Attaching the camera

As I hadn’t used the video camera (Sony DCR-HC90E, SD-quality) since XP days, I didn’t exactly remember how I used to connect the camera to the computer previously. USB? Ah, firewire!

I rummaged my drawer until I found a cable and attached it to the camera and computer… and … nothing happened. Plug and play, indeed.

Power was on in the camera etc. I doubted that the firewire port in front of the case of this (self-built) computer wasn’t active, so I crawled under the desk and shoved the cable (we are still talking firewire here!) inside the port.

And… new device discovered!

Windows installed drivers for some time and after it finished, this window popped up automatically:

Cool! I wasn’t expecting this, as I would have been glad just to get the device working with Windows. I was prepared to use Windows Live Movie Maker beta or WinDV for capturing the data, but seems like I could skip that step

The "More options" –link opens this dialog:

The "Import videos as multiple files" -setting uses similar (same?) algorithm as Windows Movie Maker to divide the video into parts where it thinks the scene changes. I chose it as the video is then easier to edit and manage.

Importing the video

After I was happy with the settings, I clicked Next in the first dialog and the capturing started:

The capturing happens in real time (it takes 60 minutes for 60 minutes of video), so be sure to reserve time for it. Plugin the camcorder to a power source, too.

Wrapping up

Finally the capture was complete and it didn’t drop any frames in the process:

Finally, Windows splitted the captured video into smaller pieces:

As a result, the folder shows bunch of videos that are ready for editing:

Closing thoughts

I was surprised how smoothly the whole process went, especially in this beta stage. Notice that I did not have to install any drivers or software for the camcorder, motherboard or firewire-port. It just worked like one would expect.

Like many previews have already stated, I agree that Windows 7 beta is already a solid operating system. It is nice to find all kinds of little things that feel right. Btw, if you haven’t read Tim Sneath’s The Bumber List of Windows 7 Secrets, I recommend you to do it now.

This desktop is relatively old – I bought the original parts in 2004 – and while Vista Ultimate worked about fine, Windows 7 works very smoothly with this. The specs are: single-core P4 3.60GHz, 3GB RAM, 256MB ATI 3650.

Not suitable for modern gaming due to slow cpu and display adapter, but decent enough for .NET development and normal desktop use for few more years. If you have similar specs and wonder if your computer is fast enough for Windows 7.

Soon, I’ll install Windows 7 beta to my work laptop (Dell Latitude 830)

 PDC’08 is here and Azure Service Platform was announced.

You may also be interested to know that the CTP’s (Community Technology Preview) of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are now available for download!

I’m really interested in Workflow Foundation 4.0, "Oslo" and "Dublin". I’ll blog my thoughts about them later. Azure seems like a nice way to get started with hosted services, too.

I’ll tell briefly my case so you can avoid this or find the solution, should you have the same reason for the problem.

The TFS 2008 is installed on a single Windows Server 2008 machine (except SharePoint) and uses SQL Server 2005 SP2.

When I tried to install the KB949786 (TFS SP1), the first part went always fine (TFS Build), but it ended in Fatal Error during the update of the actual TFS. TFS got into unusable state (clients couldn’t connect etc)

The errors in the Event Log were:

“Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server – ENU – Update ‘KB949786′ could not be installed. Error code 1603. Additional information is available in the log file <file>”

and

“Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server – ENU — Error 29003.TF 230001: The error mode for the Team Foundation Server Web application could not be configured properly. This problem occurred because the application root for the Team Foundation Server Web application does not exist. For more information, see the Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) log.”

