Trip report – PDC05 (closing remarks)

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Craig

As I mentioned earlier in my trip report, this PDC was highly energetic and projected a sense of urgency (i.e. its technology horizon is both near, medium and far). Technologies are more baked; forthcoming pipelines are more substantial; capabilities are more comprehensive and offer a better foundation upon which to build software solutions.

Storage, Data, Presentation – FREEDOM !!

The PDC Bloggers experiment for me failed. Why? First, the stream of information is substantial but it’s also overwhelming. Keeping up with it while focusing on PDC proved quickly to be impractical for me. Second, the vast majority of bloggers aggregated into the single feed aren’t known (vetted) to me; so, their authority is questionable–not to mention the fact that a number of posts are focused on “what’s in the goody bags” and other valueless trivial. However, I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure. Through the experience I was able to locate a new handful of blogs I subscribed to as a result. Perhaps my experience suggests that there a new tools waiting to be developed to efficiently mine feeds for the actual content of personal interest.

About the session slide decks…Attendees had to download sessions one at a time (or write a custom application to batch/bulk download instead). WHY?!? What a colossal waste of time. Microsoft would do well to consider a storage/server/net solution that could support downloading at least daily Zip files. Does the absence of a smart client solution for PDC05 say anything about Microsoft’s smart client priority? (Previous PDCs had such tools.) Where are the keynote decks? Why did the .one files never see the (second) light of day? (For each PowerPoint deck there was an associated OneNote file. At least that was apparent to the public CommNet briefly on the Sunday before PDC05.)

About internet access during the conference…Wireless access was still quite poor throughout the conference with quite a few dead spots and other areas of sporadic connectivity. Isn’t the underlying technology and current capacity such that we should be beyond this? The free high-speed internet in the hotel courtesy of Microsoft was a nice touch.

Finally, my original intent was to blog my trip report on a daily basis during the conference. This proved to be impractical and too ambitious for me. Settling time was necessary to add clarity and to help bubble up more important points. Even given some time after the conference, my trip reports here on this blog are essentially in note form and remain to be condensed, distilled and made more actionable.

Tags: PDC05

Trip report – PDC05 (day four)

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Craig

Friday 9/16/2005

PNL14: The Future of RSS: Beyond Blogging – Robert Scoble et al

I attended this session because I believe that feeds represent a significant amount of content and I’m an ECM architect.
Robert Scoble MC’ed for the panel, which included a range of other individuals both inside and outside Microsoft.
RSS: What can it be used for, what does it need, what does platform incorporation mean, etc.?
One needs to really understand the existing infrastructure before reinventing wheels!

There was some good discussion concering “RSS extensions.”

Time-based feeds are sometimes problematic (e.g. publishers want to just create simple lists (Top 10) rather than reverse-chronological ordered feeds)
Unlocking back office data
Data here is not visible to a normal aggregator
Greg Reinacker (NewsGator CTO and founder) didn’t really answer the question Scoble asked him about his view on extensions. He did say that RSS in Vista is good for NewsGator’s business. It makes the medium and the user experience pervasive. It also requires NewsGator to continue innovating in order to provide unique, compelling value (i.e. provide significant motivation).
Security (e.g. DRM in RSS) – see Greg’s blog entry on leveraging existing HTTP authentication
Ability to apply lifecycle and retention on feeds (e.g. avoid undue system stress by aggregators asking for files that no longer exist and exist but are static (blogger has moved on); mark a feed for expiration, redirection (i.e. HTTP 410); seasonal feeds, recurring feeds – something more general than “it’s gone” (e.g. “I’m just quiet for now”))
Very large file enclosures and something like BitTorrent
Viruses tend to mutate via joining (e.g. RSS and BitTorrent)

The other end of security (i.e. tracking) was discussed.

Privacy issues
Advertising issues
Auditing issues
Identity isn’t enough – need to know that authenticating role initially is still the current role (or the current role is still auth’ed)
Not all feeds are public. There are organizations with 10K feeds behind the firewall that will never see the (public) light of day.

Enclosures were discussed.

Micro-formats (what?)
WinFS implications
VDMs, compound docs, etc.
There was mention of a Microsoft-Technorati meeting that occurred during PDC that focused in part on this subject (enclosures).

Other discussion topics included the following:

Dynamic feeds, interactive feeds … or just static feeds like today
Standard attacks that plague HTML, email, etc. will be applied to RSS once it’s truly mainstream. Therefore, a platform should responsibly anticipate this and guard its users.
Simple shouldn’t mean naïve
Check out Microsoft’s start.com property, which is focused on providing richer user experiences above RSS.

