Microsoft Talk

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The Importance of R&D

Ballmer told analysts that as part of its effort to understand the current economic climate, Microsoft asked some of its employees to read various company annual reports from 1927 through 1938. The goal, he said, was to find out who had done a good job handling the Great Depression.

OS Market Share Challenges

Ballmer framed much of his strategy analysis on Microsoft’s relative market share in various business segments. The company’s dominant position in personal-computer operating systems, for instance, is both a blessing and a challenge: It provides enormous revenue to Microsoft, Ballmer said, but it is also vulnerable to the slowdown in hardware purchases. He also conceded that the company’s OS market share has slipped slightly in the face of improvements in Linux, Mac OS X, and even pirated copies of Windows.

“I think, depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more,” Ballmer conceded. “And a point of market share on a number that’s about 300 million is interesting. It’s an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think.”

Ballmer doesn’t think the challengers to Windows will be limited to PCs and, clearly, Google looms large in his strategic thinking.

MS Danger

Don’t get too excited though, it looks as if developers wouldn’t stand a chance of actually building anything.

Bloggers are abuzz about the possibility since one claims he received a query from a recruiter looking for a NetBSD developer to work on the Danger Sidekick mobile phone. Microsoft acquired Danger early last year.

As dramatic as the move may sound, Sidekick users would be unlikely to notice, and developers probably wouldn’t have the chance to freely build new applications for the device.

NetBSD is an open-source operating system that works on a variety of devices including computers and phones. However, even though it’s open source, its license doesn’t force Microsoft to open up its own contributions to other developers.

“It would be far, far more revolutionary if Microsoft chose a platform (Linux) that carried some inherited Open Source obligations — such a product might be far more interesting to developers,” said Garrett D’Amore, the developer who received the recruiter query.

Under the BSD license that governs NetBSD, Microsoft would not be required to share back developments based on the code or make its software open to other developers. While NetBSD could be the basis of an open system, D’Amore said he’d be “shocked and amazed if Microsoft was involved in the development of a product which used NetBSD at its core and supported developer access to NetBSD APIs [application programming interfaces],” he said. “It is very possible to build completely closed systems around NetBSD.”

Tech Ed 2009

Tech Ed is Microsoft’s premier technical education and networking conference, going on their 17th year. It’s a five day conference filled with Microsoft innovators, third-party experts, soon-to-be-released Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms, and services.

Straight from the Tech Ed website:

With the 2009 line-up of Microsoft team members, you can gain expert knowledge right from the source. Learn about the implications and opportunities of the latest software services for your specific needs.

More skills.

You’ll acquire insights from Microsoft and industry experts on the products you work with every day. It’s all designed to help you get better at security, interoperability, troubleshooting, and management of your existing infrastructure.

More previews.

Especially now, you want to try out new technologies before you invest in them. That’s what Tech·Ed is here for - helping you prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

If you register before February 27th, you can save $200 off the price.

Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications.

One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs.

The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design.

Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample

Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here. This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application.

Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here. You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here.

The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences.

Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2
Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications.

One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs.

The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design.

Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample

Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here. This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application.

Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here. You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here.

The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences. Celso starts with a developer version of the application, and then customizes and sculpts the UI to have a fun twitter character theme:

The Application Model

The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted within an ASP.NET server application that exposes a web service that enables the Silverlight Twitter application to communicate to the Twitter service (since Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). Communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.NET web server is done using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

The client application uses a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern (also known as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern) which is commonly used in large WPF applications. Even though this is a fairly simple application they wanted to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP allows and allow room for future growth.

Maintaining the separation between the visuals and the application logic also enables designers to make fairly complex visual changes without impacting the basic application flow. The video goes through some examples of the styling flexibility this architecture facilitates.

Developers get new tools and a glimpse into future of robotics, Surface, other Microsoft innovations designed to address societal issues and change the computing experience.

Microsoft Surface SDK

Microsoft Surface is a computing platform that opens a new chapter in the way people interact with computers by connectng them to digital content through natural gestures, touch, and devices such as wireless phones or even tagged drink glasses. The platform is being opened up to the developer community for the first time at PDC2008 with the limited release of the Microsoft Surface software development kit (SDK). The SDK enables developers to build groundbreaking applications that take advantage of the attributes of Microsoft Surface, which include:

• Direct interaction: the ability to execute commands through gesture or touch, rather than via a mouse or keyboard.

• Multi –touch: the ability to manipulate multiple on-screen items at once. Surface can read more than 52 individual touches.