After some googling, I found similar symptoms from the MSDN Forums. Logins etc were alright in my case, so the reason was elsewhere. (Tip: don’t change TFS service accounts unless you have a very good reason and if you do, use the tools mentioned in the forum)

Finally I just had to go through the installation log and from there I found the reason:

08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: Commandline: "C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe" set config "Team Foundation Server" -section:httpErrors -existingResponse:PassThrough -commitpath:apphost
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: IgnoreExitCode: 0
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: Silent: 0
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: ActionStart: 0
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: Cost: 0
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: WorkingDirectory:
08/13/08 10:51:15 DDSet_Status: HideCmdLine: 0
ERROR ( message:Cannot find SITE object with identifier "Team Foundation Server". )
08/13/08 10:51:16 DDSet_Status: Process returned 1168
08/13/08 10:51:16 DDSet_Status: Found the matching error code  for return value ’1168′ and it is: ’29003′
08/13/08 10:51:16 DDSet_Error:  1168
MSI (s) (B8!94) [10:51:16:127]: Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server – ENU — Error 29003.TF 230001: The error mode for the Team Foundation Server Web application could not be configured properly. This problem occurred because the application root for the Team Foundation Server Web application does not exist. For more information, see the Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) log.

I have the habit of putting server port in the names of the web sites in the IIS and I had renamed the “Team Foundation Server” to “Team Foundation Server – 8080”. The patch was obviously looking for the original name and failed because it didn’t find a web site with exactly the same name.

I just renamed the web site hosting the web services back to “Team Foundation Server”, run the patch again (without uninstalling it first) and everything went fine.

Microsoft, you could modify that part of the patch to search the web site with partial match or better: with some kind of unique ID of the web site instead of the name.

TFS is still very new product and it relies on so many other services and products that there are many places where something can go wrong. This is why it is better not to mess with anything directly without using official tools.

You have probably noticed the new status bar at the bottom of the Query windows in the new SSMS:

While exploring the new version, I just noticed this setting in the Connection Properties:

Checking the box allows you to pick any color from a standard color –dialog after clicking the Select… –button.

Here is the status bar in red:

…and in green:

So what?

Now you are probably thinking: “Neat, but not a big deal. So the color can be changed. Whee! What does this guy want for this discovery? A medal? Front paged in DotNetKicks, Digg and Techmeme? 5000 2000 followers in Twitter and FriendFeed? Interview from the Louis Gray?”

Actually the point of this blog post was to tell how this feature could be used for avoiding human errors during daily administration & development.

If you are like me, you often have multiple connections open for several servers and you have to be careful to make sure you are working on the right one. Color coding the connections could help to avoid – possibly serious – mistakes.

For example, you could dedicate:

• Green for development servers
• Yellow for test servers
• Red for production servers

This way you are more likely warned before accidentally executing that TRUNCATE TABLE on a production server instead of the test server you meant to…

Great thing about this feature is that SQL Server remembers your preferences per server, so you need to define the colors only once.

It is required by the SQL Server 2008 when you want to install it on computers with Visual Studio 2008. Be sure to install the VS2008 SP1 before installing SQL Server 2008 on the same machine.

Of course, besides SQL Server 2008 support, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes lot’s of other exciting features like ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, Entity Framework (loved by many, hated by even more;) ) and much more.

You can read about the new SP1 features from here. Oh, and the SP1 for the TFS 2008 is also available )

Here are the links to the downloads:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fbee1648-7106-44a7-9649-6d9f6d58056e&DisplayLang=en

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso, stand-alone, 831MB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=27673c47-b3b5-4c67-bd99-84e525b5ce61&DisplayLang=en

Team Foundation Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9e40a5b6-da41-43a2-a06d-3cee196bfe3d&DisplayLang=en

Here are other related downloads (Remote Debugger etc):
Search From Microsoft Download Center

Credits for notifying about the update goes to johnrummel, thx

Updates:
SQL Server Express Edition is also available! (thx, wisemx)

Guy Burnstein has also a nice list of downloads in his blog.

Here are links for your convenience:

• MSDN
• TechNet

Can’t wait to get to install it to my dev machines… / server.

Update:

The available editions are (x86, x64. Some editions also for ia64, but who cares):

• Enterprise
• Developer (use this edition for desktop-Windows -versions, like XP/Vista!)
• Standard
• Workgroup
• Web
• SQL Server 2008 Express will be available for download at the end of August 2008.
  • More details here. Core edition of the Express Edition will be released with the VS 2008 SP1 (week of Monday, 11th). Available now.
• SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 is available now.
  • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for desktop 32bit
  • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for desktop 64bit
  • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for Devices
  • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Server Tools (Merge Replication) 32bit
  • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Server Tools (Merge Replication) 64bit

Update #2:

Here is a link to the press release.

