Good morning from Redmond. I'm going to file a story for WinInfo and then head over to the Microsoft campus early. I'll post my PDC10 Day 1 stuff here throughout the day today. The keynote begins at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET and will be streamed live.
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Microsoft is offering a free 500 GB hard drive for customers who purchase Windows 7 Professional (Full) from the online Microsoft Store. (US only, I'd imagine.)
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Leo and I are recording the Windows Weekly podcast today, but at a different time to accommodate my PDC schedule: We go on at 1:30 pm PT/4:30 pm ET.
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It's 7:50 am ... pitch black here in Redmond, and I'm finally on campus, in the press room at the EBC.
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NYT's David Pogue finally gets around to reviewing Windows Phone 7 and he delivers the expected and obvious complaints but can't bring himself to completely pan it. That's because it really is good.
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OK, we're in the keynote hall. Live notes to follow...
Steve Ballmer on stage.
"Pumped up to be here today." No developer prance.
Calling it "biggest PDC ever" (take that, critics). Oriented to people who can't travel. Over 30,000 people from around the world, live. Everything is captured, recorded, broadcasted later. Not just live.
Focused this year. Excited things with IE, Windows Phone, Azure. But start with broader context.
Devices: Windows 7 PCs, Windows Phones, Xbox 360
IE 9 with HTML
Cloud: Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Xbox LIVE, Bing, Office 365, Windows Live
Move to more smart devices, all kinds of screens. Cloud as a backplane. Powerful new platforms. Wave of opportunity. New exciting apps, with approachable UIs.
We're driving hard on the redefinitions of the device types. On backend, Azure platform etc. - experiences - program against data on the Internet. Fundamental services. The glue is HTML 5. In some senses, a way of allowing a level of independence and innovation on front- and backends.
Windows 7
It all starts with Windows. Windows PCs are most popular smart device. Over 350 million new PCs purchased in past year. 240 million new Windows 7 licenses in the same time frame. Phones are important, TVs. But PC is number one. Lots of innovation going on here. New form factors for holiday season and beyond. Build on ink and touch support built into Windows 7. With new devices, developers can do new things. Momentum with developers is unparalleled. (Not sure about that one.)
Windows apps and HTML 5 web sites matter on Windows PCs.
My question: 110 million PCs shipped in the last year without Windows 7??? WTF is that?
IE 9
Focus on rich graphics, interactivity/improved UI, HTML 5 web standards.
Modern web takes off with HTML 5. Looks and works great on IE 9, unlocks full power of PC and web at the same time.
News: 10 million downloads of IE 9 in 6 weeks. Most downloaded IE beta ever. (Eh. There are 1.4 billion PC users.)
Dean Hachamovitch - IE 9 demo.
A lot of enthusiasm from developers. Three things today: Developer opportunities around HTML 5, around app-like web pages, and how it gets better today.
IE 9 - kexparchive.org web site - "site at the center of the user's experience." Look at the site, not at the browser. Crazy, animated site. Very rich, great topography, with custom, downloaded font. Doesn't feel like a web page. Full HD video playing in the background of the site. Alpha-blending on onscreen elements. Pretty impressive actually.
Track Splash demo. Hardware accelerated graphics and video. 60 fps. Inevitable browser comparison with stable beta Chrome. It runs. Profound performance differences. IE accelerates everything. Not pieces of the web, like other browsers.
App features. Pinned web sites on the Windows 7 taskbar. Custom icons, jump lists, etc. Uses sample site to show how it works. Shows code for adding jump list items and nofications. Javascript and HTML.
www.ietestdrive.com for this and other sample code.
Today, updating IE 9 Platform Preview to version 6 for developers. This is NOT the RC release for end users.
PP6 adds CSS3 2D transforms and semantic text.
Ballmer is back.
Windows Phone 7
launched about 2 weeks ago, US in the next few weeks
Tried to do a number of things - entering a market with a lot of activity. "We really nailed it." Different kind of phone. Diversity of devices, but with the coherence in the UI and for devs.
