'Innovate During Slowdown or Perish' — Microsoft

When Steve Ballmer descended upon a gathering of more than 200 software

professionals, coders and engineers, at the Hyderabad International Convention

Center, he admitted to being in a 'not usual for me' down self, when he began

his keynote with a statement like “The world economy is currently in reset mode,

and if the economy has to grow, it cannot be done with debt, but with innovation

and productivity”. Positioning Information Technology in a rather therapeutic

avatar, Ballmer stressed that non-IT innovation will be fueled by IT innovation

at times of slowdowns like these.

Microsoft TechEd India 2009, a three day jamboorie organized by Microsoft

every year, brings together software professionals, analysts, and media under

one roof to exhibit the company's developer initiatives for the year, and broad

product roadmaps. In both the areas, the event this year had lots to talk about

—from a sneak peek into Windows 7, to a rather surprising number of 'open'

initiatives at the developers' disposal — from open APIs for Windows 7,

including the Server variants, to open platform support for Windows Azure, the

Cloud offering — in short, a well-received sense of freedom for developers not

having to learn or unlearn their expertise in a particular programming language.

Microsoft echoed a rather encouraging statement all through this year's TechEd:

“irrespective of your language specialization, we now allow you to connect to

Microsoft seamlessly.”

Deciphering developers



The event brought together domain experts and evangelists from Microsoft,

who spoke on various technical and business aspects of various products and

platforms. Don M. Smith, Product Manager (Patterns and Practices) and Blaine

Wastell, Senior Program Manager were two of them. Speaking on their

understanding of the make-up of developers worldwide, they said in unison, “the

majority of developers can be classified into two segments, one, who are

motivated by the technology itself and two, who focus on the impact of the final

solution.” Blaine Wastell explained, "The first category of developers is those

that seek to grow with a particular technology or development environment. They

begin with the basics and end up learning the technology inside out. The good

thing is that they can stretch a technology to its limit and the bad thing is

that other technology is alien to them." He continued to explain the second

category of developers. "They work backwards. The final product is what matters

to them.

Depending on the business need and understanding of the usage of the

solution, they choose the relevant technology, or have a mix and match of

technologies to achieve the desired result."

Steve Ballmer addressing software developers at the TechEd in Hyderabad

So, which of these two methods is ideal in the current economic scenario? Don

Smith said, "A mix of both. In an ideal scenario, a product, software or

application has to be developed by a bunch of people, certain components of the

coding need deep knowledge of the relevant platform or knowledge, but for

increased usability and adoption of the final solution, you do need developers

who can shuttle effectively between platforms."

The seventh wonder?



PCQuest got an exclusive preview of Windows 7, at the TechEd this year.
According to Microsoft, the new features have been built based on three key

areas, productivity enhancement, overall speed, and ease of use. For starters,

there are the display and experience enhancements like automatic wallpaper

changes every 30 minutes, based on the theme you have selected. To make you feel

at home when you are traveling, you can use the theme of your desktop based on

the location. Another interesting enhancement extends itself from the Vista

version. The Ribbon feature, which was introduced with Vista will now be

featured in very basic applications like Paint and Calculator and Wordpad. Also,

the APIs will be made available for extensions into corporate networks.

But the 'wow' factor in Windows 7 comes from the Aero series of enhancements

— like the Aero Peek, which gives you a 'live' peek of the applications you are

multitasking. For instance, if you have your Media Player streaming a video, and

an image viewer open while you are typing out a document or a mail, all you need

to do is to scroll your mouse over the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to

open a mini video screen or the image.Taking image-based enhancements like these

to the next level, Windows 7 incorporates motion sensor technology by

understanding mouse gestures. Imagine you have four windows open running the

same or different applications, you can choose one application, for instance the

Calculator and 'shake' it (literally) with the mouse. The rest of the windows

get stacked up on the task bar and only the Calculator stays up on the screen.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft has paid a lot of emphasis to security

and manageability. In a scenario where an enterprise organization needs to have

data transferred between branch offices, a 'branch cache' of the data or

application that was invoked, is stored not in the server, but in the client

which used the application recently. Subsequently, if anyone else in the branch

needs to use the same application, it is invoked from the user's client. Add to

it, enhancements like Adaptive Bandwidth and Application Blocker, Windows 7 is

slated to be the next big transitional operating system of the times.

Taking Interoperability a step further



Taking this open initiative a step further, Microsoft has also funded for

interoperability with other programming languages with its Java SDK for

Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET services. .NET Services

essentially is .NET on the Azure Services Platform. Vijay Rajagopalan, principal

architect, Microsoft said, "We at Microsoft have realized that we have been

going after only the developers who focus on enterprise-class applications, and

this where the concept of Silverlight comes from. Now we realize that there is a

huge breed of what I call the 'hobbyist' developers who grasp languages swiftly

and contribute a small chunk of a big application, or create small applications

as part of a big project. Interoperability with platforms will expose these

developers to the capabilities of the cloud."

Another interesting initiative is the ability to port Silverlight on Eclipse.

Now, a Silverlight developer can invoke instances or vice versa from Eclipse,

making software development more pervasive and taking it to higher levels of

being open.

.NET on the cloud has three important components, a Service Bus, Access

Control and Work Flow. The Service Bus is an HTTP-based clearing house for third

party platforms and applications. If a Java Application needs to interact with

one in a different environment, the Bus will form the messaging bridge based on

the Access Control, which takes care of the authorization, Authentication and

Registration. The Work Flow component orchestrates the connection effectively.