Just sharing some of my inconsequential lunch conversations with you... 
Ok, I haven't the faintest idea how to do it other than the experience given by Olav Tollefen. I've applied for access and I'm still waiting - the list is long, I'm afraid. Here's the site to go: http://www.azure.com. Be sure to take your time reading Olav's great post!
PS: be sure to register soon, the list is getting bigger!
Unfortunately I didn't find any site with the PDC videos. All I can find is channel 9 PDC videos sections. Here are some of Roy Osherove's recommendations:
Here's a nice alternative to MSDN Downloads for downloading Visual Studio 2010 CTP - once you have the direct links :)
Enterprise Library 4.1 – October 2008 is Available for Download. Heard it on Guy Burstein's blog:
This release includes:
- Support for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
- Interception mechanism in the Unity Application Block.
- Performance improvements.
- Usability improvements of the config tool.
- Fixes.
I'm always divided about EL adoption. Should we adopt best-of-breed libraries or incorporate best-of-breed concepts on a unique and consistent point? Oh well, until them I'll just use both :)
Here's Windows Azure, not a classic OS as some could expected but many had already realized. Here's a cool presentation from Das:
Manuvir Das: Introducing Windows Azure
I've blogged about it some weeks ago, I'll be fun to see how are my forecasts :)
This was pretty annoying... after a while getting an unexpected 'Row not found or changed', here's the solution:
disabled concurrency checks on *all* fields, then added them back one at a time. Turns out the culprit was a string field that was nullable in the DB but not set as nullable in the designer.
Should probably have chosen EF. No comments...
Here a great little LINQ to SQL bug. Consider the following code:
IEnumerable<MasterEntity> masters = db.ExecuteQuery<MasterEntity>(
@"select * from MasterEntity master join DetailEntity detail on master.id = detail.MasterId
);
Not imagine if you have the same name column both on MasterEntity and DetailEntity, let's say 'IsMandatory'. When you try and get a this property form a MasterEntity object, what should you get?
Well, on my code it happen to return... DetailEntity.Name! Yes, on my dev box the implementation seems to return the first projection by name. If you really want MasterEntity.Name to get returned, you'll have to get:
IEnumerable<MasterEntity> masters = db.ExecuteQuery<MasterEntity>(
@"select master.* from MasterEntity master join DetailEntity detail on master.id = detail.MasterId
);
Funny, right? I'd expect MasterEntity.Name to get returned, as your asking for a MasterEntity object, right? No ambiguousness here, or am I wrong?
Nothing new here except for the confirmation of what we already new: the return of the Microsoft / Apple wars!
Here a great chart (original chart here):
Yes, it's a tax. It's called a luxury tax, and only those who can afford it will pay it. It's not fair, it's not rational, but's that's how it is.
Yes, from the hardware value, the price we pay for Macs is too high. The value has been centered on the exclusivity, and that is changing as we can see by Apple's crescent market share, price dropping and Microsoft's discomfort.
Daily I use XP, Vista, Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X and Ubuntu. If I had to choose, I didn't have to think twice: I had to choose Windows. For it's maturity, for it's completeness, for it's application support, for it's hardware support, for it's backward compatibility, for it's great development experience.
But I believe in diversity, so I'm happy with Mac OS X raise on the market. And this is the turning point to Apple, has they seem to already have saturated the market of geeks and people that buy luxury products. Though comfortable with the consumer market, let's see how they cope with the price dropping. And finally, let's see if Apple continues to feel uncomfortable on Microsoft's stronghold: the enterprise market.
Whenever I have to create the structure of a site using CSS I usually end up here. Mind as well share it :)
Silverlight 2 has been released! Let's see how deep can it go. For me, I've bought the concept - boy, won't HTML/javascript ever go away?...
No, not blogging about the rumor on the name Strata - strata.com is taken, and unless Microsoft has already purchased the domain name, no strata here for them.
Just posting wikipedia's definition on cloud computing:
It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet ("in the cloud") without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. According to the IEEE Computer Society, "It is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, etc."
Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Appsprovides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.
Uhmm, and what can Microsoft offer us here? Let's try and guess: well, they have been investing like crazy on huge datacenters, so they will clearly sell “as a service”, but what? Besides the obvious storage and databases, Microsoft can provide a desktop in a cloud to manage it (Live Mesh?), integrated with officelive.com, above the "interconnecting devices" paradigm. They will probably start offering on the cloud all enterprise as services products they offer today as servers (ex: Exchange and Sharepoint) on multitenancy. They will probably lend their platform to others on the SaaS (sorry, Software + Services), making use of the BizTalk Services platform. Finally they can bring a huge marketplace with UDDI and infrastructure services, along with identity, claiming and federation.
On the client, all of this will probably run mostly over a cross-platform desktop application, not over browser. And what about the connected / disconnected model? Well, it has to be supported by a cross-platform framework, and there is where Silverlight can play a significant role. Though Microsoft has not yet decided what is the disconnected persistence framework to adopt, I'd love if they chose something like Bamboo Prevalence over a classical relational based engine.
But what about the consumer market? Lately Microsoft has been traditionally in trouble on consumers. Can they pull an anti-iTunes service? Most unlikely. Can they capitalize their not so cool Mobile Platform by integrating into the Cloud? Well, there's a cool way to go, though traditionally Windows Mobile support is always the last one to get updated.
Let's wait and see.
I was reading InfoQ's article on MPI.NET and the trend keeps on going: hardware is getting cheaper! Yes, this post is not about MPI, is about getting a Cray CX1 for $25k!
On the early 90's I remember a lecture at college where about a distributed system of Unix servers taking over the responsibility of a Cray supercomputer - apparently the only reason the Cray wasn't disconnected was for the tape library it controlled.
So then I believed Cray were a dying breed of dinosaurs. I was wrong, they are alive and kicking, and you can get one for the price of a regular server 10 to 15 years ago.
I never had so much need for computational power has I did on project SADPOF, an operational decision system for the forest. I'm talking about Simulated Annealing with multi-objective evaluation, huge parallel processing needs of huge chucks of data, with inner LP solving problems. When I'm talking about huge data, I'm talking about simulation variables of matrixes of floats of 6000 x 36 x 32 x 15. And calculating about 30 complex restrictions and a huge objective function.
Our test box was a 2x Quad core and it costed about $5K. A Cray would be welcomed, though MPI doesn't seem to much appealing to work with. What seems appealing is PLINQ, which will no doubt updated to work on HPCs using MPI.
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