Same old marketing message for WP7, basically.
Yes, there are lots of apps. But things ppl care about are the center of the experiences. People. Places. Music. Games. Add developer hooks that go well beyond just apps.
Microsoft handing out a Windows Phone to all PDC attendees. (Big applause.)
LG, Samsung, HTC, Dell - Phones available on over 60 operators in over 30 countries. With and without keyboards. Etc.
Playing a Windows Phone ad. Kind of like Apple does, incessantly. (Big applause, because it's actually a great ad.)
Great product, and a great story to tell.
So nothing new, really.
Scott Guthrie to talk Windows Phone
Looks like its going to be some third party app demos.
Over 1000 apps and games in the Marketplace already.
Brandon Watson on stage for demos
Popcap - Bejeweled
Games hub with Xbox LIVE - developers can integrate with the hub
Facebook app - pivot control - full experience
Photos experience - camera roll, library, photos from Skydrive, Facebook - smart design
Kindle (yay) - First look at the app on WP7. Kindle for Windows Phone. Gorgeous. Awesome. Kindle Store recommendations - unique to Windows Phone. Very fast, fluid performance. Share via normal WP sharing interface.
TurboTax app. pivot control, very smooth
Back to Scott
Best tools for phone development, and they're all free
Demo - build an app from scratch.
Silverlight app - Panorama app - can run in emulator or on real device
Build a simple eBay "data snacking" application.
Announce: New Odata library shipping today. Standards-based. eBay has an Odaa end point exposed.
Insider red shirt joke. If you have to ask...
Expression Blend. Another free tool. Open the same VS project. Work on the same app at the same time. Allows you to create custom user experiences.
Deploys directly to device.
Announce: New capabilities for the tools going forward.
Profiling tools - run app on a real device, measure it, ID any performance bottlenecks. Pinpoint problems, help fix it. Demo occurs.
WP7 portion ending... So, not much in the way of news here. Profiler, really. We knew Kindle was coming, but it was nice to see it.
Steve Ballmer back
"We have more apps than" [Palm] I think, he said. "The guys who have been in the market for a while." Certainly not more than Apple or Google.
"When it comes to Windows Phone, make no mistake. We're all in. BOOM, BABY!" Nice!
Was in France, Windows Phone developers. Saw some of the most interesting apps, a lot of developers building Phone apps with Azure backend. Opportunities are fantastic.
Looks like the PDC giveaway phone is an LG. Maybe not: Could be a 'range' based on what he says. Also, all paid attendees get free registration to the Windows Phone Marketplace (worth $99).
THE NEXT STEP
Windows Azure - uptake, adoption is phenomenal. Bog Muglia coming to talk about this. Steve is apparently leaving.
Bob Muglia
President, Microsoft
July 6, 1992 - Second PDC, talked about NT. "The Windows NT PDC." A dawn of a new era. (PDCs are typically held before the launch of a new platform.)
Today, a generation or so later. 18 years later. A new age. Open up new possibilities. The age of the cloud, where new cloud apps will rule the land.
Different kinds of clouds exist. infrastructure as a service. Platform as a service. Software as a service. We have all three.
Office 365. Windows Server with Hyper-V and System Center.
Today, focus on platform as a service. The future of applications. Microsoft is very focused on this. the majority of our focus.
Windows Azure is the platform.
What is that makes platform as a service so unique compared to what we have today.
Today: Server, VM, network, storage, app. In cloud, it's all handled for you, you just deal with the app. If you are dealing with infrastructure, it's not platform as a service.
Today: Change through patches, service releases, new versions. Cloud: Maintained for you.
Today: Assembly required. Cloud: Ready-made services. Focus on what matters to your business.
Today: Custom, inconsistent datacenters. Cloud: Standardized. Get rid of the grunge.
Today: Plan for peak load. Cloud: On-demand scale.
Today: Built to avoid and recover from failure. Cloud: Built to expect and withstand failure. Failure will happen. But app will stay up and running through failure.
Windows Azure is the OS for platform as a service. An OS designed for this.
