To read my PDC recaps from Days 1 & 2, click on the links below:

• Windows Azure Unveiled. PDC Day #1 Recap
• Windows 7 is Coming! PDC Day #2 Recap

Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research gave the keynote today.  In his keynote, he proceeded to review the MSR organization and went down a lengthy resume of MSR accomplishments, areas of investigation and research, and strategic direction moving forward.  In his opening remarks Rashid briefly discussed the history of MSR, which was founded in 1991, and started by focusing on MSR’s Mission Statement:

• Expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we (Microsoft) do research
• Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
• Ensure that Microsoft products have a future

Rashid went on to discuss MSR’s organizational structure and focused on his mission to structure MSR in such a way that it is optimized to get maximum innovation from the researchers and the vast research community in which we participate.  As a part of this strategy, he highlighted the following characteristics of the MSR structure:

• University organizational model – The reporting structure is flat with critical mass groups who work on key research areas
• Open research environment – Rashid believes that this contributes to MSR’s ability to aggressively publish research results in peer-reviewed literature, a lot of which is posted on the Microsoft Research website.  As a part of this open environment, MSR entertains frequent visitors (researchers) from around the world from both the educational, government, and private sector. MSR also hosts daily seminars on research activities and findings
• Strong ties to University Research – MSR has a strong reputation in the University circuit and has several partnerships with leading universities for joint research activities.  University graduate students have also come out to Microsoft campuses and have worked directly with MSR personnel on critical research areas around next generation computing and how it can have profound impact on issues that plague our society, most notably Healthcare and  the environment

Interesting MSR Facts

• MSR consists of 850 PHD researchers
• The 2nd largest MSR lab facility (with Redmond being the first) is in Beijing China
• MSR also has opened large facilities in Cambridge England and Cambridge, MA (USA)
• MSR recently opened a new lab facility in Bangalore, India
• MSR continues to grow a strong presence in Silicon Valley
• MSR ranks HIGHER in research than IBM, Bell Labs, and University of Washington in  the field of computer science & engineering
• MSR has over 4000 peer-reviewed publications
• MSR participates in community leadership activities and hold positions in professional societies and have been quoted or have written articles in leading tech journals

MSR and the Academic Community

• MSR participates in the academic research community through extensive publications and conference participation as well as participation in professional service activities with organizations such as DARPA, NSF, and NRC
• MSR participates in numerous joint research projects

MSRs Involvement in our Microsoft Product Strategy
Rashid went on in his keynote to talk about how MSRs research efforts drive the innovation in what we build/ship/sell to our customers.  As a part of the product strategy, MSR serves the following roles:

• Providing focused technology transfer effort (Program management team with sole focus on technology transfer)
• Researchers who sit on product incubation “advisory” boards
• “Mindswaps” – joint product/research offsites
• Joint product/research teams.  The results of these joint teams have been rather impressive.  Some of their output have included:
  • Clear Type
  • Data Mining (originally introduced in SQL 2000)
  • Natural Language and Speech (Microsoft Office)
  • Tablet PC
• Facilitation of *Incubation* projects that have turned into shipping products.  For example, MSRs work in robotics yielded Microsoft Robotics Studio, the Concurrency Control Runtime and the Distributed Software Services Toolkit

What’s MSRs Value to Microsoft?
Rashid drove home some basic points around why Microsoft continues to invest in research.  He summarized MSRs “Business Value” in basically 3 bullets:

• Source of IP and new product technologies – MSR generates roughly 25% of the company’s patents
• Problem solving of some of the most difficult computer science problems – MSR has the ability to bring smart people to bear rapidly on hard problems confronting products, product groups, or the company
• Act as an early warning system – MSR provides ears to the ground in new areas across a broad range of technologies and can help steer Microsoft’s strategic directions as to what we should be focusing on over the next few years and beyond

Rashid and his team have established an ecosystem where we address key challenges affecting our future as a company, and as a society.  He summarized the challenges as follows:

• Challenges in software engineering and system design
• Challenges in Healthcare
• Challenges with energy consumption and environmental issues
• Challenges in Education
• Challenges in natural Interaction with the PC

SLAM
As it relates to challenges in Software Engineering, Rashid focused on a number of different areas that MSR researchers have been exploring.  One project in particular that MSR has been focusing on is the SLAM project.  This project was aimed at verifying properties of software using a technique whereby a hardware or software design satisfies a formal specification, which typically (in computer science terms) is a temporal logic formula.  Not to get too deep in the weeds here, dear reader, but needless to say they’re doing some really impactful stuff as it relates to how software is/should be developed.   It’s important to note that SLAM was productized in the Windows Vista driver verifier feature and will be further enhanced in Windows 7.

