// Steffe
måndag 9 juni 2008
Home sweet home
söndag 8 juni 2008
Atlanta
// Steffe
lördag 7 juni 2008
Last post from Orlando
It seems only fitting that I should write the last post (probably) from Orlando.
I have had a very interesting week with many good breakout sessions to less good sessions.
During the week I have mostly followed the same schedule as the other guys however I did attend a few more sessions about .NET Micro Framework, which is a very interesting area that I did not know about before going here. In short it is a variant of the .NET framework for small embedded devices with much more limited resources than those using Windows CE. In fact the Micro framework runs without an OS, it is that low level but still enables you to write managed code in C# and using Visual Studio. No more need to use strange and complicated tools for coding, downloading and debugging! I am very impressed by what Microsoft has accomplished here. This is an area I certainly will dig in to deeper and we are in fact bringing back four (4), yes four copies of a newly released book on the subject. They were giving them out for free just to promote the .NET Micro framework.
So too summarize the week it has been a very interesting and inspiring week. Starting with watching Bill Gates kick off with the keynote and attending various sessions about Windows CE, Windows Mobile, .NET Framework, XNA game programming, inspirational architectural speakers to hands on labs! Microsoft has really put in a lot of money on this event and with over 700 different sessions and labs how can it go wrong! And next week they continue with another conference! I wonder if Ericsson would ever be able to do something like this!
Well time to go to sleep, the clock is 1.43am right now so maybe its time! :)
Cheers
/Peter
I have had a very interesting week with many good breakout sessions to less good sessions.
During the week I have mostly followed the same schedule as the other guys however I did attend a few more sessions about .NET Micro Framework, which is a very interesting area that I did not know about before going here. In short it is a variant of the .NET framework for small embedded devices with much more limited resources than those using Windows CE. In fact the Micro framework runs without an OS, it is that low level but still enables you to write managed code in C# and using Visual Studio. No more need to use strange and complicated tools for coding, downloading and debugging! I am very impressed by what Microsoft has accomplished here. This is an area I certainly will dig in to deeper and we are in fact bringing back four (4), yes four copies of a newly released book on the subject. They were giving them out for free just to promote the .NET Micro framework.
So too summarize the week it has been a very interesting and inspiring week. Starting with watching Bill Gates kick off with the keynote and attending various sessions about Windows CE, Windows Mobile, .NET Framework, XNA game programming, inspirational architectural speakers to hands on labs! Microsoft has really put in a lot of money on this event and with over 700 different sessions and labs how can it go wrong! And next week they continue with another conference! I wonder if Ericsson would ever be able to do something like this!
Well time to go to sleep, the clock is 1.43am right now so maybe its time! :)
Cheers
/Peter
fredag 6 juni 2008
Fourth day
Wow! Last day!
Mathias and I started the day with "Using DirectDraw in Windows Mobile applications". The lecture was about accelerated graphics on embedded devices, with Microsofts technology DirectDraw in mind. However during the lecture both Mathias and I got the impression that OpenGL seems to be the better choice both when it comes to features and hardware support. It was clear however that the interfaces of today will need hardware acceleration in order to evolve.
I then attended a session about replacing the Windows CE shell with your own. How to do it, what you need to think about, and what a shell should typically handle.
After lunch we went through the MS partner area and talked to various companies.
The afternoon started with "Beyond Windows XP Embedded" and was all about Windows with codename "Quebec". This will be released in 2010 timeframe, and will be based on Vista (or later). This adds a number of features to the embedded world such as Bitlocker (for disk/flash encryption), Readyboost, SuperFetch etc. Most of the techniques found in Windows Vista will be present. They demoed a Asus EEE (cheapest variant) running Quebec. It was kind of cool to see WinVista running on a small EEE which only has 2GB flash disk, 512 MB RAM and is powered by a 900 MHz Celeron. I borrowed the EEE after the lecture and tried it out. Really cool. It ran faster than my 2GHz DualCore with 2GB RAM.
We finished the day with a lecture on using Windows in robotics. The lecture went through the typical real time demands such a system has, and how Windows Embedded CE helps in these areas. The lecture ended with a demo of a video streaming robot running WinCE.
