After hearing that there would be no PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in 2010, yesterday Microsoft announced that there will be a PDC. It will be held October 28 & 29 in Redmond on the Microsoft campus. It looks like it will be developer focused and will have keynotes from Steve Ballmer. I am torn on whether I will be going. If I can get a speaking slot then I will definitely be there. If not I am not sure. There are a limited number of seats available, the conference is very focused on a few topics, and of course, it is in Redmond in October. As I think about what I will be discussing with my boss I have come up with the following reasons to not go and also reasons to ask for permission to go.

Reasons not to attend PDC 2010

• The conference will be small so the chances for networking might be limited. If the Microsoft people come in, present, and then head back to their offices where you can’t ask follow-up questions a lot of the value of an in-person conference might be reduced.
• October in Redmond can be wet, rainy, and depressing (not a really strong reason but something I thought of)
• If I am not interested in the cloud or other topics covered then there might not be anything for me
• PDC used to be about the long term roadmap (3-5 years) the general topics seem to make it appear that this is more about current to 3 years out. This follows the trend of the last few PDCs but it still makes a difference to some people and their ability to attend.
• You may have already planned for or attended all of the conferences that your travel and training budget will allow.
• The web site says you can watch it live. If you can watch it from your desk you won’t have to pay for travel.

Reasons to attend PDC 2010

• The small conference will mean that you will have plenty of opportunities to ask questions and get answers from the people who developed the features.
• If the person you are talking to doesn’t know the answer it is possible that they can IM the right person and you can talk to them in a few minutes.
• Even though we like to tell ourselves that we can learn from watching the live stream the reality is that if you are not dedicated to attending the conference someone will come and bother you causing you to miss out on something important to your job.
• Networking. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being around a lot of really smart people and being able to learn from their experiences.
• Focused learning. Conferences have never been the same as a training class but when you go to a general conference there are usually lots of sessions and in any time slot I can find 2 or 3 that I want to go to and it becomes a balancing act. With a few topics covered it should be easier to filter down the good ones and come up with a series of good session in a track like cloud, mobile, or IE. Whatever you need to learn about you should be able to get a lot of sessions without the distraction of having a good session on SharePoint or SQL to pull you away from what you are there to learn about. (I guess that might be me and my learning style but I plan on looking at the sessions and trying to figure out if there is enough depth in any area to make this a strong argument.)
• Microsoft campus. I can remember the first time that I went to a training class in Redmond and was able to see the Microsoft campus where all of that good software comes from. Ironically now that I know more about the geography in Redmond I realize that the hotel I stayed in is in walking distance of our offices in Kirkland. It is sort of like a pilgrimage to the mother ship and a chance that not all developers get.

Today is (according to the mail in my inbox) World Intellectual Property Day. Innovators Network is asking us all to write our elected officials and ask them to provide strong support for intellectual property and to ask our trading partners to do the same.

I have been in several discussions over the years about how to protect intellectual property. There is a continuum of opinion on how much our code needs to be protected. At one end you have the open source projects that give the code away and at the other end you have the proprietary applications that use activation or a dongle to protect the application and ensure that only licensed users are accessing it. I don’t know that any one way is right or wrong but it is more of a business decision. In college I was working for a professor who had computer based training available and he made the decision to require a dongle to use it. The dongle attached to the parallel port and in a few cases caused problems with printers (the pass through didn’t work right or something). I know he generated some ill will and I talked to some irate customers but in his case he thought it was worth the hassle. Whatever your views on the issue I think most of us agree that we should be compensated for our efforts. In some cases that is money in others it is peer recognition but we should be the ones who choose what we expect to get from our efforts. Because of that I think we should all be concerned when our work is taken without our permission.

There is a form at https://secure3.convio.net/act/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=121&AddInterest=1027&JServSessionIdr004=11jql40as2.app331b if you want to fill out a form to send a message to your elected representatives asking them to support intellectual property.

I am downloading the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 right now. It is available for MSDN subscribers. Yet another reason to subscribe to MSDN. According to the download manager in just 3 hours I will be able to install the release candidate and start playing with all the new goodness. It’s like Christmas in February.

