Microsoft SharePoint & Developers Conferences Wrap-Up - Part 3

18
Dec
2009

Fred Yeomans

Professional Developers Conference 2009

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is Microsoft’s big programmer event. Usually, this is where they announce major new products and technologies. For example, PDC 2003 was the first major public announcement of Windows Longhorn (which grew up to be Vista) and its underlying technologies. At last year’s PDC, Microsoft announced its cloud computing strategy, Windows Azure.
PDC09 was a little different. This year was more about fulfilling the vision. A number of new products are in late beta stages and approaching release:

• SharePoint 2010
• Office 2010
• .NET 4.0
• Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight 4.0 Windows Server AppFabric (formerly codenamed Dublin and Velocity)
• Windows Azure

In addition, with Windows 7 having just been released, there was considerable focus on Windows 7 desktop development, especially on some of the new features, such as multi-touch support.
 
The conference was very heavily weighted towards Windows Azure cloud services and Silverlight 4.0.

Azure is Microsoft’s foray into the cloud computing space. In Windows Azure, you can develop solutions using .NET technologies (ASP.NET for the UI, .NET worker components for the logic). Windows Azure provides the infrastructure for hosting these components in the cloud, as well as a cloud-based SQL Server storage service, as well as an application fabric which facilitates communications and integration of cloud-based applications with on-premise resources.

A significant aspect of Windows Azure which was demonstrated a PDS was the ability to use none Microsoft technologies in the Microsoft cloud. For example, there were demonstrations of Apache Web Server with PHP applications running in the Azure cloud.

There was also significant focus on Silverlight 4.0, which was released to beta at the conference. Major new features of Silverlight 4.0 include:

• Comprehensive printing support enabling hardcopy reports and documents as well as a virtual print view, independent of screen content.
• A full set of forms controls with over 60 customizable, styleable components. New controls include RichTextbox with hyperlinks, images and editing and masked textbox for complex field validation. Enhanced controls include DataGrid with sortable/resizeable columns and copy/paste rows.
• WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier applications including transactions, paging of data, WCF and HTTP enhancements.
• Localization enhancements with Bi-Directional text, Right-to-Left support and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai and 30 new languages.
• Exclusive tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010. Including a full editable design surface, drag & drop data-binding, automatically bound controls, datasource selection, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support and full IntelliSense.
• Fluid interface enhancements advance application usability through animation effects.
• Webcam and microphone to allow sharing of video and audio for instance for chat or customer service applications.
• Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction, enabling a wide range of end-user interaction and communication scenarios for example video conferencing. 
• Bring data in to your application with features such as copy and paste or drag and drop.
• Long lists can now be scrolled effortlessly with the mouse wheel.
• Support conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu.
• Support for Google’s Chrome browser. 
• Performance optimizations mean Silverlight 4 applications start quicker and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 application.
• Multi-touch support enables a range of gestures and touch interactions to be integrated into user experiences.
• Multicast networking, enabling Enterprises to lower the cost of streaming broadcast events such as company meetings and training, interoperating seamlessly with existing Windows Media Server streaming infrastructure. 
• Content protection for H.264 media through Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
• Output protection for audio/video streams allowing content owners or distributors to ensure protected content is only viewed through a secure video connection.
• Enhance support for out-of-browser applications, allowing them to run in either sandboxed mode (with limited access to local machines) full-trust mode. 

Next time (January) … what does all of this new stuff mean to a law firm?