It Lives!

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Thanks to Ian, and his breadboarding skills, we now have a working prototype.

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With this, we can rule the world....

Everything went very smoothly really. In fact it worked first time - which always makes me nervous. Sure enough, later on it started to behave stupidly, which we tracked to a floating output enable signal. Now I just have to get it to Barcelona without breaking it.

Although I will be bringing it into the department on Tuesday to demonstrate as well.

Little Big Planet vs. .NET Micro Framework

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Today I bought a copy of Little Big Planet for the PS3. It is supposed to be wonderful. It lets you create fantastic contraptions in a virtual world. It is still in the bag, unopened.

Because I've been playing with the .NET Micro Framework. It lets you create fantastic contraptions in the real world.

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Circuit design. Actually produced in a pub.

I'm making up a hardware/software system for TechEd 2008 in Barcelona next week, where I'm presenting a session called "Putting your Big Ideas onto Tiny Devices with .NET". I can't tell you what it is yet for two reasons:

  1. It is totally top secret.
  2. I might not be able to get it to work

Suffice it to say that the above circuit is crucial to successful completion of the project. I'm having a whale of a time bashing out the code in Visual Studio and deploying it to the target device.

Tomorrow we build the hardware...

.NET Micro Framework 3.0 is Now Out

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While we are talking about Version 3.0 of stuff we find that the third version of the .NET Micro Framework is also available. This one is very interesting, because it with it the mouthwatering prospect of being able to develop for the embedded platform using the Express versions of Visual Studio. It runs in Visual Studio 2008, including the free ones. This is wonderful news for hobbyists, as it means that you just need to get some hardware and you are away writing C# code for your tiny device. Go and get it (again for free) here.

And don't forget to enter the DareToDreamDifferent contest.

Bond Fire Night

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Went out to see "Quantum of Solace", the new Bond film.  Didn't really fancy watching anything outdoors, what with the truly horrible weather. So it was off to Vue in the middle of Hull for fireworks of the indoor kind.

We drove through what seemed to be a "Festival of Bad Driving" to get to the theatre, what with death wish cyclists, deranged lane changers and someone who seemed to want to race me round the car park, our nerves were pretty shredded before the film started....

I wasn't sure what to expect. Some of the critics have been a bit "ho hum" about this one, but I think is because the novelty of a new Bond is starting to wear off as Daniel Craig beds into the part. They may have a point about the plot, which seems to have reverted back to standard Bond faire, with sinister world domination types coming back to the fore.

Having said that, the whole thing was done with conviction and style and everybody played their role very well. It was definitely a bit bleak though, if you are looking for smug type endings with Bond and babe under a fur rug somewhere in the sun you are going to be disappointed. But if you are looking for another good action thriller, you won't be.

Running Windows 7 for Fun and Profit

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At the PDC last week we all got given "The Goods", in the form of a hard disk full of software and a bunch of dvds with Windows 7 on them. They are heavily marked "For testing purposes only" since we are some way from a Beta release of Windows 7 and you really aren't supposed to use the system for real work.

I thought I'd give it a go anyway. So tonight at 7:00 pm I started an upgrade install on my main Vista machine. I didn't go for a clean install, life's too short for re-installing all those applications. At 10:30 the upgrade had just about finished and I was able to get my first flavour of Microsoft's new system.

It works. It works fine. I'm using my MacBook (which might make for interesting times if I ever try to boot back into OS X) and all my hardware has been detected with no problems. Since the current test release is based on Vista I wasn't expecting driver trouble and so far I've not had any. Setting up the monitors was a bit fiddly, but I soon managed to get them arranged how I like. And after a slight kerfuffle with the login for Outlook I've now got a very good place to work that does all the things it used to.

The whole machine seems a lot more zippy, with applications opening much more quickly and running very well. I've not really had much chance to play with any of the new features, but I don't think I'm going to have a problem living with this test release. If you were at PDC and are thinking about putting Windows 7 on your machine I'd say go for it.

