Today was the keynote by Rick Rashid, Sr. VP from Microsoft Research. Notes on the session:
Why is fundamental research important to a company like Microsoft or country like USA. It is to survive tough times, about agility through your earlier investments and having smart people
Talked about Terminator, liveness property. Basically if you create a lock in say “C” will the code release it and so on
Talked about Dryad – Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs, without knowing anything about concurrent programming
The study on computer “programs” help us to understand more on human “cells”, similarly study on “cells” is helping us to understand “programs”
Microsoft has been working with Washington university for Collaborative technologies – ConferenceXP
Microsoft released today a new version of Microsoft Worldwide telescope Autumnal Equinox Beta
Feng Zhao (Principal Researcher) talked on the energy usage, how to sense and how we can reduce. He showed a small device made by Microsoft Research that uses a 16-bit CPU, 10K RAM, 40K ROM to collect humidity, temperature and other parameters. It then transmits it using a low-power Radio as they are powered by batteries which need to last long.
He showed the below demo on how this data can be visualized:
This session was done very well by Eric Schmidt (Director, Microsoft).
Some top-level highlights were:
34 top level events sorted by icons
At the peak, 17 live separate events were happening
2000 hours of live content and 2200 Highlight content that was created
The result was staggering: 1.3 Billion Pageviews, 50 Million Unique Visitors, 70 million videos watched, 5000 Unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 600 million minutes of video delivery, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 35 million mobile views (external), 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered, were built for 2.5 times of what was delivered.
Four main types of contents:
Live Content were delivered with Windows Media Server, with commentary was coming from commentators typing in a CMS which got moved as XML to production
Rewind – Video on Demand play of live content
Highlight NBC pulled out 50 Interns from college put them in 30 ROCK and make them create these 3-5min highlights of individual events.
Encores – Broadcast replays
Other points mentioned:
Planning of capacity was most important. When, Where and Size (each sport is of different length) was to be planned to determine the CPU, storage and ingress/egress needs.
NBC was helped by Intel Penguin processor, NBC waited for it and the servers got shipped around in May and took 6 weeks to go to Beijing
Bandwidth out of Beijing was limited to a 40 meg (DS3). 40 encoders were running live, so about 1MB per encoder (Digital Rapid). All this went into two windows media services box in Beijing, this got patched to window media services in 30 Rock, New York so that they can control if they had to. Which was then mapped to Limelight & Level 3 CDN’s massive WMS boxes. More details of encoding process in the blog post here
No full screen due to IOC Advertising requirements on the percentage of advertisements to video
Many partners were involved: Deltatre (Italy) had the CMS the best in the world to do live score on web
HTTPWatch Professional (and Fiddler) was useful to see what’s going on
Lessons Learned:
Scrum and Scrumming builds better teams as the teams were distributed worldwide
Meeting Face to Face was very important, especially to bring this up cost in RFP stage
Everyone should know all roles and all architectural touch points
Reduce complexity via common schema
Long-tail delivery hides issues, when you are watching current items you needed to focus on the older contents that were being watched by the long-tail
The industry needs better telemetry and monitoring solutions
“Chunked” workflow (smaller sized thousand of files created) presented new challenges – Now IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming in Media Pack announced yesterday does this better
Over 250 people between Microsoft, NBC and all other partners
The announcements made in this keynote today was picked by every media around the world, so I will be brief. You can watch the full keynote from here.
Windows 7
The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250 Processors
BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data
Native VHD support to mount and boot
Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool
Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more…
On seeing this I was initially disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.
The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce “Roles” like in Windows Server for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way “Developers”, “Power Users” and “Home Users” can have different settings and security prompts.
.NET 4.0
The idea to have the “Web” guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements and on WPF was a “major coup” to promote it.
AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their native C++ rendering
A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today
In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and .NET 2.0 CLR
A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor can be customized
VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better
Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within Microsoft
ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so on
Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100 million of them have Silverlight 2.0
Live Services
David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID, Communication & Presence and Directory services
Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet
The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The BBC Engineer talked that “Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see”. What they are watching, which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered by Live Mesh
Office “14″
This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office (Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web
The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version and the Online version. All working behind the scene with “REST” protocols
Microsoft claimed this to be “Office without Limits”
After showing preview of Silverlight for Mobile two years back, Microsoft has been absolutely silent. Since there was no news for a long time I presumed they have killed this project. After seeing this session today I am glad the project is alive and getting closer to release. In this session by Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo, they talked more about this – both the speakers did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience and making the session fun. Notes on the session:
The Mobile version of Silverlight will be Silverlight 2.0 with .NET Managed code support and not the SL v1 with JavaScript (Thank god)
Public CTP will be released in Q1 ’09
Most of the Silverlight applications written for desktop today can run in SL for Mobile
A new emulator for debugging Silverlight for Mobile is now integrated with Visual Studio
By using the User-Agent and Platform class you can determine whether your application is running in Desktop, Windows Mobile or Nokia phones, etc.
Lot of optimisation work is happening to play media well on SL for Mobile
You can see one of the demos in the video below that was shown running in a Windows Mobile:
You can read here an interview with Amit Chopra by Register, where talks about what’s in and what’s out.
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