MSR is also involved in research projects that help fuel our S+S and cluster computing initiatives, and were deeply involved in the creation of the Windows Azure Services platform.

Energy Efficient Computing
Feng Zhao, a Prinicpal Researcher with MSR who focuses on Sensor Networks, took the stage and discussed our investments in sensor technology, with the intent of decreasing energy consumption and promote more energy efficiency in phones, servers, and data centers.  Zhao demoed a sensor device that detects temp/humidity and monitoring environmental conditions in the LA convention facility using a “SensorMap” portal application that collected environmental data and displayed via a dynamic visual display (leveraging Virtual earth).  Data collected by sensors are stored in the cloud.  NASA has made use of the SensorMap application

MSRs Efforts in Healthcare
MSR has been involved in a considerable amount of research to help leading research institutions tackle critical areas in the area of Healthcare.  Some of these efforts include:

• Unlocking the mystery of your genes for personalized medicine
• Fighting HIV/AIDS through Machine Learning.  This was a pretty interesting effort because they are using the algorithms we use in detecting SPAM to predictably determine the patterns of HIV.

MSRs Efforts in Education
MSR has been involved in a number of educational initiatives around the globe.  Here’s just a few of the things they’ve been involved in:

• MSR supports a center for collaborative technologies at U of W
• MSR has created a Tablet-Based Computing (http://research.microsoft.com/erp/tech)
• Robotics for the computer science classroom
  • Center for Personal Robotics in Education – Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College. Robots in core CS curriculum
• World Wide Telescope (new release – “Equinox” Beta release)

Boku – Lightweight Programming For Kids
Matthew MacLaurin, Principal Program Manager at MSR, took the stage to talk about the Boku project.  He led into is presentation keying off of Rashid’s earlier comments that programming should be viewed as a “life skill”, and as such, we should look to engage our youth in software development/design and dymistify the arcane approach to software construction and relay it in such a way that our youth can easily grasp the concepts and become tomorrow’s computer scientists.

Boku is a game authoring system for children (and the childlike) centered on a novel visual programming system designed around a concurrent rule system.  The core of the Boku project is the programming user interface.  The language is simple and entirely icon-based.  Programs are composed of pages, broken down into rules.

The Boku language is designed specifically for game development.  Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior.  While not general purpose as classical programming languages, Boku can express advanced game design concepts in a simple, direct, and intuitive manner.

Below are some screenshots of the environment:

Game Load / Community Screen

NOTE: Before you start hitting the MSR website and searching for the application, Boku won’t be available until early next year

SecondLight – Interaction Beyond The Surface
One of the other key highlights of the keynote was concerning a new type of surface computer, called SecondLight, which allows for interaction above the standard Microsoft Surface unit into the *real world*.  During a rather compelling demonstration, MSR researchers demonstrated a prototype of a next generation surface unit where you could virtually “lift” objects off the surface and have them projected on other objects.  Through special infrared cameras, additional data encoded behind objects displayed on the surface table (data mind you, that was “naked” to the human eye) was shown being projected on tracing paper plastic lenses, etc being held over the unit (e.g. NOT LYING FLAT ON THE TABLE )  It’s rather difficult to put this particular demonstration into words.  This is just something you’ll have to see for yourself!

Summary
The MSR keynote capped of a week of some very good presentations from our executive leadership.  It showcased that we are truly committed to moving computing forward with Microsoft being the leader of this “innovation movement”.

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To read my PDC Day 1 recap, click here.

Ray Ozzie once again kicked off the keynotes for the day.  Today, the focus was on the client and the Live Services component of the Windows Azure platform.  In his opening remarks, Ozzie further solidified our story around the integration of the PC/Web/Phone and how our strategy will fundamentally change how we as consumers interact with these devices and that consumers demands for this type of integration is growing.  Our approach is to seamlessly integrate our S+S platform across these devices, exploiting the power of the PC through our investments in Windows and client runtimes such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the power of the web through our investments in Silverlight 2 and Internet Explorer 8, and the power of the mobile device (e.g. Phone) through our investments in Windows Mobile and our Windows Live Services.  In his commentary, he basically broke down the 3 aforementioned areas as follows:

PC

• Full and high-performance access to displays & peripherals
• Natural UI & common controls for ink voice/audio, camera, touch
• Local data privacy, portability, reliable/fast/full access
• Use & recombine applications, data, documents, media
• A personal environment, trusted & assumed under your control

Web

• One common way to find, access, assemble & interact with people
• One common way to find, access, share & transact information
• One common way to connect devices, services, organizations & activities