Best Practices from 'Hard Code'

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I picked up a book while I was at PDC. it is a best practice book for software developers. And it is excellent. I really like Steve McConnell and the stuff that he writes but "Hard Code" from Eric Brechner (writing as the deliberately provocative "I M Wright") is just as solid on technique, and has a really good line in snappy titles and no-nonsense talk. (one of the early articles is called "Development schedules, flying pigs, and other fantasies")

The content is based on articles written by Eric for in-house magazines at Microsoft. The intention was to spark debate about what you should be doing when you try to construct systems out of software, and the best ways to make sure you do it right.

If you write code for a living, or are a student learning how to write code for a living, or just want to find out what makes developers go tick (and probably cuckoo as well) then this is a great book to get. Strongly recommended.

Jet Travel Sock Conundrums

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One of the daftest things I ever did was to get a set of socks with days of the week on them. I have now of course become fixated with wearing the correct socks on each day, lest some horrible sock-date-related misfortune becomes me as a result.

Today I'm flying back to the UK, losing a few hours of my life in an aluminium tube and crossing a dateline. In short, I take off on Friday and land on Saturday. I have two pairs of socks, one pair marked Friday and the other Saturday. This leaves me several options:

  1. Wear the wrong day and suffer whatever vicissitudes that fate decides to deal out as a consequence.
  2. Wear one sock marked Friday and the other Saturday. This should mitigate the effects of fate somewhat. It would of course leave me with another pair of odd socks that I could never wear again.
  3. Change my socks at midnight on the plane, which could lead to some consternation amongst my fellow passengers.
  4. Wear no socks at all.
  5. Stop worrying and get a life.

Hmmm. Tricky.

PDC Wrap Up

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This is my last night in LA. The PDC has finished and I'm squeezing things into the suitcase. But I thought I'd put down a few things which I've seen over the week, which has been as excellent and inspiring as usual.

Microsoft Surface

I want a Surface device. Want, want want. I've had a chance to play with one, I'm even in the Surface community, which means that I can download and play with the surface simulator, which lets me create applications and run them on my PC.

If you've not seen Surface you are in for a treat. Nobody would say it is portable, think coffee table with a 24" flat screen TV laid on top, but the things it can do are amazing. Thanks to a bunch of cameras beneath the display it can see and track multiple finger inputs along with objects tagged with a kind of dotty barcode. The  way that you can move and manipulate objects on the screen is truly wonderful, and a massive pointer to the fact that the days of the mouse as an input device are definitely numbered.

I went to a Surface presentation and also had a chance to play with the software and the device itself. You can't say that version 1 of the hardware is going to find its way into every home and office, but when the technology develops, and it will, you will find that all the software interfaces that you will need to make the best of this way of working will be tried, tested and in the operating system.  Find out more here.

Home Server

You might not have heard of Windows Home Server. It tends to only be available when you buy the server hardware that powers it. It provides resilient, scalable storage for all your data at home, and can also be used to tie all the machines in your house into a unified network.  What I hadn't realised is just how it makes itself available to systems outside your house. You can set up a proper, secure, remote access which you can use to access applications running in your own personal "cloud". I'm not sure if anyone will want to go quite that far, but they might like to get access to all their home media when away from home. Find out more here.

Oslo

Don't know what Oslo is? Neither did I until yesterday when I went to a session because Boss seems to be interested in this stuff, and he knows a good thing when he sees it. Oslo is a great way to build line of business applications. It is a modelling language (also confusingly called M) which lets you express the design of your application in a way that lets the data do the talking. Because the starting point of your new application must be a good understanding of the information that underpins it you end up writing much less program code. And that has to be a good thing.

For me the great thing was that all the stuff I'm presently hammering into my second year students (yes, that's all you fighting with the "Make It Yours" specification) about establishing the scope and then moving onto the design of the underpinning data fits very nicely with Oslo. Find out more here.

C# Futures

C# is my favourite programming language in all the world. For now. The new version promises to be even favouriter. It promises something that is really interesting, dynamic types.