Installing it now. SQL Server 2008 requires .NET 3.5 SP1 and seems like it is RTM-version, too, like it should. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will be available during the week starting August 11th 2008.

.NET Framework SP1 installation requires restart.

While you are waiting for the download, you could read about the hardware and software requirements.

If you are planning to install it on your development computer, you should wait for the Visual Studio 2008 SP1, coming after 8/11/2008, as described here and here.

The “Web 1.0” way was to have mostly closed communities, like forums or membership sites. The content was usually personal and hardly ever shared between other users. There were some personalization benefits for registering, but not much else.

The “Web 2.0” was a step towards more open communities. Sharing the data between users and building social networks became important. Many successful services have opened their APIs to make sharing of the data between tools and services even easier.

Now I think that in the future it won’t be important which service you are using for the some specific task. The more open and usable the service is, the more likely it will be  a success. Staying as too closed service, like Facebook, will hurt your service in the long run.

Dissatisfied users want to be able to switch

Lately there have been many outages with Twitter and those that have got bored of seeing the famous Fail Whale have been seeking alternatives for microblogging from services like identi.ca or Pownce.

What prevents many people from changing from Twitter, is that they have built their social network of people they follow and possibly large amount of followers. When you switch services, you have to rebuild the whole network.

What needs to happen is to move the social network from the services to some central aggregation service, like the FriendFeed. There it doesn’t matter what service you (or especially the people you are following) are using for any given task.

If you switch from the Twitter to identi.ca, you won’t lose your followers, as long as they can follow your updates from the FriendFeed. If they don’t happen to have account in the same service, they can comment to your content in the FF.

I like to follow many people, like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. I don’t necessarily check their blogs or Twitter/identi.ca daily, but from the FriendFeed I can see all the important things (=those that cause discussion). As a bonus, I can see their Flickr, Digg etc updates, too!

Discussion is important

If the topic causes discussion, it can happen in the FriendFeed (thanks to the new commenting feature) or some discussion service like the Disqus. FriendFeed also offers to submit the answer to the original service; at the moment at least to the Twitter.

I think this is very important. If you don’t want to lose the user generated content / discussion, you need to make the APIs two-directional. ATOM/RSS-feeds offer only pulling of the data, but if you want to receive the updates done elsewhere, you’d better provide some REST/JSON/ATOM –API to make bi-directional communication possible.

While writing this blog post, I happened to notice that Rob Diana had guest written this article to Lois Gray’s blog: Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?. Also, Dave Winer wrote about this federation.

I was nice to see that such a big names are thinking among the same lines, which gave me confidence that I maybe onto something, too.

Rob and Dave talk about the federation as a solution and Rob mentions there is a need for some kind of DNS-like service for microblogging. What made me write this post in the first place was the realization that FriendFeed already acts like one – at least to some extent.

Also, I don’t see the need of publishing to multiple locations important, as long as people can find my content. I simply recommend them to follow my FriendFeed. If I switch a service for managing the content, they won’t miss a beat. If the same data is published in many locations, it makes the discussions hard to follow as you’d have to follow actively many services.

With a bit of evolution, FriendFeed could be made the central point of data exchange. When it starts to talk more back to the services, it will be much more valuable to both users and the services. It would act like a message broker that also has its own community.

I’m not just talking about microblogging, but completely different services like Flickr could easily integrate, too. If somebody comments a favorited picture in the FriendFeed, I’m sure the owner of the picture would appreciate to receive the comment under the picture as well. Or a “Like” in FriendFeed could be counted as a favorite in Flickr. As long as there is activity, it doesn’t really matter, where it originates from.

How to make money if everything is distributed?

If members and tools are decentralized and use whatever tools they like to participate, it raises questions about money. How to benefit from the users that are elsewhere?

When RSS feeds and aggregators became popular, many became worried about losing the visitors to the actual site thus losing the advertisement income.

What I have observed, majority still follow the sites using a web browser and only minority reads the comment through the feeds. I think it is because the concept is still too technical for average people so technology geeks are still the primary users. These same people are also unlikely clickers of ads as they probably have ad blockers.

