I’m sitting in one of the coolest talks at PDC. ChrisAn & GioDL are showing how you can use the nascent "Oslo" language technologies to write your own textual language. MGrammar has been described as yacc on crack.
You should check it out (probably starting tomorrow) at: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL31/
UPDATE: You can download the SDK here and start playing with writing your own custom language. Fun stuff!
On Monday afternoon I unveiled WF 4.0 at PDC 2008. With this public disclosure you will start seeing a lot more details of the WF system here.
For those of you that were able to attend my session in person, please fill out the evaluation form (we’re currently at about 5% participation).
For those that couldn’t join me in person, the session was videotaped and is available at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL17/. Enjoy!
That was Lauren‘s first reaction to stepping onto our first Virgin America plane. The personal TVs are great and first class looked amazing (closer to int’l business class seats).
Last night I had a very strange dream….
I was in a large room doing a dry run for a PDC talk where I was code monkey-ing for Barack Obama. The organizers were expressing concern about low turnout since Barack had never given a PDC talk and they were considering swapping roles to have me headline with Barack code monkey-ing in order to increase turnout.
Wonder what’s been on my mind this month?
Distributed applications are tricky. The internet is a fickle beast that will lost data at will and run counter to many intuitions. Getting distributed applications to run smoothly and performant at scale is particularly difficult. There isn’t a single "go fast" silver bullet, rather it’s more of an art. At PDC this year you’ll have a great opportunity to learn about the Zen of WCF Performance and Scale at Nicholas Allen‘s lunch session. Enjoy!
Matt posted a great description of the WCF (and WF) talks we’re giving at PDC.
In particular there are two sessions that I’d like to call out.
The first is Ed Pinto’s session, where you’ll find out about the significant investments we’ve made to improve the WCF authoring experience:
WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0.
Eliminate the tradeoff between ease of service authoring and performant, scalable services. Hear about significant enhancements in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. See how the new WF messaging activities enable the modeling of rich protocols. Learn how WCF provides a default host for workflows exposing features such as distributed compensation and discovery. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that simplifies configuration and is fully integrated with IIS activation and deployment.
Once you’ve built your services, you will need to deploy, host, and manage them. Windows Server "Dublin" handles this complexity, and Dan Eshner will unveil the details here:
Hosting Workflows and Services
Hear about extensions being made to Windows Server to provide a feature-rich middle-tier execution and deployment environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications. Learn about the architecture of this new extension, how it works, how to take advantage of it, and the features it provides that simplify deployment, management, and troubleshooting of workflows and services.