Wow, TechEd has ended and it has been one intense week, and we are kind of exhausted. So now we have had dinner with a proper sized steak and a few beers! ;o) Time for bed!
Over and out from TechEd!
Mathias and I started the day with "Using DirectDraw in Windows Mobile applications". The lecture was about accelerated graphics on embedded devices, with Microsofts technology DirectDraw in mind. However during the lecture both Mathias and I got the impression that OpenGL seems to be the better choice both when it comes to features and hardware support. It was clear however that the interfaces of today will need hardware acceleration in order to evolve.
I then attended a session about replacing the Windows CE shell with your own. How to do it, what you need to think about, and what a shell should typically handle.
After lunch we went through the MS partner area and talked to various companies.
The afternoon started with "Beyond Windows XP Embedded" and was all about Windows with codename "Quebec". This will be released in 2010 timeframe, and will be based on Vista (or later). This adds a number of features to the embedded world such as Bitlocker (for disk/flash encryption), Readyboost, SuperFetch etc. Most of the techniques found in Windows Vista will be present. They demoed a Asus EEE (cheapest variant) running Quebec. It was kind of cool to see WinVista running on a small EEE which only has 2GB flash disk, 512 MB RAM and is powered by a 900 MHz Celeron. I borrowed the EEE after the lecture and tried it out. Really cool. It ran faster than my 2GHz DualCore with 2GB RAM.
We finished the day with a lecture on using Windows in robotics. The lecture went through the typical real time demands such a system has, and how Windows Embedded CE helps in these areas. The lecture ended with a demo of a video streaming robot running WinCE.
Wow, TechEd has ended and it has been one intense week, and we are kind of exhausted. So now we have had dinner with a proper sized steak and a few beers! ;o) Time for bed!
Over and out from TechEd!
Third day,...
Today me and Mathias started out quite embedded with "BSP and Drivers for CE6". It was quite interesting and a bit more hands on what you need to do to get CE6 running on your hardware. It went through the BSP and all the things you need to do there. Quite interesting!
Then we took a deep dive into the CE6 build process in the lecture "All you ever wanted to know about Its Build Process". Also quite interesting to get to see what this whole ~12000 files large build tree really consists of and where to find things, and how to optimize build and build time. A lot has been done here between CE5 and CE6.
I also attended once session to rellay get a grip on what Expression Blend is, and what you can do in Blend and Visual Studio respectively. The idea of dividing the work between designers and developers sounds great!
A quick lunch and then we all attended a lunch seminar called "Introduction to XNA Game Studio" which is MS environment for developing games. The games can be run on either your PC, your XBOX and now also, beware, on a Zune! Quite cool to see the possibilities here, and that you can create one game and with extremely small changes make it run on all three platforms!
I then dived into "Peer-to-Peer Windows Mobile Software" and got a bunch of info about the bluetooth stacks on WM. The author also had written a quite interesting bluetooth lib which he gave us. With the lib you can easily develop bluetooth applications towards the Microsoft stack. He finished off his lecture by creating a mesh network of WM devices and had a multi peer chat running over that mesh network! Totally cool!
The afternoon continued with "Choosing the right API for your Embedded CE6 application" where a real nerd :o) created a "photo frame" application in both C++/Win32 and .NET managed code too see the differences and various aspects of both approaches. I talked about him regarding test boards for WM afterwards and he had some good tips. The one he ran on could run both CE, XP and beware, Vista embedded. :o)
Then I did a hands on lab for .NET Micro where I got to program .NET code and download that to a small hardware board and see the results of my button presses on a small "alarm panel thingy" on a small text based display.
After this it was time for the attendee party at Universal Studios. Quite fun to walk around a theme park and everything is free! Even the beer! ;o)
Then we took a deep dive into the CE6 build process in the lecture "All you ever wanted to know about Its Build Process". Also quite interesting to get to see what this whole ~12000 files large build tree really consists of and where to find things, and how to optimize build and build time. A lot has been done here between CE5 and CE6.
I also attended once session to rellay get a grip on what Expression Blend is, and what you can do in Blend and Visual Studio respectively. The idea of dividing the work between designers and developers sounds great!
