Europe Surface Training Round Two

I landed nice and early in London Heathrow this morning in order to finish the final setup for the Surface training in the UK this week. I am delivering two courses this week, each one is two days long and today (Monday) is setup day. I was so excited to get in early and have my reserved rental car actually ready and waiting for me, thank you National. I am so pleased I switched from Hertz, who have been useless the last few times; reserve a car online a week ahead and then wait an hour an half for the car to be ready.

Anyway having the car ready was nice, spending 2 and half hours sitting in (mostly) stationary traffic on the M4 was somewhat average. There was a BIG smash on the M4 motorway between London Heathrow and Reading, where I am delivering the training. I guess it was a good welcome back to the UK for me, a reminder of why I don't live here.

Finally I made it the Microsoft campus in the UK and was very pleased to discover the MTC team here are as efficient as ever and the room was mostly setup. The lab machines and Surface units were all waiting for me. I have loaded up the hands on labs and some new demo applications and now the room is ready for 4 days of intensive Surface training. Should be a lot of fun.

MIX'd up in the economy

Coming way from MIX I have a nagging feeling that all these great new technical previews (CTPs) that Microsoft has released and announced will not get used as much as they might have in the past.

It is clear that the economy is in trouble, attendance at the MIX event seemed to be down and many of the attendees I spoke to told me that last year their company paid for the trip to the event and this year they had to fund it themselves. Some thought it was worth it, other attendees less so.

With the less stable economic situation software developers need to focus on creating software that they can sell. The CTPs announced and released do not have a license which would allow the software created to be sold or commercialized. I am sure that for special cases Microsoft will do one off deals, for the majority of developers this technology is useless until it ships with a license. 

So what should Microsoft do? I think they need to keep the transparency and show case where they are going with the technology. It would be great if they could provide more solid ideas of timeframes in which the technologies will have a license, along with the pricing models.

In the mean time I expect most of the software developer community will focus on building solutions that they can actually sell and use for commercial benefit.

MVP Summit thoughts

This week another MVP summit has started and finished. I spent time with various groups and got the chance to catch up with a number of old friends. For me there was a very different feel to this MVP summit. It is something that I have felt was coming for a while.
Many of the MVPs I spoke to felt that the product groups were not be open with them or telling the MVPs the whole story. Personally I think this is the right thing for the product groups to do. People are now awarded MVP status because they have blogs, twitter too much (more than not at all) and are generally loud mouths in the online world. If I had something secret I wouldn't share it with this group either. During the evenings when MVPs of different technology areas gathered I overheard many conversations between MVPs where they were sharing the things they had learned that day. The point of signing an NDA as an MVP seems most questionable. I would suggest that the MVPs really need to be reminded of the meaning of the NDA.
I have also been doing some _real_ work this week and having meetings with some of the Microsoft product groups. This is the first time that when a Microsoft employee asked if I was here for the MVP summit I cringed as if I felt I didn't want to be associated with the MVP group. MVP status used to be something I was proud of, something that helped differentiate me as a person that adds value. Now I feel that being an MVP associates me with a bunch of Microsoft fan-boys (and some girls) who want to be the first ones to break the news that Microsoft is releasing product XYZ. Of course there are still many MVPs who do the right thing, and understand the business value. Yet I do not get the impression that MVPs overall are perceived to be adding great business value, and in some cases are presenting a hindrance to the progress of Microsoft products.
This is a great challenge going forward and I really hope there are some folks within Microsoft thinking through how to address these issues.

NICTA/Microsoft Innovation Day

I have only been back in Sydney a few days and I have crammed a lot of activities and catching up into a few days, including a short sail on the harbour, dinners and the obligatory run on the beach followed by a splash in the sea.
On Thursday, at the Microsoft Sydney office, was the NICTA and Microsoft Innovation Day. I was there with some of my friends from nsquared to present the work we have been doing to improve social learning activities. We have a stand with two touch screens; one running Windows 7 and one running Windows Vista highlighting some of the single touch, multi touch and multi mouse software we are building. We were also fortunate enough to have access to a Surface unit to demonstrate some of the educational software we have been prototyping for Microsoft Surface. It is always great to get a big crowd around your exhibits and we certainly had that, thanks for dropping by and the great questions and feedback.

