Microsoft’s currently hosting a two day Professional Developer’s Conference at their campus in Redmond and broadcasting live via the web. This is great as it provides access to far more people, doesn’t require any travel and is free to participate. The video quality is excellent. Of course you don’t get all the interesting conversations over breakfast/lunch, the free drinks and the goodies.
The last PDC I attended was in 2008 in Los Angeles. The big announcements were Windows 7 and Azure. The danger is that you spend a lot of time learning about technologies that are in very early stages of development and either never see a release or are substantially changed. A couple of other things were demoed in 2008 that have yet to see daylight.
Compiler as a Service
Anders Hejlsberg, architect of C#, mentioned in his 2008 talk that his team were rewriting the C# compiler in C# and going to make it available as a service. Apple recently did the same thing when they integrated LLVM into XCode 4. It opens the door to lots of intelligent refactorings and better error messages in the IDE.
In 2008 Anders demonstrated a C# REPL, i.e. an interactive C# command line. Mono already has this. The compiler service was mentioned again yesterday in Anders’ talk but not the REPL. The demo didn’t quite work and no timeline was mentioned. I’m guessing it won’t be released until the next version of Visual Studio so we’re looking at at least a year or two. Given that a new compiler will require extensive testing maybe they’ll release a CTP for VS2010 before then.
Oslo
A blue-sky project for modelling applications accompanied by a new language, ‘M’, and an editing tool called Quadrant. I’m guessing this was someone’s pet project. It’s now dead. According to the linked blog post ‘M’ the language is apparently still living but given the amount of investment required to support a language I can’t imagine Microsoft releasing another version. F# is clearly Microsoft’s preferred niche language and is widely used by scientific and financial developers. IronPython and IronRuby have just been turned over to the community, maybe ‘M’ will follow suit.
InfoCard/Windows CardSpace
Probably an over-ambitious project to provide single-sign-on for websites by allowing users to store identity profiles on their Windows machines. Unfortuantely it was heavily tied to Windows and Internet Explorer although a 3rd-party Firefox plugin did surface. It received little take-up and Microsoft abandoned the idea. It didn’t solve the problem of logging in from multiple computers as all your profiles were tied to a single machine. This is especially cumbersome when you want to login from a random public computer. Unsurprisingly the project died.
Microsoft have just announced AppFabric Access Control for Azure which looks much more promising. It allows users to easily login using their Facebook, OpenID and Windows Domain crendentials. It can be easily integrated to any ASP.Net application and requires no browser support or change to user behaviour and provides an immediate benefit.