Up until now C# has been very strict about what you can do with what. This is all to the good, in that it stops your program asking an object to do something that it doesn't have a behaviour for. The C# compiler will refuse to run a program until it can determine in advance that everything the program tries to do will end up being possible.

Unfortunately this gets in the way when you are trying to combine objects in a looser way. More modern languages have a much more relaxed approach to this kind of thing, finding behaviours dynamically as the program runs. In the dynamic programming world you don't actually have to be a duck to fit in. As long as you have a quack method you can be treated like one.

In a really superb talk Anders Hejlsberg showed how programmers will be able to mark objects as having a dynamic type which is resolved at run time. This all happens in a way that preserves type safety, meaning that C# can mix it with languages like Javascript without making the code more dangerous.

This is all being built on a new version of the runtime for .NET which will also underpin other dynamic languages like Iron Python and Ruby.

But the best bit, the very best bit, is the way that soon the C# compiler will be componentised so that it can be driven from within your program. This brings an old school Basic flavour to the language, where you can type in lines of C# and have them compiled and run before your eyes. This was amazing. A fifty line program produced what looks suspiciously like a C# interpreter. Watch this for more.

Coding 4 Fun

I also met up with Andy Sterland and James Lissiak from Hull (now with Microsoft) who were manning the Coding4Fun stand and telling everyone about their Unreal Tournament fun and games. They had been given white coats to wear.

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There is no truth to the rumour that they arrived in a green van.

Dan Fernandez was kind enough to give me a white coat as well, on condition that I write something for Coding4Fun in the future. I'm very pleased with it, and plan to wear it for special lectures at Hull.

Don Box, Chris Sells and Azure

Azure is the new Windows Framework for Cloud Computing. Don Box and Chris Sells are two of the best programming presenters I have ever seen. They put together a session that set out neatly how much fun you can have writing code and running it in the cloud. if you get the chance to see the vide of this session you should.

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Chris and John getting started

Multi-Touch Input

Multi-Touch input in Windows 7.0 and Surface are heading in similar directions and will eventually meet up in a later version of Windows Presentation Foundation. If you really want to work with multi-touch perhaps the best way to would be to get hold of a rather spiffy Touch Smart from HP. I had a go at the lab which shows how Windows messages are managed with multiple touches. Me being me, I had to fiddle with the code a bit.

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Drawing with added jaggies.

The MicroFramework

It was great to see the Micro Framework on the exhibition floor, with even more hardware and the new Dare To Dream Different challenge. Which you really must enter.

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Down on the Micro Framework stand.

They were showing off the new board that the 100 top entries for the contest will get to play with. This is an absolutely superb piece of hardware with lovely colour touch screen, network connection and all sorts. Lucky finalists will also get inertial sensors and wireless communications with which to realise their idea. I'm going to get a bunch of entries from Hull, some silly and loads sensible.

Swag

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We say that these trips are all about finding out about new technology, meeting the best experts in the field and learning new things, but actually, they are all about swag. Above is a snapshot of the swag process. I seem to have ended with around 10 T-shirts, two books, a slinky spring, a solitaire game, a flashing bouncy ball, a dot matrix badge computer and a screaming flying monkey. Not bad.

PDC Research Keynote and Boku

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Today was the third day of "keynote" presentations. These are big impressive events, but I must admit that a lot of today's left me a little deflated. The best bit was the description of the way that computer research is informing work on the behaviour of diseases such as Aids. Apparently it is not just a question of computers providing data processing power to crunch data, it is the way that advancing knowledge in the behaviour of software systems is informing the work on the virus. That was fascinating.

Less compelling was the presentation of Boku, a new development that purports to teach programming to kids. (Rant warning: I feel strongly about this one)

Before he introduced the item, Rick Rashid told the audience how his kids are finding out how to use Visual Studio to create software. This is a good plan. They are learning something which will be genuinely useful in their future.

