Last night I went to one of the most under-advertised session at PDC. At 9:00pm the ShowOff team showed 22 short films by developers and small companies about their "that's cool!" projects.

Highlights included:

• "Finalizer" - a WinCE powererd Battlebot
• The BarCode service in 15 minutes
• The steel-ball labyrinth game on the tablet PC that got motion tracking through a web cam
• LegoLand entertainment park rides controlled by real-time CE and XP

As far as I know, these movies will be available sometime next week on channel 9.

There are a lot of things happening in the Indigo world, particularly in the interoperability area. Some notable pieces of information:

• The latest build include the WSFederationBinding, which enables the use of SAML tokens within WCF. Based on the Claims model, it is really easy to convert between claims type like e.g. SAML or X.509, simply by writing our the claims in their respective formats.
• Microsoft encourages two mode of activation for the ServiceHost: outside-in and inside-out. The former constructs a new ServiceHost(), configures it, and then Open() it. This is particularly useful for self-hosted applications. Inside-out is used in the context of container hosted services and requires sub-classing and overriding of the OnActivation() event handler.
  There are quite a few extension points (e.g. for Behaviors) in these approaches: during contstruction and by overriding the OnCreateDescription(), OnApplyConfiguration() event handlers, and when calling AddServiceEndpoints().
  Behaviors are very useful e.g. for putting state information into the ServiceHost.
• The InfoCard subsystem of WCF is acting as an Identity Selector. It mainly uses WS-MEX, WS-Security, and WS-Trust. The latter is optional, but used by ADFS.
• Channel Extensibility is necessary for remote operations, while ServiceModel extension typically handle local issues.
• The BufferManager class is most useful to increase performance in the WCF stack – in fact, it might be the single most important performance booster they are using.
• The XmlDictionaryReader for the Message body is used in the context of binary encoding, to improve the available initial vocabulary for the binary encoder.

The sessions I went to were not quite as architecture and strategy focused as they were in some of the past PDCs, but focused instead on how to use the API. Still, with a little processing, you could get a much better insight into the architecture.

Didn't you also find it somewhat remarkable that the "pillars" of "Longhorn" have been supiciously missing from the recent Beta and CTP releases, including the PDC release? What is Microsoft doing here - are they planning to release Avalon and Indigo as a companion download to Vista or release an option pack?

While support for WCF and WPF for Win2003 and WinXP will proably accerelate adoption of these technologies, keeping them out of the retail box for Vista would certainly slow down adoption considerably. This would be most unfortunate, since WCF offers a much better interoperability and extensibility model than classic ASMX or WSE.

Please check out this excellent article on te Windows Communication Foundation (formerly "Indigo") by Clemens Vasters. He explains the basic ABC (Address, Binding, Contract) in Indigo and shows how it maps to WSDL service, binding, and portType.

It is a fairly introductory article, that does not dive deep, but instead a very neat primer for developers staring to use Indigo.

Today's notes on the keynote:

Eric Rudder - Tools & Servers

• Final RC for VS by the end of this week, final release by November
  • Announcement: Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Announcement: Microsoft Expression Acrylic (Graphic), Sparkle (Interactive), Quartz (Web)
  • Announcement: Visual Studio Tools for Applications - will replace VBA
• WWF Demonstration
  • Core to Windows
  • Same engine also in SharePoint, Office
• Expression Product Line
  • Acrylic to Design Vector and Bitmap Graphics
  • Quartz for easy advanced web design
  • Sparkle for XAML Visual editing
    • fully integrated into VS2005, so advanced XAML forms can be defined in VS, beautified in Sparkle and re-imported into VS
• VSTA Demo
  • AutoCad 2006 Demo
• XAML as a universal 3D format
  • UGS showed that XAML can be used as a universal 3D format, since the viewer is available on every WPF desktop
• All attendees will receive a free version of SQL Server 2005 when it ships - this is the same deal as in on TechEd. Apparently Microsoft is *really * interested in people upgrasding to SQL Server 2005.

Steven Sinofsky - Office

All attendees will get Office "12" Beta 1: http://beta.microsoft.com/ 

Strong emphasis on Enterprise Content & Document Lifecycle Management

When installing the PDC CTP version of Windows (as well as the Beta 1) on VMWare, you will likely run into an issue with the disk. This happens if you create a new VMWare disk for the virtual machine. There is a workaround, however: Just partition and format the disk (e.g. by using Recovery Console on WinXP) before installing Vista.