• Multi-user: new collaborative computing scenarios made possible by Surface’s horizontal form factor.

• Object recognition: digital responses to objects placed on Surface – functionality that will ultimately permit the transfer of digital content.

WorldWide Telescope

Developed by Microsoft Research, WorldWide Telescope is a “Web browser for the sky”, bringing together images from the best ground- and space-based telescopes so people can explore the cosmos from their PC screen. Since its launch in May 2008, more than one million people have downloaded the web application. Several new features are now available for WorldWide Telescope, including a 3-D Solar System, more than 1,000 new images, and a tool that allows people to upload and share their own images of space. Existing users will be prompted to download the new features the next time they open the program. Others can download WorldWide Telescope at www.worldwidetelescope.org

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New tools and programs improve collaboration and enable developers to create more stunning and secure applications.

Simplifying Development Today and Tomorrow

Zander showcased the substantial enhancements available in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, including 20 percent to 45 percent performance improvements for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)-based applications, a streamlined installation experience for client applications, and Windows Communication Foundation improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services.

For developers interested in taking advantage of these new capabilities immediately, Microsoft announced several special offers for both new and existing Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) customers. These offers include upgrade pricing on Visual Studio Professional Edition for developers using any developer tool, a range of discounts for Visual Studio Professional customers to add an MSDN subscription, and a 30 percent discount on the step-up to any Visual Studio Team System role edition or to Visual Studio Team System Team Suite. Those customers starting a new MSDN Premium subscription today will not only immediately enjoy access to products such as Expression Web 2 and Expression Blend 2, but also get access to Visual Studio 2010 when it ships. More information about pricing and eligibility for these offers is available at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/promotions.

“Microsoft’s goal is to enable our customers to use the latest and greatest development tools, and we don’t want cost to be a barrier to their success, particularly in these challenging economic times,” said Dave Mendlen, director of Developer Marketing at Microsoft.

Zander also disclosed details on two more areas of the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010 release focused on “inspiring developer delight” and “riding the next-generation platform wave.” Designed to simplify and improve the day-to-day experiences for millions of developers, Visual Studio 2010 will deliver the following:

• Windows 7 support. Advances include investments in Visual C++ to simplify development of native Windows 7-based applications and support of Windows 7 innovations such as multitouch user interfaces.

• Microsoft Office Business Applications support. Updates include the ability to build applications that span multiple versions of Office and new support for building applications using SharePoint Products and Technologies.

• WPF-based editor. The new editor provides an unprecedented level of insight into an application, presented in context with the code in a rich and easy-to-understand manner.

• Further C++ investments. Visual Studio 2010 also marks a major renovation of the C++ integrated development environment (IDE) to not only support emerging trends such as parallel computing, cloud computing and Web services, but also to provide a first-class C++ development experience through an IDE that scales to the large size of code bases that are typical of C++ sources.

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With no upfront costs, the program provides easy access to software development tools and technologies to build solutions spanning the PC, Web and phone.

Building Startup Success Through Software Access, Market Support and Global Visibility

As part of BizSpark, Microsoft is providing startups with a three-year Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Professional subscription, which makes available for download a broad set of development tools needed to build, test and maintain an application on the Microsoft platform, including Microsoft Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Through MSDN, BizSpark also provides professional support services and expert information resources. For startups building hosted software, BizSpark includes production licenses for application hosting and management servers including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, BizTalk Server and Systems Center, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to be added soon. The program also will provide a worldwide network of hosting partners, offering discounted hosting services to startups that would like to take their business or product online using their BizSpark licenses. Finally, startups will have the opportunity to be profiled and promoted on the BizSparkDB, an online startup directory, where Microsoft will promote promising startups from around the world every day.

In addition to the core BizSpark offering, BizSpark startups will be eligible for other Microsoft offerings, such as Microsoft cloud services technologies, including the following:

• Access to the community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform, a new computing platform that will help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone. The Azure Services Platform was announced last month at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008).

• Access to the community technical preview (CTP) of the Live Framework, a simple, open and interoperable framework for developers to access and consume Live Services. Live Services is a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources, which includes Live Mesh technologies for synchronizing users’ data and extending Web applications across multiple devices.

Microsoft will also ensure that BizSpark members are notified of all programs of particular interest to startups, such as the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and Microsoft Web Application Installer. These offerings, make it easier for developers to bring compelling PHP and .NET Web applications to market faster with a streamlined download, install and configure experience, as well as design and development integration and pre-packaged open source applications that run well on the Microsoft Web Platform.