Boku doesn't use conventional tools or notations. You get to control funky shaped creatures in brightly coloured landscapes and make them zoom around and shoot at each other. The language is what I call "sort of" programming in that you do learn that you can put into place things that control what stuff in the game does, but I'm at a loss to understand how you could ever transfer any skills attained doing this into a real, problem solving, situation with a proper language in use today. I really can't see even Rick Rashid feeling that he would be doing his kids a favour by pointing them at things like this.

I'm probably missing the point here, but I don't see how this will engage future students with Computer Science.  It looks like it might be fun to play, and it sure looked great fun to create, but at the end of the day I feel strongly that Computer Science is about solving problems in the real world, and I don't think that Boku gives any kind of useful lead on that. Modern computer games have significant problem solving as part of the gameplay and I really don't think you have to make any half way house products like this I'm afraid.

Windows 7 Looks Lovely

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I vividly remember writing blog posts about how much I liked the look of Windows Vista. I also vividly remember the torrid times I've had with hardware that didn't work and computer manufacturers who had plain lied when they labelled their machines "Vista Capable". More like Vista Culpable I reckon.

So, I will ask you, dear reader, to bear all this in mind while I wax lyrical about Windows 7....

It does look nice though. It seems to reflect a "back to basics" approach where Microsoft have taken the things that are important to the user (it works and goes fast) and put them right back at the forefront of the development. And the new bits that they have added seem to be genuinely useful as opposed to pretty.

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Steven Sinofsky and friend showing off Windows 7

Some things that have irritated me for ages seem to have been fixed, and the new bits look really nice.

Today we got a pre-beta of the operating system as part of "The Goods" package that they give out (which also includes a spiffy hard disk with lots of stuff on it) and, having chatted with a Microsoft chap at one of the Hands On Labs, I reckon I'm just going to put it on all of my machines and see what happens. I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Head in the Clouds

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Sorry for the title. I find cloud computing quite easy to poke fun at. In fact:

"Are clouds the ultimate form of vapourware? And if is called Windows Azure, surely that's the colour of the sky, not the clouds? Shouldn't it be called something like 'Windows White and Fluffy'".

See. Easy. Although after the sessions today I think it is probably a bit unfair.

I was up very early, almost in time to catch the third bus to the conference centre.

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This scene was outside the hotel at 7:00 am this morning. I think it sums up the American Dream quite nicely.

But enough of this, the keynote started at 8:30 and so after a very nice breakfast it was down to the really big hall.

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This is just part of the Hall.

Ray Ozzie took over from Bill Gates earlier this year, and this was the first time that he had flown solo so to speak.  He was very good, describing his vision of computing that is just "out there" very well. I'm less convinced by the sample application that they chose to first articulate this vision though, the BlueHoo social networking app that lets you find out if anyone around you is someone you know - I kind of high tech, Bluetooth powered, cloud network,  version of looking and shouting.

But that aside, the underlying thinking seems very solid, and when I heard that one of the people behind the cloud architecture was Dave Cutler, the man who made Windows NT all those years ago, I was much more interested. Windows NT is the basis of the technology that sits underneath all the Windows desktop and server platforms.

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Ray on the stage

Whether or not cloud computing is the next big thing is debatable, but you can't deny that it is big. What Microsoft want to do is provide a means by which you can take code that you have written using conventional languages and tools and put it up on their servers so that anyone can use it, from anywhere in the world. And if millions decide to use your program, they can - because the underlying system will handle the distribution of the software around the world and the balancing of the load on the various servers.

Of course horsepower on its own is no good to you, there is also a need for data stores of various kinds. from blobs of data to SQL databases. And all this must work in an environment where systems crash, networks fail, and bad people are out there trying to break things all the time.  Tricky stuff.

If Microsoft can pull this one off they will really have moved computing onto the next stage in its development. The architecture and the way you manage your programs seems very well thought out, although they admit that the system will be a "work in progress" for a while yet.

As far as I'm concerned it is all very exciting. People write software so that others can use it. The cloud means that if I have an idea for a million user, killer application - say I want to write the next MySpace - then I don't have to worry about getting server farms, buying network bandwidth and hosting all the user's data. I can get just put my application out there on the cloud behind a network address for people to use.