Motivate me to YES

I have been thinking about the reasons we end up saying 'no' to tasks, possibilities, options and opportunities. For me at all boils down to motivation. The motivation is nearly always in the form of energy; time, excitement, fun, money.
This is especially true when applied to software development. With enough energy you can achieve almost anything with software do you have the motivation to achieve those things?

If you find me saying 'no' it is because you are not motivating me to say 'yes'.

Microsoft Surface in the snow

I am on the last leg of the European Microsoft Surface training tour. Delivering the first round of external Microsoft Surface training to partners. I am getting to enjoy learning to be a commuter in the different parts of the world. this morning I got the train to the Munich MTC. The train station this morning was interestingly quiet and serene.

Today we discussed the vision behind Surface and how to build better Surface applications, all the attendees get to build a Surface application in the two day course. the course outline looks like this:

• The Surface Vision
• The Architecture of Surface applications
• Setting up a Surface device and the out of the box applications
• Working with the Simulator
• Integrating with the Surface Shell
• Designing Surface experiences
• Using the Surface Controls
• Vision Recognition with Surface
• End to end building a Surface application

We will be doing another set of Surface training in the coming months around Europe. If you would like some help building amazing Surface applications please let me know. We are providing some consulting and support services to help you bring out the magic in your Surface applications.

The Global Catastrophe

There is no doubt we as a global population are in some serious trouble. The ecology of the planet is in jeopardy, the capitalist concept is proving to be fundamentally flawed and the foundations of our government systems seem to be broken.

This year I have been in Australia, Canada, the USA, Iceland, the UK and France. It is clear many people are going to be in way more trouble in the coming months than I think they realize. Many high streets have stores closing, or empty. 

Yesterday I took a snowy walk down the Champs-Élysées, this is one of the worlds must see roads. The architecture is stunning. The walk from the Arc de Triomphe down to the Louvre down the tree lined avenue is designed to leave the pedestrian in awe. 

It is with great disappointment then, that as I perambulated along the route I was in awe of the realization of Idiocracy. The tourists were not taking photos of the statues along the road, the architecture of the the magnificent attractions. Instead the real attraction is now the Gucci store and the Louis Vuitton store. With an attitude like this it is clear why we have so many global problems; the desire to own things that you don't need while ignoring the real magic of your surroundings.

Please think about your actions and pay attention to what you might normally consider as the background. Lastly, what are you doing to create real value to the world.

où est le Dr Neil

cette semaine Dr Neil prestation formation Microsoft Surface à Paris.



Pardon my French, it is not as good as it used to be and I am sure this is a horrible translation, and yet here I am in Paris delivering the first round of development training for Microsoft Surface. This is the first time training has been provided to external Microsoft partners in Europe and I am extremely excited to have been chosen to deliver the training.
There are many aspects to building great Surface experiences for developers to get their heads around and nothing beats a deep dive hands on Surface training workshop.
I am really looking forward to see what the attendees end up building in the next few weeks.

Collaborate and learn

It's been a busy two weeks for me, traveling from Sydney to Seattle last week and then from Seattle to London this week.
Last week I spent some time with the Surface team reviewing and testing the software I have been working on for social learning experiences. Eric Havir pulled me aside to record some of the work we have been doing.

and


Then this week I have been at BETT talking about collaborative and social learning with technologies such as Surface and MultiPoint.
There were some interesting innovations at BETT. It was great to see the table top computing solution from SMART. I am looking forward to building some software to run on the SMART Table.

Next stop, Iceland.....

Silverlight For Mobile at We-Dig

Last night at WE-DIG Amit and Anand gave a great overview of the new Silverlight for Mobile bits Microsoft is currently working hard to ship.



To my surprise they also demonstrated this wonderful Real Estate application running on Silverlight for Mobile.
:)

2009, what will happen

Happy New Year, welcome to the new year.

With 2008 already disappearing into the distance it's time to think about what will happen in this fresh new year.

No doubt the _recession_ is going to play a strong part of the activities this year. It will be used an excuse for getting rid of staff, not delivering on projects, and the general failing of all things that would have failed anyway.

I expect Apple will release a new iPhone that will solve all those little grumbles currently seen in the devices and software and this will leave no choice in the phone market. It is clear that none of the competing companies are even coming close to the iphone in terms of consumer _must have_ factor.

