They keynote started with 6,000 attendees finding african drums on their seats. To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, "I love the smell of animal hide in the morning". A group of drummers from South Africa warmed the audience up with some massage (not successful) and drumming (much more successful). It was more exercise than some delegates in a long time. The sound of 6000 drums around the room was an excellent start. They were used instead of clapping to respond to cool announcements.
Accessibility
An interesting demo followed by a blind computer user, showing how special software drives an external Braille device. Combined with screen reading software it allows him to use the computer. Interesting demo that showed how frustrating it is to navigate web pages (even those sites designed with accessibility in mind) for blind users.
What's coming in future
The main keynote showed what was coming in the Yukon timeframe of 2006 including Windows 2003 R2, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. The Longhorn timeframe was shown as 2008 (or in somewhat difficult to understand maths, "in the next 2 to 3 years"). These include Longhorn Client and Server, Office 12, and Visual Studio Orcas.
The other messages was that the focus is now on platforms, frameworks, interop and EAI tools. So we're no longer about being a specific language developer, or just a system admin. Now it's a more holistic view based around the 'lifecycle' (bingo!)
Visual Studio Team System Demo
A quick demo of the code coverage, unit testing and static analysis tools along with the 'whitehorse' designers. The presenter mentioned that the Team System enables you to develop SOA (bingo!) applications. This confused me as SOA is mostly about the design of external interfaces rather than the deployment of the application within a trust boundary.
Visual Studio Express Edition
See my previous post.
Deployment
Dynamic Systems initiative. This allows the system to be modelled, check it against the virtual description of the environment and validate the application. This will be part of MOM 2005, System Centre 2005 (the new SMS that integrates them all). In Longhorn there will be one integrated management tools.
Virtual Server 2005. Host multiple servers on the one box. This will allow parallel test environment alongside production. Over time there will be true virtual Windows support from Microsoft.
Voice over IP
The CommNet here has Dell machines with phone handsets that can be used to make free phone calls anywhere in the world. It was also shown how this can intergrate with outlook to record calls and make notes that were associated with the call. I love this kind of integration.
Mobile Development
Two guys came dressed as full-size Windows Smartphone and Pocket PC devices (what is it with these guys and costumes?) and they created a smartphone application in Visual Studio that could post a photo to their Windows Moble blog. They showed how to use the Windows Mobile Platform and Visual Studio to build an app that posts a blog entry from a mobile phone by calling a web service. They then uploaded the app to a central website so that users can purchase and download it via a mobile. It downloaded and installed on the handset. They took a photo, the handset added the location information automatically. You can see the post here.
Jim Gray
Jim Gray spoke about Skyserver.sdss.org The goal is to get the data from one telescope online. There is 5 years of data from scanning the sky, with the full map to be completed in 2007 (It's 10 billion records and over 2 TB in size). It can be used by teachers and students to learn about astronomy and computational data mining. It uses a web service (displayed in a web page). Jim showed how these images can be inverted and can call out significant features of the image. You can see this in action here. It also allows for custom SQL Select statements to query the data.
They are trying to federate these archives and put it into a query. It's skyquery that publishes a schema web service and a data query web service. They all talk to the portal, the portal determines which of the 15 centres should answer it. Does a query plan across repositories. Demoed a 'transcontinental query' across Baltimore, Cambridge. Determines the plan in the first call, executes it in the second. http://www.skyquery.net/
Jim also talked about how the answers needed to be stored in partial form. They allow people to create databases on the portal server that can store answers queries that take a couple of days.
A second project was about CERN. It is building an enormous accelarator in 2007. It produces a Gig of data a second (this is the result of screening out the Terrabyte per second of original data!). They are looking at using 64-bit processors and 10GB internet. http://ultralight.caltech.edu.edu/lsr-winhec/ They are doing a CD per second (7.1 Gbps) at this stage with Windows 2003 64 bit version. Disk to disk is up to 450MBps.