It is the last day of 2009 and as we all know for most of us living on this planet 2009 wasn’t the best year. We had concerns over our jobs, wars, families, and other issues. Over the years I have made predictions or sworn them off based on how accurate I have been. I would like to make some predictions for 2010 and again I will break them into two broad categories of “safe” and “out on a limb”. Don’t expect any surprises with the safe predictions, they are the same ones everyone else is saying but I need something that I can point to and say I was right :)

Safe

1. The economy will “stabilize” but there won’t be a lot of growth but what growth there is will be good for IT. This is based on what I have been hearing in the news and my personal quest for the last couple of years. I am not an economist but from what I hear on the news and in the press all of the “experts” believe that the economy will have a small rebound but not large growth. The statement about it being good for IT is because I have spent the last couple of years trying to explain to anyone who will listen that making software decisions based on a platform approach is the correct way to look at your IT investments. By analyzing the entire software investment in your organization (whether you are a 1 man shop or part of a fortune 100 company) and optimizing the whole you can make better decisions that will decrease your costs, increase your ROI, and position you for growth. I firmly believe that organizations will start to look at the cutbacks of the last few years and decide that strategic investments are in order. The IT department is somewhere that they can invest their limited funds and help position the organization for the future.

2. Sales of small netbook computers will increase. This also seems like a no-brainer prediction. The netbooks are light, cheap, and are passably good for most every day tasks. I don’t want to type on the small keyboard all day long (carpal tunnel syndrome anyone?) but for a second machine I like it. For many things like e-mail, surfing the web, and carrying to a meeting they seem to be the best form factor.

3. Microsoft will ship more software than anyone can keep up with. OK again not earth shattering news. With the releases of Office, Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL Server, and who knows how many other major and minor software products in 2010 there will not be enough time for any one single person to understand all of the software coming out of Microsoft.

4. Security will get harder. With the sophistication of hackers and the large amount of money to be made by stealing information the problems with security will just get worse.

Out on a Limb

These are just some wild ideas that I have. I don’t have any proof points other than my “gut feeling” about these. I am afraid to go back an look at my success rate with these kind of predictions but I would guess that I am at less that 30% accurate. Think of these as entertaining ideas as opposed to tips you should invest money in.

1. 2010 will be the height of netbook sales growth rate. You may well say “Wait a minute isn’t #2 above about sales of netbooks increasing?”. Yes it is but I feel that a couple of forces will come together to change the basic sales forces for netbook sales. I see the forces being (among others) a) Since most people are purchasing these computers as a second computer there will be very little reason to replace them with faster hardware. b) The popularity of other devices such as eBook readers and smart phones will eat into the market some. Why would I want to carry a netbook and a Kindle? c) The price pressures being put on manufacturers by the low cost netbooks will continue to push down the cost of the low end notebook computers. As the distinction between a high end netbook and a low end notebook is blurred so will the reasons for purchasing a netbook.
I still expect to see that sales of lots of netbooks but into 2011 and beyond I think the rate of sales will go down as compared to 2010.

2. Concentrated attacks on open source software. I don’t have any insight into the hacker community but I believe that there is enough open source software in use now that we will see an effort by the “bad guys” to target one or more popular open source products. I am not saying the attacks will be successful but I believe that there is now a big enough economic reason to target Linux, Apache, or some other large open source project. Also with Microsoft being more friendly to open source there may be an attack on a Microsoft sponsored open source project just for spite.

3. More companies will adopt monthly patch cycles. Microsoft still isn’t perfect about patches, transparency, and security but by having a monthly patch cycle we know when and how to get the patches and can plan around testing the patches. I see this as becoming more of a standard procedure for software on Windows. More manufacturers will adopt some kind of schedule like a monthly or quarterly patch cycle. I even expect to see more of the “small guys” going to a monthly patch cycle. I just wish that they would not all patch on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.

Let me know what you think of my predictions and if I am right or wrong.

Scott Guthrie blogged that the launch date for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will be delayed. They are delaying the release to fix some performance problems. Also according to the blog there will be a release candidate in February with

a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment

I think this is a win-win-win situation for most developers. Let me explain.

The first win is that we get a much better product. Most developers I know want to work with the latest and greatest tools. They are willing to suffer through poor performance or some bugs to be on the bleeding edge. With the extra time we won’t have to curse our tools under our breath waiting for service pack 1.

The second win is that we can actually put code into production faster. Since the RC will have a “go live” license I can deploy my applications sometime in February with the RC rather than waiting for the launch in March.

The third win that I see is that we get more say into shaping the future of the tool that most of us live in each day. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Microsoft will be slipping in new features but we have the ability to comment for a longer period and possibly influence what will go into the version of Visual Studio after this. Scott Guthrie has graciously posted his e-mail address for feedback and there is the connect site as well. I am sure that Microsoft tries to listen to feedback all of the time but human nature being what it is and scheduling and all I am sure they are more focused on gathering and prioritizing feedback during the beta cycle.

The people who stand to loose the most from this announcement are those who either by choice or company policy are not allowed to use beta software in production. Since Scott’s post states the launch will be moved back a few weeks I don’t think it will be that much longer to wait.

It is also nice to see Microsoft reacting to our feedback and changing something as public as the launch date to make sure that the product is stable and usable. I can think back not too many years when the reaction might have been very different and they would have just moved up the date for the first service pack.