A quick lunch and then we all attended a lunch seminar called "Introduction to XNA Game Studio" which is MS environment for developing games. The games can be run on either your PC, your XBOX and now also, beware, on a Zune! Quite cool to see the possibilities here, and that you can create one game and with extremely small changes make it run on all three platforms!
I then dived into "Peer-to-Peer Windows Mobile Software" and got a bunch of info about the bluetooth stacks on WM. The author also had written a quite interesting bluetooth lib which he gave us. With the lib you can easily develop bluetooth applications towards the Microsoft stack. He finished off his lecture by creating a mesh network of WM devices and had a multi peer chat running over that mesh network! Totally cool!
The afternoon continued with "Choosing the right API for your Embedded CE6 application" where a real nerd :o) created a "photo frame" application in both C++/Win32 and .NET managed code too see the differences and various aspects of both approaches. I talked about him regarding test boards for WM afterwards and he had some good tips. The one he ran on could run both CE, XP and beware, Vista embedded. :o)
Then I did a hands on lab for .NET Micro where I got to program .NET code and download that to a small hardware board and see the results of my button presses on a small "alarm panel thingy" on a small text based display.
After this it was time for the attendee party at Universal Studios. Quite fun to walk around a theme park and everything is free! Even the beer! ;o)
onsdag 4 juni 2008
Second day...
My day started out with Windows XP embedded. So now I know how to install WinXP in 23 MB. :o) It was actually quite cool! You take a WinXP image, then download a few tools, run one exe on your target system which will determine all your hardware and determine which device drivers that are needed. Then you run another tool to collect everything and add applications. Then you run one final tool to pick out all windows component you need, and after resolving all dependencies it creates the image! Nice! Requires x86 hardware though!
After that I checked out what's new in the .NET compact framework 3.5. There is one major new thing, LINQ, which in turn requires a number of things. So with 3.5 we now have auto get/set methods, implicitly typed variables, extension methods, anonymous types, implicitly typed arrays etc. LINQ enables you to process data chunks directly. You can for instance do something like:
Then we listened to one really inspiring lecture by Coding4Fun, which showed us how to create programs for leaching and converting videos from YouTube, how to program World of Warcraft using .NET etc. Quite a funny guy! :o)
After that we had a tough afternoon with "Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Kernel and Memory Architecture" and then "Windows Embedded CE 6 User Mode Drivers". The first one was really good, but the second one could get a more inspiring lecturer,...
Peter and I finished off the day with a instructor led lab which went through how you can use the new WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to create really cool and compelling user interfaces for Windows Mobile.
After all the sessions were ended we stayed in the HOL (Hands On Lab) area and finished off a few more labs which gave us even more insight in WPF and how the work of creating applications can be shared between designers and developers.
And guess what, no free beer tonight, so we had to take care of that ourselves! Wow, time to go to bed!
After that I checked out what's new in the .NET compact framework 3.5. There is one major new thing, LINQ, which in turn requires a number of things. So with 3.5 we now have auto get/set methods, implicitly typed variables, extension methods, anonymous types, implicitly typed arrays etc. LINQ enables you to process data chunks directly. You can for instance do something like:
var results = from c in SomeCollection
let x = SomeValue * 2
where c.SomeProperty < class="kw3">new {c.SomeProperty, c.OtherProperty};
Then we listened to one really inspiring lecture by Coding4Fun, which showed us how to create programs for leaching and converting videos from YouTube, how to program World of Warcraft using .NET etc. Quite a funny guy! :o)
After that we had a tough afternoon with "Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Kernel and Memory Architecture" and then "Windows Embedded CE 6 User Mode Drivers". The first one was really good, but the second one could get a more inspiring lecturer,...
Peter and I finished off the day with a instructor led lab which went through how you can use the new WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to create really cool and compelling user interfaces for Windows Mobile.
After all the sessions were ended we stayed in the HOL (Hands On Lab) area and finished off a few more labs which gave us even more insight in WPF and how the work of creating applications can be shared between designers and developers.
And guess what, no free beer tonight, so we had to take care of that ourselves! Wow, time to go to bed!
tisdag 3 juni 2008
Ok, so here is my view of our first day, just as much for pleasing all of you, as it is to summarize the day for my own sake.
