Live from PDC 2009 Day 3 and closing notes

Silverlight 4 Performance

Finally you can use the VS Profiler to profile a Silverlight application (VS2010). Other than the profiler you can enable a couple of flag to visualize the GPU acceleration: EnableCacheVisualization and the redraws: EnableRedrawRegions. Another useful utility is UISpy https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms727247.aspx.

SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight

This is a cool technology for analyzing live data feeds. Basically you have input  adapters that streams data in to the engine where you can have LINQ queries that gets executed to filter, sort, aggregate data on the fly and then sent to output adapters. In the session there was an example for the stock trading market with as input market data some query for aggregating the volume and price by market eg. NASDAQ and then outputting the data to an Excel sheet. I like the idea and it seems very usefull to anaylize all sort of real time data like sensors data, web traffic data, financial data, meteorological data, etc…
Don’t get confuse by the name, it is not too much related to SQL Server although is the shipping vehicle and can use SQL as a repository and storage. You need to write .NET code for the adapters and LINQ query for the filtering process. More here: https://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2-complex-event.aspx

Bing Map

I was complaining about Swiss coverage of the satellite images in Bing with a girl of the product team, so i decided to show here how bad it is and I selected Airolo as an example and to my surprise it just came out better than Google. After the 10 seconds embarrassment I did learn that we have a new deal for imagery for Western Europe.

They are loading the data right now so it will take some time for the full coverage.
If you didn't know we have now also a cool Bing Map Silverlight control. You can play it live here: https://www.microsoft.com/maps/isdk/silverlight/ and download it here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=beb29d27-6f0c-494f-b028-1e0e3187e830#tm. To note that is using the same technology as deep zoom so is way smother that the AJAX version (including the competitors one).

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

This is a cool technology based on deep zoom (to be more precise based on Seadragon technology) to makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.

Here you can watch a video that tells you more: https://www.getpivot.com/ 

It was another great PDC, although being only one year from the last one there was quite a bit of announcements and new technologies.

Like a did last year here my purely personal opinion on the new stuff that I have seen with a rating for importance, coolness, potential impact and timeframe for mainstream adaption.
Ratings from + to +++++ with the last (5) being the maximum rating.

What was missing was WinMo 7 and Silverlight Mobile. Hope to see them as promised for Mix 2010.

Bottom-line is time to start coding for the cloud with Silverlight as UI:-)

Cheers from Los Angeles.

Ronnie Saurenmann