PRS334 WPF + WCF = Magic – Doug Purdy and Chris Sells

I attended this session to see the combination of WPF and WCF to form a smart client solution. I also knew that the speakers would be entertaining from past “last day” PDC sessions, and in this regard, I wasn’t disappointed. However, the session was a bit too light on content. Both speakers are quite bright; however, although their humor was disarming and entertaining, it took center stage during a technical session where content should be king.

Best speaker quote during this session: “Caffeine-free…Diet…Coke…what’s the point?”

Tags: PDC05

Trip report – PDC05 (day three)

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Craig

Thursday 9/15/2005

Keynote #5 – Server Roadmap – Bob Muglia (video)(transcript)

The overall message focused on closing the loop/gap between dev and ops.

2005 server roadmap:

R2 is focused on server management (e.g. WS-Management support, MMC 3.0 (featuring .NET-based snap-in development–guidelines to be published–to build a console that runs anywhere), SDM support).
R2 will ship with .NET 2.0 (i.e. .NET will be a “standard operating system service” in R1). When will Microsoft do itself and its ISVs a huge favor by making .NET pervasive via Windows-wide deployment of the runtime?!? Why is .NET not auto-deployed on at least Windows XP systems? (They had a reasonable opportunity to correct this in Windows XP SP2 but passed for whatever reason.)

2006 server roadmap:

Complete cluster solution (going after compute-intensive systems like academia; beta now)
This clustering technology reminds me of working on interative television (ITV) at MSI (commerical arm of Lockheed Martin Missles & Space with Microsfot in the 90s (“MMOSA” and “Tiger” systems … in competition with today’s embedded systems winner at Microsoft, Windows Embedded and Windows CE before that)
Monad – cmd-line scripting language; one underlying set of (managed) mgmt obj’s (i.e. MMC 3.0 and Mondad–for all server applications)
WinFX – coincident with Vista release (emphasis placed on WCF and WWF for server OS)

While talking about 2006, a fair amount of time was spent on identity and security under the Active Directory (AD) banner.

75% AD vs. 1% LDAP
Moving past SSO (i.e. largely already addressed) to address/tackle service access control
Demo of SSO via app.config (declarative!)
WS* compliant identity source/service
RMS is now the Information Protection Service with the AD system

2007 server roadmap:

“Longhorn Server” (Beta 1 @ PDC05, DVD #6)
Focus on virtualization and hypervisor support/enhancements
Modular OS – only deploy/activate what is required; shrink attack surface area; shrink maintenance surface area; keep this modularity in mind up front during systems architecture and development
TxF – significant update to NTFS enabling all file I/O to become transactional

Toward the end of Bob’s keynote, an IIS7 demo was provided. It proved to be quite compelling and received quite positive response from the audience. IIS7 is a VERY modular system, borrowing pages from the Apache play book. “Metabase is dead!” Code, content and config are all easier to replicate (e.g. to farm). You can read more about other’s perceptions of IIS7. I, for one, tend to leverage rather than augment web servers and application servers. However, I continue to say: “Know what you leverage!”

OFF314 Developing Enterprise Document Solutions Using Office Client and Server Technologies – Rob Lefferts

I attended this session because of my work with Kurt DelBene’s Office “12″ team including Rob.
This session tried to clarify what ECM means and put it into perspective. A scenario was provided to tie it all together (i.e. Vendor Contract Scenario – used as way to flesh-out details of problem and functionality of SharePoint’s solution).
Focus on Content Management (i.e. Document Management, Policy & Compliance, Workflow, WCM). In Office “12″ ECM means building capabilities that fit into these four buckets.
There was significant emphasis not just on functionality but its usability.
One bar set by Microsoft for Office “12″ is to be an auditable system of record. During the session’s Q&A, the question of DoD 5015.2 compliance was specifically asked, and the answer was that, yes, submitting the system for compliance verification is indeed on the current plan of record.
Knowledge Workers are smart people; so, they’ll work around issues…and be less productive in the process. Therefore, enable their maximum productivity and effectivity.
Events and “Content Types,” apparently “near and dear” to the speaker, were demonstrated (e.g. project provisioning (e.g. set of initial content to start project workflow – RFP); feature.xml – configuration file to deploy new functionality to a server).
WWF – workflow for everyone (end users, devs, etc.); great tooling via VS05; usable end experience via Office “12″
There is an interesting option to provide feedback during realized workflow (i.e. allow the edge to suggest refinement).
Oddly enough, after seeing so much WPF, Atlas and Vista visuals, the visuals during the workflow demo seemed stale.
The final demo centered around Records Management and the SharePoint records repository.