Here are some notes/snippets of this morning’s keynote marathon:

 

Bill Gates

• They strive for equivalence of (on-premise) servers and (off-premise, 3^rd party hosted) services.
• Customers demanded to have WCF (“Indigo”) and WPF (“Avalon”) available on XP and 2003.
• Office “12” features XML file formats that were described as “open” and “royalty free”. It will ship in the same timeframe as Windows Vista, which is “late in 2006”.
• They were really emphasizing RSS as a premier technology to publish information and for use in notification scenarios. IE 7 will have an XSLT to render RSS neatly – some of the server products (SharePoint, CRM) will integrate RSS deeply.
• SharePoint portal services were positioned to replace the file server for most practical purposes. It is really well integrated with the new Office release.
• The user experience on Vista and Office “12” is quite different from XP/200x. I expect the end-user training for these products to be significant.

 

Jim Allchin and the four Clowns (Box, Anderson, Guthrie, Heijlsberg)

• The Beta 2 (build 5221) was demoed during the keynote and is expected to ship “as soon as the features are fixed.”
• From their perspective, the edge of the network (namely clients) is the place where innovation and changes are happening now. Allchin strongly emphasized user experience, P2P, etc. as key differentiators for competition. Consequently, Microsoft is putting a lot of energy into these areas in Vista.
• “Atlas” is a new framework for AJAX development. It will be well integrated into ASP.NET and VS 2005. The (according to them) significant Jscript client library for Atlas is available from http://asp.net.
• WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere – “Avalon” for mobile/compact devices) is currently being developed and will be available later for the .NET Compact Framework.
• The “Data Pillar” of Longhorn (WinFS) was suspiciously de-emphasized.
• WCF (“Indigo”) will be even more protocol/transport independent, with new features like REST/POX support, deep P2P and InfoCard PingID provider for UNIX. Interestingly enough, while internally everything is still represented as a SOAP message, the “SOAPishness” can be stripped by using e.g. POX.

 

Showcase

• The Sun booth is at 118 and they have two demos there (J2SE on Vista and WS Interoperability). Interest so far was not too bad, considering that they are in a far corner of the showcase.

 

This was definitively fun. Although the turnout was not very high (hey, what do you expect at 9:30 on the day *before* the actual conference with 3 days of notice to the audience), we had a few really good an interesting discussions:

We talk a lot about interoperability through web services, in particular on WS-Adressing in JWSDP, WS-Security, Attachments (yes, MTOM is on the right way) and reliable messaging. Simon Guest talked about his efforts to get secure WS-RM interoperable and gave some insight into the current mindset at Microsoft ("It's all about implementation right now.")

Michael Preadovic of Intrinsync talked about their interoperability story, which allows Java containers to talk to .NET Remoting systems and also .NET systems to speak RMI. He also noted that their IIOP for .NET implementation get a lot of customer attention.

 

I just realized that all my old blog entries are missing and thus, some people might not know me:

My name is Gerald Beuchelt, and I work in Burlington, MA, as a Web Services Architect for Sun Microsystems, Inc. My bio can be found here, along with a picture.

UPDATE: You can now find much more information on me at http://www.beuchelt.com/.

Well - I always *love* to arrive in LA (not!): The plane was late, we deplaned on the taxiway, the baggage took 1 hour and I got lost (again) in LA's freeway jungle. Just to top it off, LA is currently in the middle of a major blackout .... Oh, well.

("Don't be such a winer" - yeah, I know. Still, I love to hate this city )

I'll head over to the conference center around 4:00, and I guess I'll be hanging out in the BOF are or around Commnet. See you at 9:30!

My BOF on interoperbility is now scheduled on Monday, Sep 12, 9:30pm in room 511A.

Please join me for a vivid discussion on today's interoperability issues and their current and future solutions.

After a fairly wild start with the PDC this year (I nearly got no conference pass, since the show was sold out), I am now scheduled to go there and - lo' and behold - hold a BOF there. It will be on Monday night, at 9:30pm at the conference center, with the title: "Interoperability: .NET, Java, Windows and Solaris". I will talk about a few interoperability issues and their current solutions there, but also meander cautiosly towards a rough sketch of a roapmap.

After partially loosing my old blog here, I decided to get a fresh start. I will post a few of my older articles here, if I find the time.

While Liberty has a very rich framework for SSO, it does not define a comprehensive infrastructure protocol framework for SOAP/XML web services. While this might look as a limitation, it can also be a strength: it's non-dependance on SOAP, WSDL et al. makes Liberty a truely componentizable architecture, where SSO and Identity functionality can be applied to all kinds of Web Service technologies, including e.g. RESTful web services.