If the service is good and has value, it will gain lot’s of users and as long as there are many users, there will be monetization opportunities. If the money can’t be made from the users, maybe services could start collecting them from each other for additional benefits…

So what should happen?

• Services need to become even more open, especially for allowing pushing of data from outside (they gain by getting more content)
• FriendFeed could invest more into pushing data back to services to make communication more bi-directional. Of course, they already have their API for services to pull data back from the FriendFeed. We also need competing services.
• People should start using FriendFeed –like services to minimize their tight coupling with the actual content services

I also think that Google is aiming for something like this with their OpenSocial. DataPortability.org and Windows Live Mesh could also fit into the big picture, but they require more analyzing.

This computer runs Windows Vista and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.

There is also a named instance (MSSMLBIZ) for Outlook with Business Contact Manager (or whatever). I had disabled this instance for performance reasons as I never use the add-on. However, I had to enable and start the service through the SQL Server Configuration Manager to get the update to install.

Then I downloaded the stand-alone security update from the Microsoft Downloads. You can find it from here: Security Update for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (KB948109). This isn’t probably necessary, as long as all the instances are running, but if you still get errors, you can check the separate log file with more verbose information.

In short, all you need to do is:

• Make sure all the SQL Server 2005 instances are running able to start
• …or uninstall unnecessary instances, including hidden ones
• Download and run the manual update

This fixed it for me.

Update #1:

Make sure that you don’t have NTFS folder compression on for the folders where the database files (*.mdf, *.ldf) are located. This may prevent the instances from starting.

Update #2:

I just installed the patch through Windows Update on my home computer (Vista Ultimate, SQL Server Developer Edition) and it went fine (with services already stopped).

I’m now certain that my first problem was caused by the disabled service and starting the services has nothing to do with it (as commenters has pointed out).

One solution that I found was disabling the firewall (the error code was also different, though).

There are probably many causes for this issue, so if you succeed to fix it, please comment here what you did, thanks

Update #3:

Updated SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition and Windows Server 2008 that hosts it. Through the Microsoft Update with no problems. Still recommend to proceed with caution on production servers before these symptoms are explained/fixed.

Update #4:

Found some good related discussions and solutions:

• http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/windows-vista/241211-problems-installing-kb948109.html
• http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsupdate/msg/8c7a94f74f4dc12b

Especially this excerpt from the first link explains the 733F:

“Error: 733F– Services Failed to Start “From MS Support”

“Description: This error occurs when the installation program can’t start the SQL Server services. This can happen for several reasons including: expired account password, invalid user account, user account does not have permission to start the service, or there is something else wrong with the service.”

Let’s say tests should be reviewed every week. When there are huge amount of tests, it will get hard to track when they were last time reviewed.

In this idea the review date is updated among the tests after each review and if the date is not updated because of a missing review, it’ll show up in the test results:

Here is a code of the review test (MSTest):

After the reported "bug", reviewer/developer/tester goes through the tests and manually marks current date to the lastReview date. Each test class could have one of these review tests in the beginning or in the end of the test class.

Of course, it is up to the integrity of the reviewer to actually go through all the tests and not just update the review date, but so is writing good quality tests in the first place. This solution can’t guard the testers, but it can help them and managers to keep track when tests might get outdated.

Being relative new to unit tests I’m not sure if this is a new or even a good idea, but I think it could help maintaining the quality of the tests. What do you think?

As the information has been quite minimal, I decided to find out what kind of job postings Microsoft has listed at the moment as they reveal something of what they are planning at the Redmond. As it turns out, there are lot’s of interesting things coming in the future versions of .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server and SharePoint.

It should be noted that the information in this post is based mostly on combination of several job listings and speculations and it shouldn’t be taken as a definite road map or truth. Projects can be combined, canceled and delayed. I’ll link to the original job posting sources, but I’m not sure how long the links will work.