Phone

• Like the PC, provide a natural UI & common controls for voice/audio, camera, touch
• Like the PC, provide facilities for local data privacy, portability, and reliable/fast/full access to data
• Like the PC, use & recombine applications, data, documents and media
• Provide a secure and reliable experience
• Provide rich access to media/data through similar facilities afforded by the PC and Web “tiers”

KEY TAKEAWAY: Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy includes driving rich user experiences across multiple mediums highlighting the strategic advantage afforded to us through the Internet.  Our client runtimes such as Silverlight and WPF, coupled with our Windows brand (to include mobile) and key advances in our Internet Explorer technology will position us to deliver the next generation of user experiences on top of our investments in our Windows Azure Services Platform.

Windows 7 is Coming!
A lot of emphasis was put on Windows 7, as it was one of the main things PDC attendees wanted to see.  Most of the other topics discussed during the keynotes were further fleshed out during the breakout sessions, but I’ll provide some commentary about those in this post.  Steve Sinofsky, Senior VP, Windows division discussed our strategy around Windows and it’s future as it relates to delivering next generation experiences.  During his keynote, Sinofsky laid out our strategy around Windows 7 as it relates to what investments we’re making in the OS to build upon the platform established by Windows Vista, learning from the mistakes we made with Vista (and yes, he openly said we made mistakes ) while at the same time building upon the groundbreaking work we’ve done in the area of Windows security, to deliver a product that we’ll be proud to sell and our customers will be proud to use.  In his “Transition from Windows Vista” discussion, he highlighted several lessons learned from our Vista experience:

1. Ship solid Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 products – With the negative press we got from the initial launch of Windows Vista, it was imperative that we shipped a solid Windows Server 2008 product and SP1 update to Windows Vista.  In reference to Vista SP1, we needed to ensure that we addressed the key issues highlighted by our customer feedback in efforts to drive broader adoption of Vista (and not just on new PC sales)
2. Ecosystem Readiness – Driving Vista readiness was a key area during the launch lifecycle where we needed to spend more energy.  Through working with our partners, ISVs, OEMs, we need to ensure that they are equipped with the information they need in order to make Vista the platform of choice for new deployments, highlighting the enhanced capabilities of the OS, and showing clear evidence of the value add for customers making the investment
3. Standards – Our investment in standards support as it relates to security, network protocols, etc has positioned us as a leader in driving industry standardization around the aforementioned areas in addition to new capabilities we introduce in future versions of the OS
4. Compatibility – Working closely with our OEMs to drive more hardware compatibility with Vista is key.  Microsoft is making significant investments in this arena, particularly as we drive towards the RTM of Windows 7, to ensure that customers have the best possible experience with Windows 7
5. Scenarios – Clear identification/clarification of Windows usage scenarios is key for us in improving the overall quality of the product.  We are taking very proactive measures to learn how the product is being used and what critical areas we need to focus on to deliver the best possible experience

Julie Larson-Green gave the PDC audience a demonstration of the Windows 7 (build 6933) and it was met with much applause and “ooohs and aaahs”   To quickly summarize the things she demoed/discussed:

• “One click” experience when navigating Windows taskbar and menus.  For example, if you have multiple instances of an application (say Internet Explorer) open on your desktop, by hovering over the any of the windows in the taskbar, you get a thumbnail view of all the instances, thereby allowing you to select whichever instance you want from a single mouse click
• Taskbar “Jump List” which essentially gives you an MRU list of the most recently launched applications & documents.  For example, if you have an Excel icon in your taskbar that you use to launch Excel, by hovering over the icon you can see a MRU list of Excel workbooks you’ve opened.  This capability extends to the Windows menu as well.
• “Libraries” which help you aggregate and search content across multiple hard drives and machines connected within your network
• “Homegroups”, which gives you the ability to creates groups of Windows 7-based machines or other computing resources (ex: printers) within your home network and when your machine is connected, have any one of those machines automatically discover/connect to those resources.
• Ability for Windows 7 to automatically detect whether you are on your home or work network and automatically change your connection to network resources (such as printers) without you having to do any manual configuration
  Docable windows which essentially allows you to drag an application window to the left/top/right side of the screen and have it dock (or “snap”) to that location.
• Windows Gadgets, which now work differently.  No more dependency of the Windows Gadget Sidebar.  Gadgets now float freely on the desktop
• Enhancements to the task tray that essentially allow you to organize what goes into the task tray (and not have it “dictated” to you by the installed application/driver/service)
• Windows 7 touch features extend to Windows Live Services such as Virtual Earth