Microsoft will release more CTP and beta software than any sane person will know what to do with. some will be good, some will be awesome and some should have been taken and shot before being allowed out to fester in the open.

I expect that I will be travelling through more countries this year. I already have 6 countries on my itinerary to visit before the end of February, and yes some of them more than once.

Another year will pass where the software industry allows people to call themselves computer programmers when they have never programmed a computer in their lives. These fake abstract layer manipulators will continue to be overpaid and under deliver. Software will still, mostly, suck.

Microsoft Surface devices will start to be found in more and more locations in North America and western Europe. The rest of the world will wait impatiently.

Microsoft Outlook will crash. Microsoft Entourage will continue to run really well with multiple Exchange accounts. With some luck Microsoft will realize that they are software company and stop trying to drive up PC sales and start driving up sales of fantastic software.

nsquared will continue to grow and to hire great computer programmers. Yet, it is the knowledge that it is hard to do well that will keep nsquared looking for only the best of the best and driving the quality bar of software ever higher.

The year go so fast that before I know it, I will be writing the 2010 version of this blog post....

Be divine in 2009!

Live Services, Live Framework and Mesh

This week James and I have been delivering training to help developers understand how to use Live Services now and start thinking about how they will use Live Services in the future.
James has been running around the world presenting the training over the last few weeks. It is interesting to compare how different cultures perceive the technologies and the opportunities the technologies bring.
One of the big lessons for me is just how little people know about what is available today to get started building applications that use the Live Services. Go to dev.live.com and find out about current Live Services and the APIs you can use to build really cool software using the technologies Microsoft is providing.
If you are doing software development you must also start to pay attention to the whole Microsoft Azure Services Platform. What Microsoft is doing here has the potential to create a serious step change in the way software is built and deployed.

Dr. Neil's Notes 51

Welcome to a special edition of Dr. Neil's Notes, Show 51

A few weeks back, before PDC, Ken Levy hijacked the Dr. Neil's Notes lab, have a listen to what happened...

Happy Coding!