.NET Framework

This job post reveals how there will be several SKUs of the .NET Framework:

You would work with the .NET Framework teams in proactively identifying/consolidating redundant feature areas and in driving the core framework technologies. One of your immediate roles will be in helping us factor the .NET Framework to be more flexible, by building the right set of runtime features, such that we can ship multiple .NET Framework SKUs in an agile manner. For example, we must reach the right layering and componentization goals to ship a nimble form factor, such as the .NET SilverLight Framework (for web client) and the .NET Compact Framework (for embedded devices), then build it up to the .NET Client Framework (for rich clients) and ultimately to the full .NET desktop client (for client/server). You would establish framework life cycle, with a particular emphasis on removing obsolete features, so that we can advance the platform futuristically. You would also closely work with Visual Studio architecture team in enabling a flexible multi-framework-targeting experience.

Source

These days .NET Framework distributable is quite large so this was also bit expected to happen at some point. I recall reading from Scott Guthrie’s blog about this earlier. It should also be mentioned that VS2008 SP1 will bring “.NET Framework Client Profile” as mentioned in ScottGu’s post.

Web Development, SharePoint, IIS

Apparently some sort of media server product for Silverlight is in the works:

Do you want to help drive the technical strategy around Web and Media technologies that will shape the internet? Do you love deep, pragmatic, and focused engineering challenges where you control the schedule? Have you ever wanted to drive a small, start-up engineering team building a code base from scratch?

The .NET Developer Platform team is looking for a Group Manager to build Microsoft’s new media server product. This team will deliver the server-side media infrastructure and services required to stream rich media on the Web and work hand-in-hand with Silverlight running on the client. We are looking for a Group Manager who can lead a small team of 10-15 engineers to build this code base from scratch, as an integrated part of the new Web and Media platform.

Source

Now this is getting more interesting. It remains to be seen, if this will be a free add-on for IIS or a commercial product.

Moving on to the SharePoint:

Would you like to be part of the newly formed team whose charter is to develop a v1 infrastructure and tools for SharePoint platform? Would you like to invent, design, and influence a wide range of RAD developer tools for the fastest growing server product in Microsoft’s history? Would you like to work on a team that is in the early stages of execution, designing a new revolutionary set of tools? If so, the Developer Division Business Applications team is the place for you.

Our mission is to empower professional, departmental, and end user developers to create a complete range of business solutions and customizations on the SharePoint. We are part of the Visual Studio family. One of our vNext deliverables includes a rich tool set to support Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) that enable developers to fully utilize Visual Studio and the .NET Framework as a development platform.

Source

The last paragraph is the interesting part. Anyone who has developed custom solutions on MOSS 2007 knows that it can be a nightmare. While it has a good collection of components and services, the development and deployment experience could be a lot better. I personally prefer plain ASP.NET projects as the development life-cycle is much more enjoyable and more risk-free. Hopefully these tools will make the SharePoint vNext development much more enjoyable.

This is also very interesting as it seems to unify ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight development:

Are you interested in delivering a cutting-edge technology that will revolutionize Microsoft’s developer platform? Are you looking for the opportunity to help drive several of the key value propositions of the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework? The UI Framework and Services team – part of the .NET Developer Platform group, and owners of ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, and Windows Forms – is kicking off a new project that will be at the heart of the developer experience for building Rich Internet Applications on Microsoft’s .NET Client platform. The goal of the project is to deliver a dramatically productive and simple experience that enables RIA developers – a key developer market – to easily build rich and powerful data-driven applications on .NET. The project will build on the huge customer excitement in Silverlight and WPF, and the success of ASP.NET, to deliver an unparalleled client developer story. The key value propositions we will deliver on are:

1. A complete RIA platform
2. An application model that vastly simplifies LOB application development
3. Greatly simplify N-Tier app development
4. Seamlessly take your RIA out of the browser

To assist us in this project, we are looking for a strong and experienced SDE to help drive our Application Model and Services team. This team’s challenge will be to deliver an application model that makes it dramatically simple for developers to build a rich, occasionally connected, n-tier application. Team deliverables will include a new deployment model that can seamlessly take .NET-based Rich Internet Applications from the browser to the Windows desktop, a framework library that makes it incredibly easy to deliver rich occasionally connected user experiences, and a set of application building blocks like authentication and personalization that reduce the time to build rich application functionality, and integrate Rich Internet Applications with Windows, IE, and Office.