Yesterday and today I have been following a story that a contractor for Microsoft China ripped off a lot of code from another microblogging service. ZDNet has a short synopsis of the issue. This got me thinking about the problems of intellectual property.

For years the idea of “copy and paste” reuse of JavaScript has been the fodder of programmer jokes. I am not a lawyer and I an not sure what the relevant laws are but I have mixed feelings on this issue. Like a lot of other people I like to view source in my browser occasionally to see how something has been done. I have never copied another style sheet but that is more a function of my lack of use of CSS than any strong feeling about not looking at style sheets.

I believe that wholesale copying of a sites style sheets and JavaScript goes way beyond the realm of “fair use” or learning and into plagiarism. If the code is open source and the intent is clearly to allow someone to reuse it then there is no question about the ethics. When you are looking at someone’s “proprietary closed source” code (even though it is visible) you run the risk of running afoul of the law. When I first read the story I thought about how I would feel if I had spent a lot of hours tweaking a look and feel and tuning JavaScript just to see it ripped off. I definitely believe that programmers should be paid for their efforts and I see this as becoming a bigger issue in the future as laws start to catch up to what is common practice now.

On the Windows IT Pro web site they are running a “faceoff” between Hypervisors (VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V) to discuss some of the pros and cons of virtualization and each product. It also looks like Novell is posting information as well.

The format is that of a blog on a topic with experts telling about each product’s strengths. I like the format of being able to see what the strengths of each tool is and how that tool can be used to complete your IT environment. The side by side format lets me compare the ideas and points without having to jump back and forth between different browser windows.

I have to say that given my limited experience with VMWare and Hyper-V I haven’t experienced any of the issues with SLAs (all personal or test machines), licensing (paid for by the companies I was consulting for), or management (someone else’s responsibility) but they have given me some ideas for what to look out for and why I might want to choose one product or the other.

So check out the faceoff and join the discussion at http://windowsitpro.com/faceoff/

I just checked and I have been blogging now for 5 years. Hopefully you have been enjoying the posts and the information that I have written about. I know that I have. I am looking forward to the next few years as there is a lot of exciting technology coming out. That means a lot of learning for me but I enjoy that. I have been thinking lately about my original vision for grokdev.com where I would create sample applications and write up how I did them. While I am still busy I am thinking about trying to carve out a few hours each week to do something like that.

Thank you so much for reading my blog. Even though I post for me I can see that there is a regular following and I appreciate that I need to keep it interesting for you.

The PDC is over and I am home. I am taking a few minutes to be a little reflective and put down some thoughts.

1. The Acer PC was great. I heard people complaining about it not having more software (Visual Studio 2010 being the most common) or RAM but I have to say I was looking for a second machine for demos and this is better than what I was looking for. It makes up for no breakfast or attendee party. Of course now Microsoft has set an expectation and it will be interesting to see if they give out other goodies like a mobile phone at MIX (hint, hint…).

2. The roadmaps were shorter. In previous PDCs the roadmap slides seemed to go out to 3 or 5 years. Almost all of the roadmaps this year only went out 18 months. This felt more like a TechEd with the shorter timelines. Of course with how little in the 5 year time frame actually got delivered it is possible that Microsoft just realized that the information wasn’t as useful as they would hope.

3. Sessions were generally good quality. I went to more sessions than I blogged and for the most part the speakers were good and interesting. In the past it seemed they just grabbed some random employee to get up there and talk but maybe they screened the speakers or gave them some training.

4. Networking was even better than the sessions. I think the real reason to go to any conference is the learning. Some occurs from the sessions but more occurs from the conversations at lunch or in the hall ways. I have come to appreciate the need for this more as I work from home and don’t often get a chance to discuss things with my peers as often as I would like.

5. Focus on some general themes. In the past PDC seemed to be about anything that any product group wanted to announce. I didn’t see the breadth of topics represented this time. I think that was a feature of the shorter timeframe but it was nice to have focus on themes like SharePoint, Azure, Windows, and Visual Studio. It meant there were a lot of relevant sessions. The down side was that there were many times when I wanted to see 2 or 3 sessions in a given time slot.

I am looking forward to the next PDC and to see how things like Azure, “Dallas”, and Silverlight 4 evolve.

Local access infeasible so you can’t get access to any of the event logs or other tracing that you would normally do on a single server

SDK supports distributed monitoring & data collection for cloud apps.
Support Standard Diagnostics APIs
Built on top of Windows Azure Storage
The same infrastructure is used by Microsoft for their monitoring so they know it scales.
Developers are in control of what gets collected and when to collect it.

MonAgentHost.exe is the diagnostic monitoring piece that is doing the monitoring and is started by the fabric UI on the developer fabric

Used Cloud Storage Studio from Cerebrata Software to show off storage information.

