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.

VirtualBox Menulet for the Mac shows a dropdown list of all your VMs and their status. Select one to launch or shutdown. Slick and effective.

VBoxHeadlessTray provides similar functionality for Windows. It prompts to your to choose a VM and then launches it in headless mode. A icon in the system tray allows you to start and stop the machine and launch a remote desktop connection to it.

Now to find something similar for Amazon EC2.

The Diminutive Bifferboard

The Bifferboard is a 486 processor running at 150Mhz, one or two USB ports depending on model, 24Mb RAM and a paltry 8Mb of flash storage. This is easily fixed with a £2 USB hub and a £7 2Gb memory stick.

As shipped the Bifferboard comes with a very minimal Linux system but even this contains a webserver. In order to make things more comfortable you need to put a full Linux distribution onto a memory stick. Things get confusing as there are numerous choices including Debian and Slackware. Installing Debian was a breeze, there is a script to copy it onto a memory stick and a ready-made kernel for the Bifferboard hardware.

Once done you have an all singing dancing Linux box albeit based around 15 year-old technology.

What’s exciting is that these things only cost £35 and can run off a battery. So you have a very powerful computer you can deploy anywhere.  I’m very tempted to stick one on the roof of my building plugged into a webcam. I’m already using USB wireless networking, 3G would be equally doable.

I bought one for an electronics project as the board has several GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) lines, and can support the I2C bus, a popular way of interfacing microcontrollers.

The complete setup

Not a pretty sight

Several exploded capacitors, nasty. I’m surprised it was still letting current flow.

I’ve emailed Globalscale, who make the device, to see whether they sell replacements. The unit is not yet a year old but the warranty is only one month, besides shipping charges to the US would make repair uneconomic.

The power supply is a custom part, not listed in the bill of materials Globalscale supply. Obtaining a part that can provide 15W that will fit into the original space will cost nearly £40 so I’ll replace it with an external PSU.

Disappointing as the unit was not connected to any external USB devices and under normal operation. Otherwise I’ve been very impressed with the Sheevaplugs.

Courier IMAP, I always hated you, and was very happy to discover Dovecot. Postfix and BIND, you remain. Behind the scenes I’m running Samba bound to an internal IP address that’s routed via a VPN to my home LAN. The VPN also lets me forget about securing individual services such as PostgreSQL and Subversion, they’re also VPN accessible only and at home or on the road I can access them conveniently without passwords.

For backups, I’m experimenting with AmazonS3 mounted via FuSE and rsync.

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