Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Longhorn stuff looks really cool. Marc blogs below: 11:12:55 AM    comment []

No program is an Island. "Don Box is presenting "Indigo: Services and the Future of Distributed Applications" - subtitled "The Object Ecosystem: One metaphor to rule them all". DCOM and Corba never worked, http will be here forever, but we don't necessarily wanna use that for the distributed web.  Watching SOAP and web services spread has convinced us that a new metaphor of services - as a way of connecting programs across platforms and my local net - is the way to go.  Service orientation versus object orientation - with strict boundaries between programs - is the way to go. Respect the boundaries of others.....  Services, clients, systems. Service is a program you communicate with using messages.  Clients are another program, that use messages.  A system is.... - you don't just deploy and you're done anymore.  Systems have to co-exist with other systems. "I am building and maintaining a system." In the service oriented world applications aren't really the interesting outcome, it's all about maintaining a system...... A system of cooperating programs.  All programs must share as much as humanly possible: object model, type system, deployment model, programming language..... Boundaries are explicit.  Services are autonomous.  Share Schema, not Class.  Policy-based compatibility. Indigo is a system to deploy technology (we respect the environment around us - we don't necessarily assume that the entire world will have Indigo or Longhorn!)  It runs on XP, Windows 2003 and Longhorn - ready to use - now. Lots of cool things in Indigo - too technical or detailed for this blog post........... more later. The real question is (despite all of Don's hyperbole) will Microsoft let us mesh into their world or put up some sort of stoppage or blockage?  They recently stopped Jabber from connecting to MSN Messenger - so there's certainly no guarentee.... But Don certainly raps out the rap - the right way.  He's brilliant." [Marc's Voice] 11:11:58 AM    comment []

PDC report #1. I’m here in Lala at the Microsoft PDC (courtesy of Robert Scoble.)  I’ve just had my mind blown by a new user interface technology, code-named Avalon.  The bandwidth here sucks - but needless to say there are about 2,000 folks - all with laptops - all trying to suck on whatever the bandwidth is that's here - which clearly isn't enough.   Meanwhile.....   Avalon briefly summarized: - Avalon is an entirely new rendering model baked deep into the OS.  It's  Flash killer, HTML disintermediator.  It takes ALL of a videogame platform, baked in video and 3D and everything you'd expect in a smart, modern UI tookit system.  Every trick I can think of - they have as well.   - they’ve got (what I call) multimedia personalization built-in.  This means that the OS assumes that there are many kinds of end-users, each requiring their own unique layout, set of controls and capabilities.  Their demo looked just like the demos we were doing for Kalieda  back in 1993.  But now it’s being deployed in a mainstream OS – it only took 10 years to get here and another 2-3 to go!   - the whole dam thing is based upon Direct3D and DirectX – so it’s rendering full res, scalable graphics and multi-plane video.  This is the Nirvana of user interface systems, providing what we’ve always dreamed of!    - flow rendering is not just provided for documents (think Pagemarker or Quark) but also flow UI, docking support, sidebars, etc.  Smart obejcts that do what they're supposed to do, all baked into their attributes and behaviors.  They've stolen every Mac OS X trick there is - and then some.   - it all uses this language called XAML, which I'll leave to geeks like John Udell to explain - but it's got everything you wanna have. There's also an oo-file system, gobs of web services stuff, digital ID, security, the list goes on and on. There are 7,000 developers here - each session is mobbed and so are the hallways.  What a scene.  Symbolic that LA is burning while this is all going on.   - they've future proofed the thing, preparing for future higher res systems, Tablet PCs, Media Center scenarios, cell phones, PDAs - you name it, they support it.   - it'a all working, they're showing demos, Visual Studio tools supporting it, building apps in front of our eyes.  Of course - all you need is a Longhorn SDK and.....2 years." [Marc's Voice] 11:11:12 AM    comment []