Of course money will have to change hands. Microsoft will want me to pay them to host my software, but this payment will be based on the use of my program. I only have to pay for the services that I consume. I'll pay more if I have more users, but since the more users I have the more income I should have then it all comes out OK in the end. This is a new business model that anyone who writes programs that provide services to others will have to take note of.

The thing that really does it for me though is the way that I can now take C Sharp and Visual Studio and write code for thumbnail sized computers to control my Christmas tree lights or go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and turn out an application for millions of people to use. All with the same essential skills. 

I went to a few more talks on Windows Azure as it is now called, and I must admit it looks good.

And I'm feeling a bit guilty about poking fun at it.

Visual Basic in the City of Dreams

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So, what do you do when you are in the city of dreams, when the day dawns full of sunshine, wonder and promise? You stay in your hotel room and write Visual Basic courseware. That's what.

Mind you, after the excitement of yesterday I could probably do with something a little more sedate. And I did nip out to City Walk for a burger. And of course I took the camera.

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I call this one "Water Pipe and PDC bus"

Let's Go Skydiving

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I'm not very good on fairground rides. And I hate heights. So why not jump out of a plane at 12,500 feet?

I blame Iain. He mentioned that, seeing as we were out in LA a day early, and he knew of this ace skydiving place down the road, why not drive down there and maybe do a jump?

Iain is a proper skydiver, with his own parachute and everything. I would be travelling with a partner who would do all the important bits and make sure that nobody died. Having signed one of the scariest waivers I have ever seen in my life, forked out a goodly sum of cash (including the video package where they give you your own cameraman up there to film the whole thing) we set off.

I felt really sorry for my instructor. There were three of us doing tandem jumps. Two charming, beautiful and petite young ladies. And me. If he did draw the short straw, he took it with good grace, and was excellent. How you can make a career out of strapping yourself to total strangers and leaping out of planes with them is a mystery to me, but by gum, he was good.

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Forced jollity at ten thousand feet

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After this it is downhill all the way

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The instructor even let me drive for a while.

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Bank on terra firma.

I can't describe what it was like. How it feels to be falling at 120 miles an hour is a difficult thing to put into words. I can say only it was like nothing else. And if you get the chance you should do it. I've got a video of the whole thing, nicely set to Frank Sinatra. I'll put it up once I've transcoded it.

Thanks and kudos to instructor Adi Blair, videographer Herbie Loureiro and everyone at the Perris Valley Skydiving School who made the most frightening thing I've ever done in my life so much fun.

Los Angeles and PDC 2008 Here I Come

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So, this morning Iain and I headed off for Humberside Airport (my favourite) for the first leg in the trip to the 'states. Even managed to get a leg roomy seat on the long flight, which was wonderful. Then into a taxi for the ride to the hotel.

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The driver didn't think we were worth putting his tie on for......

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My hotel is right next to Universal Studios, which is nice

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Artistic roof shot

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My kind of guitar

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What I should probably settle for.

The hotel is great, with a good, fast network. And I've just done a couple of hours of email and blog posts at four in the morning. So the jetlag is coming along nicely.......

Silverlight at Black Marble

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Straight after Grahams ceremony it was time to head off to Bradford and Black Marble. They have a program of community events and we try to get along if we can. I filled a mini-bus with students and we set off in search of enlightenment and free food and drink

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The "Black Marble Posse" striking a pose.

Today it was all about SilverLight, XNA and a famous game from way back, Manic Miner.

Richard Costall & Pete McGann have created a version of this venerable game which you can play in your browser and Richard had come over to talk about it. The talk was wide ranging and interesting, ranging from the difficulties of the playing the original game all the way to the fun you can have trying to create pixel perfect collision detection within a Sliverlight application.

All really good stuff. Everyone had a good time, and the food was excellent (and there was plenty too - even by student standards).

Thanks to Black Marble for inviting us along, and Richard for giving such a good talk. I'm going to do a Silverlight talk at Hull, having been inspired by what I've seen.