WADDirectoriesTable and WADLogsTable store log information. The data in the directories data is the standard IIS log files that are in put into development blob storage.

The diagnostic monitor is a separate process and can do things like crash dumps and Windows Data Sources like event logs. Data goes into the local storage directory and is then uploaded to Azure storage.

The oldest data will age out.

System.Diagnostics.Trace to write information out to the logs. Reference Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics and import the namespace.

DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration lets you set up the configuration information. Everything is buffered locally by default and not uploaded to the storage. You have to provide the storage configuration when you call the Start() method.

TraceListener added iinto the web.config by Visual Studio to allow the monitor to listen to the events and store them.

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.Manager namespace used to write an application that will let him do on-demand uploads of data to storage.

If you are trying to catch crash dumps in a web role ASP.NET will most likely capture the data so you won’t be able to examine the dump. If you fail in the startup or in a worker role you will be able to get the crash dump information.

Turning on IIS tracing incurs a performance overhead and can not be turned on or off dynamically so you will need to upgrade your application to change the setting.

There is no automatic deletion of logging data from the Azure storage. You need to clean it up so you don’t pay for log entries you don’t need.

Data partitioned by the high order bits of the tick count so you can query on just that partition.

WMI is not supported natively but your role can reference WMI and log the information into an “arbitrary log”.

The role runs in the “Performance Log Users Group”. Soon IIS logs will be generated in the role’s local data directory.

Azure contains 5 main pieces:

1. Windows Azure Application Platform
2. SQL Azure
3. Windows Azure platform AppFabric
4. Azure “Dallas”
5. Pinpoint marketplace? (I came in late and only saw the screen for a second so I am guessing this was the 5th element)

Different roles on architecture slide:
Web Role
Dynamic Worker
Distributed Cache Worker
Partitioned Worker

Fundamentals:
Security
Performance and reliability
High availability
Scale out
Multi-tenancy

Service healing is available because the data is copied to multiple servers and if one goes down that can be detected, that instance shut down, a new instance spun up, and a message sent to the load balancer to start sending load to the new server.

New will be drives so you can map to Azure storage and use standard APIs to manage the data.

Coming soon:
1. Programming model – administrator privileges in the VM
2. Storage – user-selectable geo-locations for replicas
3. Service management – remote terminal server access to VMs

Note: These are my raw notes from some of the sessions I attend. Items in italics are my comments. Others are notes from the slides (or at least what I heard).

I have been working with a lot of really good people at Microsoft and we have come up with a poster that lists the important namespaces and classes in .NET Framework 4.

You can download the PDF version of the poster from http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/6/A/E6A8A715-7695-493C-8CFA-8E0C23A4BE1D/098-115952-NETFX4-Poster.pdf

If you have a plotter or a printer that can handle 24” x 36” paper you will have a good looking poster. If not you can print it and do the cut and tape the printed pages together. If you are attending PDC we are planning on having copies of the poster available there.

I am following up on an earlier post. I ran Office Diagnostics again today. This time I was notified that it found 1 problem and fixed it. When I looked at the details it showed fixing something in the setup but didn’t tell me what. The funny thing is that I haven’t had a crash since I ran diagnostics last time so I had thought the problem was fixed already.

Yesterday and today InfoPath and occasionally Word was crashing. Out of nowhere after one crash I got a message saying I should run office diagnostics.

It ran and did not find any issues.

When I clicked on the continue button I was taken to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/diagnostichelp.aspx?ShowHelp=30,15,23,25,11,10&Responses= where I followed the following instructions.

Access, Excel, PowerPoint, or Word

1. Click the Office Button, and then click Access Options, Excel Options, PowerPoint Options, or Word Options.
2. Click Trust Center, click Trust Center Settings, and then click Privacy Options.
3. Select the Download a file periodically that helps determine system problems check box.
4. Wait about a week to allow the file to be downloaded, and then run Microsoft Office Diagnostics again.

In my last post on my experiences with Windows 7 I wrote how it helped me to find a driver and fix a problem I didn’t know I had. Today I have a slightly different take. I have been installing the important driver updates whenever they show up on Microsoft update. Along with the important updates I have been picking an optional update to install as well. Today I worked my way down the list to one that appears to be for my smart card reader but I wasn’t sure. I decided to click on the “More information” link on the Windows Update screen. It took me to the following web page.

So while it seems that Windows 7 itself isn’t showing any problems there might be things with the extended ecosystem around Windows 7 that need to be finished before the general availability later this year. Having the driver information “Coming Soon” is not a big deal right now as my solution is to skip this driver for now and install a different optional driver. Sooner or later I will come back to the driver and by then I hope it will have some information.