First off today was Bill Gates KeyNote. He announced that this was the very last time he would hold the KeyNote at TechEd since he is now retiring as chairman of Microsoft. Mathias has stated the details below in his post.
He held a good key note where he divided the field of development in three sections:
- Presentation where one key thing is to bridge and ease the connection between designers and developers. It will be easier to have designers doing the UI parts and then connecting this to the work done by the developers. The big buzz words are WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation and it's subset Silverlight which is making its way to Mobile devices as well.
- Business logic where Visual Studio offers new ways of visualizing the architecture of your applications and systems, and actually validating your design in order to easily find design flaws. So a lot is in the loop when it comes to architecture tools in order to ease the design of larger systems.
- Data where MS SQL server 2008 is the big product. Focus in this area is on centralizing storage points and provide better synchronizations between clients (mobile, PC based etc).
One large area which BG also mentioned and which seems to lie close to his heart, is robotics. MS is currently developing a suite of tools specifically aimed at robotics development. During the show a two wheel balancing robot with a TFT screen head showing a picture of MS CEO Steve Balmer entered the stage and did some tricks. MS sees robotics as one field that will grow extremely fast during the next years. They made the analogy that robotics is today where PC:s where 30 years ago.
My first session today (Debugging tough kernel and device driver issues) unfortunately got cancelled and I attended a session on maximizing your use of Visual Studio IDE. So now I know all the tips and tricks on working effectively with the IDE. The lecturer was a guy who has previously worked with Borland since the early 90:s and been part of their whole development line of IDE:s such as Delphi.
We also attended one session describing the .NET Compact Framework Powertoys which described a few tools for doing performance and memory analysis on .NET CF apps for mobile devices.
I also attended the Silverlight session described by Mathias below. It became clear during the presentation that Silverlight 1.0 is only the beginning. Silverlight 1 is based on javascripts and means that you cannot really interact with the platform running Silverlight. Silverlight 2.0 (upcoming release later this year) will be totally based on the .NET framework and will give you much more power.
Peter and I then did a lab where we learned how to create our own custom drawn components for in .NET framework to create compelling Windows Mobile user interfaces. It was a good opportunity to get some insight in how the graphic components works.
The lecture about the future of multi/many core was more aimed at large computer clusters and was focused on MS upcoming HPC server for building giant clusters. But we also got an insight on the difficulties on parallel computing and how MS tries to aid by developing new tools for for instance debugging. But there is still a long way to go here. MS stated though that this is the only way to go since we are hitting the roof when it comes to CPU speed, cache size effects and CPU pipelining. So we must overcome the obstacles of parallel computing in order to get that extra performance. I asked the question on where we are going when it comes to parallel computing in embedded devices, and got the answer that since the frameworks (.NET) on top are getting new components for parallel computing, the underlying kernels will be adopted for parallel computing as well, even for embedded devices.
The day ended by walking around talking to MS partners and learning what they do and how they can help us. We collected some tips on how we at YAHM can set up a lab environment to learn the MS embedded tools and environment better.
And hey, they served free beer! :o)
First off today was Bill Gates KeyNote. He announced that this was the very last time he would hold the KeyNote at TechEd since he is now retiring as chairman of Microsoft. Mathias has stated the details below in his post.
He held a good key note where he divided the field of development in three sections:
- Presentation where one key thing is to bridge and ease the connection between designers and developers. It will be easier to have designers doing the UI parts and then connecting this to the work done by the developers. The big buzz words are WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation and it's subset Silverlight which is making its way to Mobile devices as well.
- Business logic where Visual Studio offers new ways of visualizing the architecture of your applications and systems, and actually validating your design in order to easily find design flaws. So a lot is in the loop when it comes to architecture tools in order to ease the design of larger systems.
- Data where MS SQL server 2008 is the big product. Focus in this area is on centralizing storage points and provide better synchronizations between clients (mobile, PC based etc).
One large area which BG also mentioned and which seems to lie close to his heart, is robotics. MS is currently developing a suite of tools specifically aimed at robotics development. During the show a two wheel balancing robot with a TFT screen head showing a picture of MS CEO Steve Balmer entered the stage and did some tricks. MS sees robotics as one field that will grow extremely fast during the next years. They made the analogy that robotics is today where PC:s where 30 years ago.
