? PDC 2009 Keynote Roundup: Day 1 | Main

November 22, 2009

PDC Keynote Roundup: Day 2

Day 2 (as usual) was focused on Windows and the new developer tools and SDKs.  Some of the information here was alluded to in the keynote but didn’t come in detail until the sessions.

Windows 7

Steven Sinofsky, who runs the entire Windows division, led off talking about Windows 7.  First, Steven went through the background on how they engineered Windows 7.  Given all the problems that Vista had, it was important that they learn from everything and do it right.  Here is the basic timeline and goals:

Overall, it was clear that they put a ton of work into making Windows 7 more stable and reliable than Vista.  So far in my usage, it’s much much better – boots extremely fast even though I have a lot of junk installed, is responsive, and causes very few issues.

On the developer side, Windows 7 adds a ton of new features that applications can take advantage of, including:

Also, I attended the Windows 7 Dev Camp on Monday. Of particular interest was the Windows 7 Kernel Changes talk.  It was put on by Mark Russinovich of SysInternals fame, as well as Arun Kishan and Landy Wang, both of whom are architects on the kernel team.  What they discussed were all the changes and improvements made to the kernel in Windows 7.  Highly fascinating.  There are also two sessions from the conference on the same topic – watch them here and here.

IE Update

They just started IE9 a few weeks ago.  The goal is to improve standards compliance even more, support HTML5, improve JS performance (compiled?), and take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics a text.

Steven ran a demo of IE9’s current build, and showed off some of the speed and rendering.  So far it looks promising, but it will take a ton of work to make it the browser everyone really wants to use.

Silverlight

Scott Guthrie came on stage next to talk about developer tools, and SDKs.  He led off with Silverlight.  SL3 released in the summer, and currently has a 33% penetration (total SL penetration is at 45%, compared with 25% at MIX09 in March).  So overall adoption is growing, thanks to big wins with Netflix, NBC (Olympics and Sunday Night Football), Major League Baseball, the Democratic National Convention, the White House, etc.

He then went on to talk about Silverlight 4, which is slated for release in the first half of 2010.  SL is on a pretty aggressive release schedule – SL2 was October 2008, SL3 was July 2009, and now SL4 in H1’10.  They are working hard to penetrate the market to better compete with Flash in the browser.  But they are also trying to make Silverlight the cross-platform development platform of choice for desktop apps (competing with Adobe Air, primarily).

It seems like Microsoft’s strategy is multifaceted:

[Aside: Many people are having the “Is WPF dead?” discussion these days.  I don’t think it is.  Silverlight is definitely the platform-of-choice in many instances, but WPF has legs – Visual Studio 2010 is being built on it, and other applications inside Microsoft are probably watching that project intently to see if WPF is something they can move to.  The current Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 is very good so far.  If you watch Paul Harrington’s session on how they’ve built it, it’s pretty impressive.  We had to solve a lot of similar problems on our project and it was interesting to compare their solutions with ours.]

The features announced in Silverlight 4 are very ambitious, but also very needed.  Following is a rundown.  If you read the Adobe link I referenced above, you’ll see tons of overlap.  I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

If you want to watch some Silverlight sessions, go here.

Overall, the tools and SDKs talk was much meatier (for me, anyway) than the Azure stuff.  There is a ton of great stuff coming down the pike.

Other links:

Posted by eburke at November 22, 2009 10:51 PM

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