Sinofsky stressed our focus on “Fundamentals” in our engineering efforts as we drive towards the RTM of Windows 7.  In his fundamentals discussion, he focused on the following:

Decrease

• Memory Footprint
• Disk I/O
• Power Consumption

Increase

• Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready)
• Responsiveness (Start menu, Taskbar)
• Scale (256 processors)  – Yes, you read it right, Windows 7 is being positioned to support up to 256 processors)

It is important to understand though that Windows 7 shouldn’t discount the benefits of moving to Windows Viata.  This essentially goes without saying, but opting Windows Vista positions enterprises to more easily migrate to Windows 7 when it becomes available.  Windows 7 is going to present some very compelling features that may have folks thinking they should wait, however, it’s key that Microsoft wil continue to drive Windows Vista as the base platform to build upon.  Sinofsky made it evident in his keynote that we’re still committed to Windows Vista.

What about Windows XP?
We will continue to push out updates to Windows XP for our XP customers.  It is important though to get them moving towards Windows Vista.

Developer Platform
Scott Guthrie came on stage and talked about our investments in our client runtimes (e.g. Silverlight, WPF) as well as our enhancements in Internet Explorer and IIS7, and our web development platform (e.g. ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data) as well as laid some groundwork for where our future investments are as we evolve these platforms/technologies.

Windows Live Services
David Treadwell rounded out the keynote to talk about our investment in the Live Services component of the Windows Azure platform.  He discussed the Windows Live Essentials offering (currently in beta and available for download at http://download.live.com/) which provides capabilities like email, blogging, messaging, photos, etc. In addition Treadwell talked about the rich integration of Windows Live Platform with Windows 7 and how key Windows Live capabilities will be a natural part of the Windows 7.

Announcements

• Windows Live Framework – Provides a developer framework for building applications on the Live Services platform.
• Office Web Applications – Web-based equivalents of the Office client applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) During the keynotes, the Group PM of Office demonstrated the Office Web Applications.  This provides a solid platform for delivering web-enabled versions of our popular office suite that BLOWS THE DOORS off the competition.

IMPORTANT NOTE: As it relates to Office Web Applications, this should NOT be viewed as a replacement for the client suite.  As a matter of fact, the web applications should be viewed as complementary and a part of of the Microsoft S+S strategy.  It is important that this not be positioned as an alternative, but as a solution to further extend the reach of Office.

The day was filled with great breakout sessions that covered the following products/technologies:

• Windows 7
• Live Mesh
• Silverlight 2
• ASP.NET 4.0
• WCF/WF 4.0
• “Oslo” – Codename from our new application modeling platform.
• Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure
• Live Services Platform
• “Dublin” – Codename for a Windows Application Server that essentially provides a highly scalable runtime environment for WCF/WF 4.0-based distrubuted applications/services

Resources

• Engineering Windows 7 Blog – Great blog that gives a “behind the scenes” view, from the perspectives of the product team themselves, on how Windows 7 is being built
• Windows Azure Portal – Provides information on the Windows Azure platform as well as it’s sub-components (ex: Live Services)

That’s about all I have for now   Hope it’s useful.

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A lot of exciting things came out of day #1 at the PDC.  I’m sure you’ve already started to see/hear about the great technology that we are unveiling.  During the keynote, I saw laptops being pulled out and I’m quite sure there are tons of blogging going on in the blogosphere

Today, Ray Ozzie kicked off the 2008 PDC with a keynote that basically laid the foundation of our software plus services strategy and highlighted the key investments we’ve been making over the last few years in bringing our cloud platform to fruition.  In his talk, he focused on the landscape as we see it in 3 tiers:

• Experience Tier – The experience tier focuses on the end-user and their user experiences with the desktop/mobile device
• Enterprise Tier – The enterprise tier focuses on people interaction with enterprise systems and system-to-system interaction within the enterprise
• Web Tier – The web tier focuses on leveraging the web as the backbone for next generation computing.  Our cloud computing initiative is focused on leveraging the web through providing scalable hosting services for applications services.

Windows Strata becomes Windows Azure

During the keynote, Ray made the “formal” announcement of the name of our new cloud platform.  For those of you who knew this as codename “Windows Strata”, the platform has now been officially branded as Windows Azure.

Windows Azure provides a hypervisor-based model for providing secure and scalable hosting services.  It separates the application/service being hosted from the underlying operating system.  It is also important to note that Azure is not only for managing server infrastructure, but also web services as well and provides an end-to-end approach for accomplishing this.  At the heart of Azure is a “Fabric controller” which dynamically manages resources within the data center to preserve the health of services/applications that are deployed to the Azure Platform.

