PDC 2008 Mini-report
I thought I'd share my impressions from PDC 2008 where I was both working and attending sessions. It was interesting how secretive everyone was until the very announcement day (all client stuff including Win7 was not even talked about until Day 2 of the conference when it was announced). Most announcements seemed to be surprising to the audience and created quite a buzz. Windows 7 was met very warmly, but I was mostly interested in other things. Azure (formerly known as Red Dog) and .NET Services (formerly known as Zurich) created were by far most paradigm-shifting for Microsoft and our development community at this conference. The whole notion of applications that “need” to be ported to the cloud seemed both terrifying, confusing and exciting at the same time to the audience, although many seemed to completely ignore it from the beginning as they didn’t see any need for it in their apps. Many folks were silently watching the presentations and not asking questions being so confused about what’s going on - that changed towards the end of the conference somewhat, but still it was quite a difference with previous PDCs.
Both notion of further decoupling applications and queuing everything and concept of “eventual availability” could be traced in almost every presentation on S+S technologies.
I was impressed the most by Oslo and its tools – Quadrant and IntelliPad. Oslo, being mostly called at this conference the “modeling framework” introduces so many new concepts that they found their traces in large portion of presentations in one way or another, but the most impressive one was Quadrant tool itself.
Codename “Quadrant” basically allows you to create models instead of applications and only then take it to the next level where applications are generated using different “renderers” (deployment, compilation, distribution, configuration, customization) and corresponding runtimes which allows very agile and adaptive software development not heavily dependent on changes in underlying technologies. It seemed very easy to also create models for existing applications (Don Box mentioned they’ve put IIS7 models into repository already). One somewhat oversimplified by good definition that I liked – “Dublin” is all that happens after F5 and “Quadrant” is all that happens before. Two tools that are included in codename “Quadrant” – IntelliPad and well, Quadrant – allow you to build either text DSL or visual models in variety of ways that get synchronized with repository (database). Quadrant tool’s models themselves are in repository and if you shut down SQL Server the tool won’t even start. Quadrant tool's models are also completely exposed through the tool – hence you can modify absolutely everything in the environment, even position of specific buttons and menus on the screen and can provide the same to the end users of your application as well. It almost felt like we’re giving too much flexibility to the developers now J.
While I highly recommend Oslo-related PDC sessions, one of the most overlooked new technologies from business application development perspective seems to be Live Services Platform. It was mostly viewed as consumer-oriented offering and I don’t think PDC will change that too much for overall developer community, but it was clear from many presentations that they are thinking more of business applications leveraging Live framework now. We’re also thinking of deploying Live Services on premise so all of the services are available in enterprise environment (this is not going to be available at least until 2010 though).
An interesting concept from Live Services team is automatic device and application discovery and notification over the web with subsequent P2P communication that works with every client, be it mobile device or corporate app. As for Live Mesh connectivity, even people with exotic devices (like T-mobile G1 phone) are able to use it now just by getting authentication and application tokens and registering the device as regular Mesh application. That seems to create extremely good “reach” opportunities for app developers. One myth here though – many people think Live Mesh is created on Azure platform. It only partially is, it even uses its own storage for now and there are two different notification/transfer pipelines not based on Azure infrastructure, but they are converging and the goal is to have entire Live framework on Azure in the future.
And finally, I encourage everyone to view the sessions online at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/ - they’re worth every second.
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