Source

And another related post excerpt:

To assist us with these efforts, we are looking for a strong and experienced SDE to help drive our UI and UI Framework team. Building UI from data is at the heart of virtually every LOB application, and the team will deliver a set of rich Silverlight based controls, including a data grid, that enable new data experiences. The team will also deliver a programming model experience that makes it incredibly easy to build rich data-driven UI and visualizations. Building on innovative technologies such as Silverlight, LINQ and WPF, this team’s work will allow developers to very easily build a fully functional UI application out of data. Using the UI Framework, developers will be able to then easily customize and enrich the application by adding functionality such as navigation, editing, and validation.

Source

This isn’t a big secret, but it was news to me:

Our goal this year is to get Ruby on Rails working in IronRuby. You will be expected to work on the compiler, Ruby libraries, and performance improvements. We also want to provide IronRuby support in the Visual Studio IDE. This includes editing features (color-coding of source code, intellisense, etc), debugging features (breakpoints, data tool tips), ensuring a Ruby look-and-feel (interactive console, etc), and integration into the Visual Studio project system.

Source

Visual Studio

Major changes are coming to Visual Studio (some day):

Over the next few years we plan to modernize and/or re-architect various areas of the [Visual Studio] platform where we see the greatest potential opportunities for improving the developer experience exist. These include creating a new User Interface that takes advantage of the latest in UI tools, techniques, and hardware; a robust extensibility model that helps 3rd parties extend and enhance the VS environment to improve developer productivity; an editor that is both modern and extensible and greatly improves developer code understanding; a build system that can scale to projects as large as building the Windows Operating System; and an automation model that makes it easy to automate the development environment and allow for tasks like nightly builds to be automated.

Source

Another posting reveals that WPF is one of the “latest UI techniques”:

Major initiatives for this team for the next release of VS include:

* Work with the Shell UI team to migrate portions of the VS Shell to WPF

Source

Visual Studio Team System

I have just adopted Team Foundation Server 2008 and other Team System features so I’m very excited to see what’s happening on this area. Here are some finds:

If you use Visual Studio or any other popular IDE to write code in C#, C++, VB, Java, etc. then these services are a familiar part of your development lifestyle. If you develop for any of the major SQL platforms, then the available development tools leave you relatively out in the cold. In certain respects, database development tools are fully three decades behind the curve!

Come work for the team that is changing this with a market-shifting database development project system within Visual Studio. The mission for the team is no less than to bring tooling-support for database developers to par with that of traditional languages such as C# and C++, for the complete application lifecycle. This is a challenging charter, in a fundamentally unique problem-space. In one team you will find a broad spectrum of software development challenges from designer and user interface work, to the nuts and bolts of language parsing and cutting-edge code-modeling.

Source

Interesting and I have no idea what it could be in practice.

Testing will also get more tools in the VSTS:

In the Rosario release of VSTST we have the ambitious goal of fundamentally changing the relationship between Development and QA by providing tools and workflow that make testers first class citizens in our customers’ development process. To do this, we will deliver world class Test Case Management, Test Authoring, Automation Tools and Frameworks, as well as game changing integrations within Visual Studio Team Suite.

Source

Distributed Applications

These days I do integration projects and distributed programming is part of my daily life. That’s why I’m increasingly looking into WCF, WF and BizTalk as they could be part of our integration product. After reading these posts it seems that something interesting (that is, Oslo) is on the way:

Join the Connected Framework (CFx) team and help us create the programming model central to Microsoft’s next generation of the distributed application framework. The team has recently delivered first versions of WCF (aka Indigo) and Windows Workflow, which are receiving significant customer acceptance. WCF is THE Web Services stack for Microsoft, and Windows Workflow is THE foremost declarative, process model framework. Now is a great time to join the team as we are starting to work on the next major release that consolidates and enhances these two powerful yet simple and elegant development frameworks into a single unified platform aiming for 10x productivity increase in distributed applications development.

