mark Orange represented Intergen at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los
Angeles from 26th to the 30th October.

PDC is arguably the most important Microsoft conference held anywhere in the world, as it is the place where all the new and important technology, product and strategy announcements for the
next 12 to 36 months are made public to the market.
Despite a crowd of over 6,000 geeks from all around the world, for some reason we still found it easy to stand out in the crowd.

Having content built by Intergen presented during a number of conference sessions, including a keynote, certainly helped give us visibility. The opportunity to get up close with the upcoming
Microsoft technologies and products was almost as important as the opportunity for us to meet and build connections with the Microsoft people and community experts who actually design, build and evangelise these technologies and products.

From the well known products, such as Office 14 and Visual Studio 2010, to the evolution of Live Services, to the revolution of Surface and Windows Azure, it was full steam ahead for five days of geek paradise.

Here are some highlights from the action-packed line-up:

Silverlight 2.0

There are many significant enhancements to version 2.0 of Silverlight, but the most important is the cut down version of the .NET 3.5 Common Language Runtime that is now embedded in the Silverlight client. Finally we can run managed code directly on the client and provide a truly rich user experience through the browser. Microsoft has worked very hard to keep the Silverlight download below 4mb to ensure a low barrier to adoption; so we’re going to be seeing a lot more Silverlight applications appearing over the next 18 months.

Windows Azure

Intergen has been working with some of the technologies that make up Azure for about 18 months now but it was still super exciting for us to see the covers come off the fully branded version. Azure is the long awaited ‘Operating System for the Internet’ that Microsoft has been talking about. It provides an abstraction above both the hardware and the underlying Windows Operating system that allows the deployment of massively scalable cloud hosted applications. Intergen will be hosting
some of the first Azure events in the world throughout New Zealand in early 2009.

Windows 7

On day two, Windows 7 was unveiled, the next release of the Windows operating system that will supersede Vista. The initial challenges with the introduction of Vista have been overcome. Now that the PC ecosystem (operating system, software, hardware) properly supports Vista, we’re ready for the evolution to the Windows 7 operating system. In particular, this prepares the way for the new wave of multitouch computing or NUI – Natural User Interface. NUI is the next evolution from GUI (Graphical User Interface) which has been with us since the late 1980s. It’s all about ditching the keyboard and mouse for many applications and using multiple fingers to touch the screen and interact with the application. Not only is this a leap in technology but there is now going to be an inevitable leap in
interactive design and user interface design to match. Don’t think dumb kiosk with a touch screen where a single finger replaces the mouse, think multiple fingers and multiple people interacting with a whole new world of solutions and experiences.

Oslo, Dublin and the M Language

‘Oslo’ is the forthcoming modeling platform from Microsoft. Intergen has been involved as one of the external ‘advisors’ for Oslo since June 2007. The business goal behind Oslo is to break down the silos in enterprise IT by providing a model-based toolset for expressing and executing complex business applications. Oslo will provide visual modelling tools to cover the entire application lifecycle and
ultimately these models will be executed in ‘Dublin,’ the new application process server being built into Windows. Oslo models are expressed in a new modelling language called ‘M,’ a language for textually describing domain models.

Office 14 plus Live Mesh – The More Connected Office

Have you ever wanted to have multiple people collaborate inside the same document
by editing different sections? What if one of those users was working through a browser from the other side of the planet? Well, that is exactly what Microsoft demonstrated with the new Office 14 versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote and the Live Mesh platform, all planned for release late
next year.

Leveraging Silverlight 2.0, through the browser, Microsoft delivers a rich viewing, editing and collaboration experience for these core Office applications without requiring the full client applications to be installed on the user’s computer. Live Mesh provides a reliable storage platform in the cloud that can store these documents and automatically keep them in sync across all your different devices including PCs, Macs and mobile phones.

As always, we’d love to hear from you and we’re always happy to provide a detailed briefing on any of the current or future Microsoft platform components that we cover. Email
us at strategyandinnovation@intergen.co.nz.