Massive set of services across foundation, services, information, and tools categories. No way I could type that all in. :) "high comprehensive." Yes it appears so.
Azure platform: Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET, Visual Studio, System Center
not just running apps in a VM. Cloud-based. Fully available, scaled service.
SQL Server vs. SQL Azure. SQL designed to run on one server or a cluster of servers. Azure is not like that. yes, the same technology underneath it. Same for developers. But it runs on 1000s of computers across 6 datacenters, with automatic replication.
Open platform. You decide: language, dev framework, dev tool, management tool, datacenter.
The only general purpose platform as a service on the planet.
"It's all about the app." That's the theme today.
Video: Pixar's Renderman. Industry standard.
Chris Ford, from Pixar on stage. Toy Story 3 is 103 minutes long. At 24 FPS, 148,000 frames. In 3D. 290,000 frames. Each frame takes 8 hours to render. Requires lots of resources. 272 years to render a movie on one processor. So you use a render farm data center. Even then, takes weeks or months to generate. Real story here is medium-sized studios and content creators. They can't afford a large render farm. Cloud makes this possible, Azure. Upload assets and gain access to processors.
Cloud is elastic. Can scale. Push jobs through very quickly, it's wide and deep. Ensure that a solution we use is there is a few years. Confidence is critical. Plus, it just works.
Demo. Proof of concept demo on Windows Azure. Using Maya, 3D app to aggregate scene elements. Models, sets, background, light sources, cameras, other assets. Scene description file called a RIB file. Upload to cloud. Choose rendering speed (where faster is more expensive), determines the number of worker jobs. Can view the frames as they are rendered.
Ford done.
New features coming in Windows Azure, help you move apps to the cloud. New transformative things for cloud apps.
Announce: Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role - take an R2 VM image and move it into Azure and run it as-is. (Applause). Will enable image creation in the cloud in the near future as well.
Announce: Server Application Virtualization. Server App-V. Like App-V on Windows client, takes existing App and packages it into a file that can be xcopy'd onto a desktop, and now on server and Azure.
Announce: New features. Extra Small Instance, Remote Desktop, Full IIS, Virtual Network, Elevated Privileges, Windows Server 2008 R2 Roles, Multiple Administrators. All of these are coming before the end of the year.
Mark Russinovich
DEMO
Channel 9 - big bet on Windows Azure, now running on Azure not on-premise. New Windows Azure management portal. Big improvement. Channel 9 service has two roles, Memcached and Channel9view (web role, hosting the site); two instances of the latter. Connect button to use Remote Desktop to connect directly to the server. Uses Process Explorer.
Can also load Azure-based IIS into Visual Studio.
Channel 9 encodes video into 8 different formats. Uses EvNet Video Publisher. Uses a Hyper-V VM installed in the cloud. Uses virtual networking feature to provide domain access to that machine. Can mix and match on premise network resources with cloud-hosted resources. They all work the same way.
Mark gone, Bob M. back.
Microsoft app demo. Will be in CTP next year: Visual Studio Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure.
Brian Harry, Technical Fellow for the Demo
Software development collaboration solution. Today, TFS is on-premise only. In the cloud, access from anywhere around the globe. Sign in with Active Directory only in current version, but adding Live ID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and more for the cloud version. Corporate identity. The developer experience in VS is no different from current version.
Brian gone.
New and updated services announcing today
Access Control service with more providers, Caching, and Service Bus with durable message support on Windows Azure.
Reporting and Data Sync on SQL Azure.
DEMO: Don Box and Jonathan Carter
Don is loud.
Bob M back, I assume to wrap it up.
I guess not
Announce: Windows Azure Marketplace
Windows Azure DataMarket for data providers available now
You gotta have a marketplace, I guess.
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OK, I have lunch, and then a couple of meetings, and then the Windows Weekly podcast. By the way, if you're a Mystery Science Theater fan, the Rifftrax guys are doing a live satellite broadcast to local theaters tonight. I'll be watching with friends in Redmond.