Source

For the last few years, we have been on a mission to make the usage of transactions simple, fast and ubiquitous. We have made tremendous progress so far. The Systems Transactions namespace in .NET 2.0 made transactions far easier to use, with dramatic improvements in performance. We have extended the reach of transactions all the way from web services to the kernel. We authored and implemented the WS-Atomic Transactions standard. In Vista, we integrated our transactions stack with the transacted file system and registry! In Oslo, we are planning to add distributed compensation support by adding long-running transactions support to the connected framework runtime! But all of this is just the beginning. In our upcoming releases we will continue to extend our reach, from atomic transactions to long-running activities with compensation to generic agreement protocols! We will continue to make it easier to write reliable and consistent distributed applications. Most importantly, we will continue to ship regularly to get our work into the hands of customers.

Source

SQL Server and Data Programmability

Do you have a passion for building state-of-the-art graphics software? Would you like to influence the direction of a key technology used across multiple Microsoft products?

We are seeking a Lead Software Development Engineer to drive the architecture, design, and implementation of rich data visualization components – including charts, gauges, maps, and calendars – that will be included in upcoming releases of SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Office. In this highly visible leadership role, you will be responsible for managing a high performance team of software developers using the latest Microsoft technologies, including C#, ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight, and WPF.

Rich data visualization capabilities are quickly becoming a requirement for modern business applications. The SQL Server Reporting Services team is on the cutting edge of this technology, creating a set of powerful and interactive data visualization components for application developers, IT professionals, and end users. We are a growing team that is passionate about creating the most comprehensive database reporting, data visualization, and notifications platform in the industry. We have an expanding customer base that has ever-increasing demands for more capabilities, and we are continuing to extend our product reach, evolve the feature set, and deliver new customer innovations.

Source

Those data visualization controls will be welcomed.

XML tools for SQL Server/Visual Studio will be enhanced. Interesting point is that WPF and Silverlight will be part of it:

Help build the XML Editor, XSLT Debugger and XML Editing platform for developers. The Data Programmability (DP) Tools product team is a new and growing product unit that is looking for a talented and motivated developer. We want you to help define and build state of the art tools that are distributed as part of Visual Studio and SQL Server and are used by millions of developers world-wide – hobbyists and enterprise developers alike. We value and encourage innovation and excellence in graphical tool design, usability, infrastructure, and execution. SQL Server is investing in tools. If you want to make a difference and work with state of the art technologies such as WPF, Silverlight, MEF/MAF, and help define tools standards for developers, then we would like to talk with you.

Source

This posting gives many interesting details about SQL Server’s future:

SQL Server is embarking on an ambitious effort to rejuvenate the T-SQL language and to embrace all the programming models in the data platform – relational, spatial, full text, xml and entities. This involves all aspects of the SQL programming surface from designing procedural extensions to the language, to improving the cursor model, to enhanced metadata discovery, to application packaging, to building a new compiler for T-SQL, to building extensibility into SQL Server. And this is just a sampling of the problems for which you will need to design and help build good solutions. In addition, this effort will require you to work on and influence Microsoft’s Data Platform Strategy.

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As you can see, many interesting tools and technologies are on their way in the next few years. My research method was very random and the job postings don’t reveal much, but I’m sure that we’ll get more information in the coming months.

However, the pattern already shows that many coming features build on existing components and aim to unify the development experience by combining them in many ways.

It seems that there will be much more graphical designers, DSLs and other modern ways of generating applications. This will split the opinions as many developers prefer to code in the traditional way, but I’m sure there will be something for everybody – I probably found just a few interesting bits out of many!

From my view point the most interesting finds were:

• UI developers will get the Application Framework(?) that combines the WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET technologies.
• SharePoint development experience will be tolerable, perhaps even fun.
• Distributed developers will get the Connected Framework(?) that builds on WF and WCF.
• Productive LOB-application tools that utilize latest UI-technologies (Silverlight, WPF) with little or no code.
• SQL Server will get major changes to T-SQL and new XML tools.
• Visual Studio will be enhanced in many, innovative ways with technologies like WPF.
• Visual Studio Team System will make database development more integrated with the development process. Testing will get more tools.

Do you have any rumors to share?