Windows Azure will provide support for both managed (.NET) and unmanaged code which essentially allows you to host non-.NET applications within this cloud fabric.  From a developer perspective, developers will be able to take advantage of this platform locally, through the Azure SDK and supporting tools for Visual Studio, that’ll provide facilities to support the development/debugging of cloud-based applications.  Through a “publish” operation in Visual Studio, developers will be able to publish their solution to the Azure services Developer Portal.

The Azure Services Platform consists of the following platform technologies:

• Windows Live Services
• Microsoft .NET Services
• Microsoft SQL Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Services (this is not to be confused with WSS)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The Azure platform should also not be confused as a replacement of our one-premise offerings, but rather a complementary, cloud-based equivalent.  our on-premise offerings as a part of our strategy include:

• SQL Server 2008
• BizTalk Server
• SharePoint Server
• Dynamics CRM
• Windows Server
• Systems Center

The platform will provide capabilities that allow developers to model the services deployed on the platform.  Service modeling consists of:

• Roles and Groups (e.g. who has access to the services that are being published and what operations/actions they can perform
• Channels and Endpoints (e.g. defining how the services will be exposed and over what transport protocols)
• Interfaces
• Configuration Settings

During the keynote, there were partner demonstrations of solutions that are already taking advantage of the Azure Services Platform.  Jonathan Greensted, CEO of Sentient, gave a demonstration of a solution that his company has been working on called, Bluehoo.com (http://m.bluehoo.com) that integrates cloud-based services with mobile devices.  You can download and starting playing with the solution from http://m.bluehoo.com.  In addition, Shawn Davison, VP of RedPrairie, a Supply-chain manufacturing solutions firm, demoed a “one button” product recall orchestration running on Windows Azure and leveraging .NET services like workflow.

Bob Muglia came on stage and discussed our roadmap leading into 2009+.  He focused on the theme of the “5th generation computing”.  In his discussion, he highlighted where we’ve been and where we’re going

• 1970s – Monolithic
• 1980s – Client-server
• 1990s – Web
• Today – SOA
• 2009+ – Services

Bob’s “evolutionary” discussion provided additional context to what Ray covered in his keynote and further solidified our messaging around the Windows Azure platform and the investments that we’ll be making from now, until we ship.

What’s in Microsoft .NET Services?
.NET Services (formerly known as BizTalk Services) are a set of Microsoft hosted, scalable, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks upon which developers can create cloud-based or cloud-aware applications.  Essentially, it breaks down into the following 3 components:

• A full end-to-end service bus solution – Makes it easy to connect disparate applications over the internet
• Facilities that support Identity/Access Control – Provides an easy way to control web applications and services using standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directory services such as Active Directory and web-based identity stores such as Windows Live ID
• Workflow Services – Provides a highly scalable host for running workflows in the cloud.

What’s in SQL Services?
SQL Data services extend the capabilities of SQL Server to the cloud as web-based services, which enable you to store your data in a highly-scalable and internet-facing distributed database service infrastructure.  It contains the following key components:

• Database
• Data Sync
• Reporting
• Data Mining
• ETL
• Reference Data

What about Microsoft Online?
Our Microsoft Online Strategy still remains intact and will take advantage of the new Windows Azure platform as it evolves.  The Microsoft Online platform is geared at addressing many customer challenges we’ve heard, including:

• Best in class collaboration
• Staying up-to-date with software versions/patches/updates
• Lower, predictable costs
• Scarce IT resources
• High Security
• High Availability

NOTE: It is important to note that the current version of Microsoft Online IS NOT built on the Windows Azure platform.  Over time, it will take advantage of our investments in Windows Azure.

Can customers host Windows Azure within their own data centers?
This question was asked several times within today’s breakout sessions.  The answer to this is that as the features/capabilities of Windows Azure evolve, we (Microsoft) will take a look at the capability stack and identify key features of Windows Azure and roll it into our enterprise server products.  There is still significant value within our enterprise server platform and overtime, those products will benefit from the rich investments being made in Windows Azure.

When are we going to ship Windows Azure?
Answer: When it’s ready.

Essentially, we’re targeting some time in calendar year 2009, however, we’re largely basing our release on when our customers think that it’s ready to be released, and not a moment sooner.  We will follow a similar process that we’ve followed with CTP services we’ve already released and will be doing frequent updates.  However, the final ship date was not disclosed.

Are there any resources available to learn more about Windows Azure?
You can find more information about the Azure Services Platform, including whitepapers, SDK and tool downloads, datasheets, and a link to sign-up for a test/dev account to the Windows Azure cloud platform at the Azure Services Platform website.

That about sums up day #1.  I hope you find this recap helpful.

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