There was some good Q&A at the end of Rob’s presentation (e.g. the DoD color I already noted above).

Down-level experience asked (re: info panel)
Scalability? A (partial): Inside of a single library, 10 million items can be stored; views on libraries reduce the effective number of items in a library, though; 2000 items in any container before a new site collection is required; 100 million items for indexing; …
How are versions stored? A: Separate items

PRS420 ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2) – Nikhil Kothari

I attended this session because Nikhil is the lead architect for Atlas; so his perspective on the framework carries significant weight.
This was more a session of demos than slides.
Atlas is about making scripting more approachable.
Atlas is an end-to-end framework (i.e. client and server).
The “nuts and bolts” demo came across as a ton of plumbing and debugging concerns. This is the exact opposite impression projected by ASP.NET 2.0 (e.g. “70% less coding” in certain regards). Why when WPF and Windows Forms are so much easier to build against and offer more substantial tooling?

In between sessions and over lunch, I had a good discussion with the Director of WinFS Program Management, Quentin Clark.

DAT320 Windows Vista: Building RSS Enabled Applications – Amar Gandhi (part of Team RSS)

I attended this session to see how Vista provides a platform for RSS and to better understand the need for and nature of Vista’s RSS extensions.
Subscription applies to much more than blogs and news
This talk is about these broader use cases (i.e. real business scenarios)
Goal of this talk: more time in code than in slides
DVD #5 in folder “Web Feeds …” – APIs discussed today
Implementation available in Oct CTP of Vista
RSS model overview (e.g. incremental merge to client store, etc.)
Feed normalization process (i.e. “jiggling”) – any fidelity implications (e.g. original format biases)?
“Interesting stuff is in the extension” (smells like embrace and extend to me!)
API is COM-based to increase its reach and to avoid loading the CLR (e.g. IE scenario; Windows Media Player scenario)
Consider the experience you want to provide
Where/how to expose feeds from your application
Use cases for enclosures (e.g. audio, images, video, related files, etc.)
Jon Udell posted an interesting interview with the speaker, too.

PRS324 Using Data in Your WPF Applications: XML, WCF, ADO.NET and More – Namita Gupta

I attended this session because data is the pervasive element in all applications.
The speaker chose to leverage slides as pictures, as visuals (i.e. very short, at least, on text). This ended up being a very reasonable way to convey important points.
WPF data binding – pervasive, expressive and open
A technology roadmap with demos was provided.
Control templates are a BIG DEAL (e.g. you can declare data binding in a control template)
Every control is bindable to data
Data binding + templating => POWER (in WPF)

DAT209 “WinFS” Future Directions: An Overview – Shishir Mehrotra

I attended this session because of my work with the WinFS team and specifically with Shishir.
WinFS is Microsoft’s current attempt at Integrated Storage (single, unified store).
The first presentation of this material was so popular that a second session (this one) was added to accommodate those interested. And the room was full on the second go-round…and an overflow was required, again.
It would be useful to convey some of the power of WinFS if the video presented here to invoke application ideas becomes generally available.
WinFS goals: Unify, Organize, Explore, Innovate
WinFS for developers – the PDC05 landscape compared to the PDC03 landscape
WinFS has two primary facets: store and API.
ADO.NET will be the WinFS API. This is excellent news and provides a uniform API for coding WinFS and non-WinFS data sources alike.
ADO.NET for WinFS will feature “Entities” (“ObjectSpaces” reborn–dropped feature in v2) and ORM. “Mapped connections” will map tables into objects. Inheritance will be supported.
ObjectSQL will be the query language and will generate a storage expression tree.
WinFS will feature a common data model–”Entity Data Model” (close to UML).
Metadata handlers work in pairs (promoters/demoters) and exist to resolve item/file conflicts otherwise caused by naïve Win32 applications
The “Life Journal” demo reminded me of exposure to NASA visualization research I saw in the early 90s; it also reminded me of views for day traders–not that I am one. It would be interesting to examine the “Life Journal” code base to better understand the separation between presention, data and storage.
The post-PDC DVD, if it contains videos, not just slides and audio, will be quite compelling (e.g. where this session is concerned).
There were significantly more sessions on WinFS during PDC 2003 (i.e. nine). The industry would be wise not to misinterpret the lesser coverage during PDC05 as a decline in this technology’s significance and potential impact.
Play with the WinFS Beta for Windows XP available today!