Parting gifts from Bill Gates
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By Larry O'Brien
July 1, 2008 —
“The success of Microsoft is really due to our relationship with developers.” So said Bill Gates at TechEd 2008 Developers.
The speech was Gates’ last as a full-time board member of Microsoft. By the time you read this, he will have swapped time allocations, devoting himself primarily to the Gates Foundation. While there’s little doubt that Gates will be trotted out on special occasions, this would be his last time cradling the remote mouse in his unique manner and gamely clunking through scripted banter with a series of other presenters.
In this case, the theme of the “spontaneous” questions was, “Gee, weren’t PCs really small when you started Microsoft?” This was tied by the thinnest of strands to the substance of the talk, which was a straightforward presentation of the development space, divided plausibly enough into “three-tiers plus services.”
The presentation tier was represented by Silverlight 2, which went into Beta 2 (with a Go Live license) at TechEd. Silverlight is Microsoft’s Flash killer, and while its initial release gained little traction, the new version is very impressive, with excellent media capabilities (including low-bit-rate video that, to my eye, seems to outdo the competition). Most appealing to developers, though, is that Silverlight 2 is the primary vehicle for the Dynamic Language Runtime, the component that allows languages such as Python and Ruby to be used seamlessly with the .NET Framework. (At RailsConf, a few days previously, Microsoft’s John Lam demonstrated that IronRuby had passed the huge milestone of running at least simple requests against an unmodified copy of Rails.)
The business-logic tier was represented by a presentation on components of Oslo, Microsoft’s unified modeling framework. Technical Fellow Brian Harry said Microsoft intended to provide a CTP of Oslo at the Professional Developer’s Conference in October.
In the meantime, he showed a nice example of validating an architecture. In one Smalltalk browser-like view, he showed the classes and components of an application. “Noticing” a dependency between a client-side element and one on the server, Harry switched over to an Architecture Layer Diagram, in which the intended architecture (with a separation of concerns) was diagrammed. A right-click context menu provided a “Validate” option, which diagnosed the dependency issue in Visual Studio’s familiar “Errors and Warnings” list. It was a good demo and reminded me that Visual Studio Team System has quietly shipped some nice quality-review power tools.
It’s tempting for developers to reduce their thinking about the data tier to “draw an entity-relationship diagram, don’t embed your password in your connection string, and hire a DBA to do the rest.” But I have to say that Dave Campbell’s SQL Server 2008 demonstration was the one that most made me want to upgrade as soon as I could. First he demonstrated the new SPATIAL data type, which allows for geotagging and distance calculations with none of that pesky trigonometry (a function that actually calculated road times as opposed to crow’s flights would be even more helpful. Are you listening, Popfly programmers?)
As common as geotagging has become, an even bigger problem for developers has been consolidating RESTful architecture with decades of relational database infrastructure, momentum and data. SS08 Data Services provide a RESTful view of relational data and, glory be! SS08 supports using the file system as the backing store for BLOBs and CLOBs.
For those working with XML and service-oriented systems, there could hardly be better news. I would pay the upgrade cost for SS08 out of my own pocket to get that (although I wonder how the news will be received by the developer who recently told me that “file systems don’t scale as well as relational databases.”)
The “plus services” part of the vision was not demoed per se, but Gates had a slide or two showing that any of these functions might be provided “for free.” Additionally, he said, “Some will be ad-supported and a number (the ones that provide rich guarantees) will be provided on a commercial basis.”
The talk was book-ended with more interesting topics. It began with the exceptionally well-done “Last Workday of Bill Gates” video (the “director’s cut,” now including John McCain and, inexplicably, lots more Matthew McConaughey) and Gates talking up alternate input methods, including tablet input, multi-touch, speech and vision (given how long Gates has been predicting these shifts, one cannot help but think that there’s a certain feeling of unfinished business there).
Robots excite the imagination in the way that PCs did in the mid-1970s, and the last guest that Gates brought out on stage were Tandy Trower, who heads the Robotics Studio project, and Patrick Deegan, an endearingly tongue-tied Ph.D. candidate from UMass Amherst, whose uBot balances on two wheels while rotating its torso and swinging its arms. The uBot was rebranded the Ballmerbot for the purposes of the demo and gave a cute little “Developers! Developers! Developers!” rant.
What little meat there was to the robotics presentation was a quick discussion of Microsoft’s RoboChamps promotion, in which people can use the simulation capabilities of Robotics Studio to compete for prizes.
Gates summed up the talk’s key points and then said, “Microsoft has always been very committed to developers. It’s always been the center of the company, and always will be, and we appreciate your support. Thank you.”
And then Bill Gates left the stage.
Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.
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