Day Three PDC Keynote: Microsoft Research Magic

Welcome to the last keynote, and what a magical grand finale it was! The presentation opened with an appealing video demonstrating the history and relevance of the Microsoft Research Department. Rick Rashid, the longest serving MS executive, delivered a very natural performance both in the video and on stage. He knows what he is talking about and has a real passion for pure computer science.
Rick started by explaining the Microsoft Research Mission Statement, which is to:
• Expand the state of the art in each of the areas we do research
• Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
• Ensure that MS products have a future
Rick’s history in the software business leaves no doubt that this is someone with passion for what he does and the output of this passion is seen in many products today. Rick worked on the Mach kernal, the underlying software that NeXT computers used in their NeXTStep operating system. This kernal still lives today in Apple’s OSX products and the iPhone OS.
Did you know that Microsoft Research contains 850 PhD researchers at their worldwide facilities? That is a larger faculty than even Carnegie Melon or Brown. Microsoft’s researchers have distinguished themselves among research staffs in the field of computer science. The size of the Microsoft Research Department is equivalent to creating a Berkley staff every year for 17 years. The largest facility is in Redmond, the second largest is in Beijing, China. Microsoft Research worldwide owns the largest Ph.D internship program in Computer Science in the world, and its researchers write between 10-30% of papers at academic conferences.
Some of the fundamental computer science research has lead to some brilliant output in the form of concurrency runtimes and the Microsoft Distributed Software Services. This work will have impacts on fundamental software engineering and system design in the coming years.
As MS Research looks forward to 2020 they are doing more work on provable systems, to validate properties of large scale programs. The Vista driver verifier technology came from this research, we should expect more in the way of deterministic validation from this group. This is fantastic as it means we will be marching ever closer to truly bug free solutions. An example of the work being done is the solutions discovered to Church’s theorem to determine what can be recursively computed.
Microsoft Research is doing much of work to reduce energy consumption. While good for the environment, it is clear there is a business driver here to help reduce the massive cost of running hugely scaled data centers.
Presenter Feng Zhao spoke about research in sensor networks and how it can help people understand energy use as it pertains to human activities. We can improve energy efficiency - computing devices that consume a lot of power. For some time in software we have been asking questions like how much memory will your app use? and what is the CPU utilization? The next big question is how much energy does your software use?
Feng introduced a device that showed how sensor energy technology could be used to monitor and manage the cooling of machine rooms. Before the start of the convention, crews attached eight rows of sensors to the ceiling of the convention hall. Using a MS Virtual Earth map on the screen behind him, Feng centered the map in bird’s eye view on the location of the auditorium and a heat map displayed showing the relative temperature of the room in different areas throughout the day. At this time, 10,000 sensors are being placed in rack rooms in MS datacenters – perhaps to scale down some of the costs associated with running them, but whatever the case may be this is exciting stuff.
Who would have thought a software company could contribute to modern healthcare? MS uses computer science theory to tackle problems in the medical world in a dramatic new way. MSR is working towards designing medicine for a person and their genetics - the near future may hold mapping of the entire human genome for $1000 a person. Using this technology it will even be possible to create custom medicine for a person’s genetic makeup.
Right now, MS is working with scientists from Harvard and Oxford to apply SPAM hunting technology to the hunt for and killing of the HIV virus in the human body. HIV does not mutate at random, and bits of HIV serve as decoys making it an extremely difficult disease to tackle. MS is using computational analysis of HIV and computer science theory to innovatively attack problems in the medical world. Watch as this monolithic giant truly makes a positive difference in the lives of individuals and communities.
More fascinating contributions of MSR come in the field of education. Here in Washington State, the Center for Collaborative Computing at the University of Washington is just one of the many combined scholastic facilities around the world. At the Center for Personal Robotics at Georgia Tech, students receive a personal robot to program throughout their graduate career; fun and educational at the same time.
The World wide Telescope Equinox Beta links all the data from the great telescopes around the world to provide a 24/7 experience of the night sky. Even amateurs are finding things that professionals didn’t see using the 21 giga parsecs of visual data available in this amazing program.
MS programs empower children by teaching them to program. Matthew McLaurin, Principal Program Manager at MSR, presented Boku, a system that works like a game and allows children to program on their own. Programming is now a fundamental life skill.
Last on the agenda, Rick presented Steve Hodges and Shahram Izadi, who demonstrated Secondlight, an interaction beyond Surface using an infrared multi view display and pass through projection to bring the Surface interface out of the display. Words cannot describe the experience as shown on the video that was presented - this is the real magic in computing. When things appear to be beyond the achievable we know we are close to a new breakthrough in this field.
For those of you who love research as much as I do, you must see this exciting and compelling presentation by Rick Rishad, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research and other members of the Microsoft team. Watch it here.

Why I hate the Web

I live a life of frustration, always waiting for web pages to load and refresh, it is all so slow.

The Web Browser provides the state of the art in dumb terminals with slow performance and lack of responsiveness. I have a machine with a 64 bit bus, more memory than I would know what to do with and I am constrained to spend nearly half my life interacting through this most unbearably restrictive interface of rendered markup languages and remote procedure calls over shared networks to overloaded time sliced servers.

Computing has not come very far in my opinion.

What can we do about this?

Build smarter client applications that are connected to the cloud, but understand how to take advantage of the computing power in my hands. Please build your software to be network aware, power managed and very fast.

Day Two PDC Keynote - Rock and Roll to the Epic Saga of Misunderstanding

(cross post from nsquared blog)

The initial pump and excitement was certainly there this morning as opposed to yesterday’s slightly lackluster performance.

It should not be surprising that Windows 7 gets the rock star treatment on stage. It is the bus that drives the cash to Microsoft's front door every day.

Ray's introduction to the session was a perfect pull back and setting to the scene. Explaining the history of Windows, positioning the PC, the phone and web platforms from Microsoft's perspective was perfect. This is the theatre you need in a keynote, and the scene was set for Steven Sinofsky to get on stage and start showcasing Windows 7 and the features being improved.

It is clear that a lot of work has gone into the user experience for the client, and there is an understanding that Windows is now (and has for a long time been) a consumer operating system not just a business operating system.

Windows 7 is about much more than the user experience. The core technologies have had some great improvements at a power management and networking device management level. Goals for Windows 7 have been around performance and responsiveness; Windows 7 now supports 256 processors, boots faster, uses less memory and reduces the power consumption on the device.

Today all attendees get a copy of the win7 pre-beta (milestone M3 ) build. Beta will be delivered early CY 09.