My first session today (Debugging tough kernel and device driver issues) unfortunately got cancelled and I attended a session on maximizing your use of Visual Studio IDE. So now I know all the tips and tricks on working effectively with the IDE. The lecturer was a guy who has previously worked with Borland since the early 90:s and been part of their whole development line of IDE:s such as Delphi.
We also attended one session describing the .NET Compact Framework Powertoys which described a few tools for doing performance and memory analysis on .NET CF apps for mobile devices.
I also attended the Silverlight session described by Mathias below. It became clear during the presentation that Silverlight 1.0 is only the beginning. Silverlight 1 is based on javascripts and means that you cannot really interact with the platform running Silverlight. Silverlight 2.0 (upcoming release later this year) will be totally based on the .NET framework and will give you much more power.
Peter and I then did a lab where we learned how to create our own custom drawn components for in .NET framework to create compelling Windows Mobile user interfaces. It was a good opportunity to get some insight in how the graphic components works.
The lecture about the future of multi/many core was more aimed at large computer clusters and was focused on MS upcoming HPC server for building giant clusters. But we also got an insight on the difficulties on parallel computing and how MS tries to aid by developing new tools for for instance debugging. But there is still a long way to go here. MS stated though that this is the only way to go since we are hitting the roof when it comes to CPU speed, cache size effects and CPU pipelining. So we must overcome the obstacles of parallel computing in order to get that extra performance. I asked the question on where we are going when it comes to parallel computing in embedded devices, and got the answer that since the frameworks (.NET) on top are getting new components for parallel computing, the underlying kernels will be adopted for parallel computing as well, even for embedded devices.
The day ended by walking around talking to MS partners and learning what they do and how they can help us. We collected some tips on how we at YAHM can set up a lab environment to learn the MS embedded tools and environment better.
And hey, they served free beer! :o)
The fist day of sessions is at an end. Here's my recap of the events during the day...Keynote session
Bill Gates opened up the keynote with a very nice video about his retirement. From july 1st he will focus on foundation work and will only have minor involvement in the decisions at microsoft. The video included people like G.Clooney, S.Spielberg, H.Clinton, T.Blair etc... And was great fun. Furthermore the keynote speak included demos on visual studio improvements, wpf (windows presentation foundation), silverlight and robotics. A fun detail was that SonyEricsson Xperia was on the front of the windows mobile initiative.
More on Silverlight
We attended a session on Silverlight that's ment to be cross-plattform and cross-browser. Silverlight is a flash-replacement built on top off .NET (2.0). More on this in future posts. Noticable though is that Nokia will support silverlight and then also .NET framework on Symbian.
Hands-on labs
Today I also completed a hands-on lab on Plattorm builder and WinCE that was very informative.
Windows mobile enterprise architecture
There's a new server product coming up called System Center Mobile Device Manager that will act as a gateway for mobile devices when interfacing with enterprise systems like exchange, sharepoint, biztalk etc.
måndag 2 juni 2008
The first day at TechEd
Here's Stefans schedule for the week. Mine and Peter's looks fairly the same with some small differences. Not included are the birds of a feather and hands on labs.
Our carnivor decides...
// Steffe
Kennedy Space Center
We succeded in missing the shuttle launch yesterday. Our airplane took off from atlanta at the same time the shuttle launched, bummer! Anyway we visited Kennedy Space center and took all available tous totalling some 8 hours of sightseeing.
The main assembly building where they connect the shuttle, the extra fuel tank and the solid fuel rockets (the ones on the side).
Stefan is contemplating what to buy. I think he went for some freeze dried icecream and some other small surprises.
The main assembly building where they connect the shuttle, the extra fuel tank and the solid fuel rockets (the ones on the side).
Stefan is contemplating what to buy. I think he went for some freeze dried icecream and some other small surprises.
söndag 1 juni 2008
Good morning USA
Awake and of course time for a new post. Here's our hotel from the outside. The wheater looks promising with a slight risk for showers. Today we'll probably do some sightseeing at Kennedy space center. Stay tuned!
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