This is where the keynote should have ended but Microsoft VPs rather appreciate long-winded tales, so it must have made sense to them to continue telling stories. Feedback for anyone putting together a presentation - tell one story, create a beginning, middle and an end. Perhaps learn from theatre and movie makers – please keep it short and simple next time, folks.

The next story was presented by the great Scott Guthrie. The new features in WPF, .NET 4 and VS 2010 were briefly covered by Scott, and the developer focused audience loves the fact that now more average developers can write code. Again a democratization of software development continues, allowing more mediocre software to be built and shipped. You have to hand it to Microsoft for enabling software development to be done by unexceptional members of the world’s population; leading to even more rubbish software in the world. Personally I think this may be great, it will allow the people that really know what a computer is doing to build fantastic software that will really differentiate from the rest.

Two hours in and the Day Two PDC keynote kept going and the audience got restless, the exodus started from the keynote room as David Treadwell came on stage to disclose information on how to build software using the Live Services. David discussed the concept of the internet as a bridge to allow users to see the same data and share data between users and devices. Mesh is now a key component of Live Services, mesh is the experience built on top of Live Services. The Live Services is now a platform for S+S, making it easy for developers to build applications that utilize the Live Services via the Live Framework.

Live Operating Environment is akin to the CLR in .NET. A set of open, consistent interfaces are provided in the Live Framework. Live Framework comes with a set of API kits including a .NET API kit making it easy for .NET developers to build Live Services enabled applications. Now your applications can tap into the user data, devices and social relationships.

Windows Azure - the old new blue thing

This morning Microsoft announced windows Azure, a new platform for web computing development and deployment.
There will be plenty of technical details of Windows Azure out there so I am going to focus on the question: Is it really new?
Time sliced shared server solutions have been around since almost the beginning of electronic computing.
What seems to be really new is the democratization of this process to the masses. This is where Microsoft plays a strong game. Taking what was high cost and hard for most people and providing it to the masses of developers and smaller businesses.
This is good in many ways. It will act as a vehicle for new business growth and drive some interesting new applications. At the same time because it will be open to the masses it will be something that will attract a lot of _average_ software too. The market will determine the value.

Two Regional Directors and one brain

On one of the rare occasions that Adam Cogan and I are in the same place the PDC brain arrived. We had to take pictures of this momentous occasion.

CXC Global and nsquared partnership announcement

Hot off the press....

A new partnership between two dynamic and growing Australian businesses is expected to yield combined revenues of AU$200m within the next 10 years.
nsquared solutions and CXC Global have worked together for many years on solving the challenges faced by today’s IT and software businesses.
CXC Global provides innovative solutions to logistics and human resources challenges and has helped businesses work smarter with their global contractors and employees. nsquared’s goals have been focused on the technical challenges faced by software businesses to overcome the hurdles of delivering high quality solutions to tight time frames.
CXC Global will provide its full backing to the nsquared services project teams as an internal administration, payroll and management service, whilst nsquared will be providing the leading edge technology and applications behind the CXC online products and services.
Ingrid Webber, CEO of CXC Australasia Pty Ltd, said being world leader in Contractor Management Services was an ongoing challenge that could only be maintained by deploying the world’s ‘best practice’ solutions.
“Working with nsquared ensures that CXC will have a huge technology advantage over any potential competitors,” she said.
Dr. Neil Roodyn, Director of nsquared and a Regional Director for Microsoft Australia, feels the partnership will help both companies grow through better value add for their clients.
“This new relationship allows both companies to focus more energy on bringing value to clients while supporting each other to increase the energy each company is able to focus on their core business. By joining forces, both companies expect to accelerate their growth to achieve the significant targets they have set for the next five to 10 years. .”
nsquared solutions delivers leading edge software in a way that helps identify the most value up front and deliver on it. The nsquared development team utilises a responsive approach to deliver solutions to meet the most pressing needs first and then works through the value chain to always remain focused on what adds the most value now.
CXC Global provides salary packaging, accounting, payroll and administration services to the global contract market and has built a solid reputation for honesty and integrity with a commitment to friendly, efficient and prompt service. CXC Global has offices in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, USA, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore and South Africa with affiliations around Europe.

Who do you know?

In the third video in the nsquared mini-series on Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio James McCutcheon shows you how to add the Windws Live Contacts control to your site.
James provides some ideas on how you might use the contacts to control to allow your website to access the contacts of the users on your site.