DevExpress will have a localizer tool

The TcxLocalizer component helps you localize those of your applications that use our controls, as well as third-party or standard controls. This component provides centralized control over an application’s UI language or locale. Using this component, switching to another locale is as simple as changing a single option.

http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx/archive/2008/10/31/vcl-subscription-new-localization-tool-coming-in-next-build.aspx

Things that make you go humble – update

Please go to the blog again to see two videos on SecondLight and on Boku. Really worth the time they take.

Things that make you go very humble

Bye,

Bart

Things that make you go very humble

Todays keynote was exceptional. The topics were coming from Microsoft Research and although the first half hour or so was full of stuff mentioning how important Microsoft Research is to Microsoft and to the world, the remainder of the presentation was unbelievable good.

Sorry about the lack of pictures and videos this time; I didn’t have the camera ready. Sorry. The most cool stuff is at the end of the article so keep reading.

Keep reading to read about SecondLight

There was a talk about how MSR works in the field of medicine, helping researchers analyzing fast amounts of data. And although you really got the point that Microsoft’s technology is helping in that field, it didn’t feel really special.

There also was a talk about very tiny measuring devices for temperature and humidity and things like that, that are actually installed at the convention centre. The devices itself use about 4K of memory (remember that from the old days?) and only have a circuit board that’s the size of a quarter coin. It has a radio transmitter and, to give you a sense of things, there are about 100 of those sensors installed in the main hall. Microsoft has gathered the data about temperature and such during the last couple of days and presents the (vast amount of) data in nice graphical form. It really showed how the cooling system works and what the impact of the equipment, audience, and the cooling system is to the conditions in the hall.

Next, a new programming language for kids, called Boku, was shown. It uses a XBox console to let kids program a ‘games world’ and do really fantastic cool stuff using iconized commands. The speaker spoke quicker than a rapid firing machine gun, but what he showed was really AWESOME and I want one of those for my kids! This will be a very good reason for me to by an XBox (not quite sure if it was a PC or XBox that was used). Go look up the videos on Boku that are probably out there. It really was amazing to watch.

But, the real highlight of the key note was the stuff on what Microsoft calls SecondLight. Really DO GO find videos on that. It comes down to this. It uses a special kind of LCD and infrared cameras. The LCD can be made transparent by applying some kind of current to the screen.The effect is that the LCD will not only display the images as you know, but also lets a second image go through, to be projected on a simple piece of paper. And the fun thing is: this second image can be totally different from the image that is shown on the LCD. The effect is that you can display secondary information about (pieces of) the image on the primary LCD. (Side note: I just hear a fellow programmer calling home about this and he calls it “Freaking Cool”). You can hold a piece of simple paper just above the screen and show some detail information about the stuff that’s under that.

I find it hard to express in words, but really, really, go find videos and other information on this. It is freaking cool.

It really made me ponder about my own work. What a amazing boring job I have! I want to be working for Microsoft Research!

Bye,

Bart

Windows 7 installed

I installed the pre-beta Windows 7 that we got. About the Windows 7 client itself: it looks a lot like Vista but has a couple of nice new things. You will find others blogging about all the new things found in there, so I won’t.

But, here’s a little tip. It runs excellently in a Sun’s VirtualBox box. Just point to http://www.virtualbox.org to get your copy and try it. I got it up and running within the hour without a hitch and that’s on a good but not very modern portable. VirtualBox feels a lot faster than Virtual PC. I will need Virtual PC though, because the Visual Studio 2010 copy that we got is made available as a VirtualPC image.

The goodies are delivered on a very nice and small 150Gb hard disk that I probably keep using because of its physical size. It’s nice and small yet very useful.

I also got to shake hands finally with Nick Hodges, Allen Bauer, Marc Hoffman and Jim McKeeth. My Dutch accent prevents me from taking part in the little interview that Jim did (I’m just too embarrassed), but I will definitely listen to it when it’s online.

We are getting ready to go to the party at the universal Studios now. And some people were already getting ready for that :-)

Bye,

Bart

Presentation on Azure/Live/Mesh on the PDC

I just watch a presentation on the PDC on MS Azure and Windows Live by Chris Anderson and Don Box. These guys had a great presentation prepared and it was pretty fun to watch. They showed a bunch of great techniques and demo-ed how Azure will host your stuff (applications and data alike). They also showed how easy it is to get something going with techniques and languages that we already know like C#, LinQ, et cetera. In my mind it shows the counter part to the Google Apps platform (and probably beyond that).

However, they hardly got any applause which I think was very funny in itself. Although the stuff they showed was excellent and pretty ground breaking. Now, why didn’t they got the applause that they were quite obviously expecting?

A couple of reasons are possible:

1. The audience didn’t get it. Nah, there are a couple of thousand developers in the audience and probably all very smart programming on a day to day basis. That can’t be it.
2. The stuff isn’t that special and people thinking: what’s so special about that? That can be it, but that would probably because the stuff is so easy to do. From within Visual Studio and with a couple of easy mouse clicks you can deploy your software out there and the same goes for your data.
3. Now, the third reason might be it (and it is the reason why I didn’t clap my hands a lot). This is ground breaking stuff that gives companies and developers a lot of power to create new solutions quickly and much faster than before. But, would you trust your applications and data in the hands of Microsoft?

I think that for applications that provide public services, like route finding applications, this all is great stuff. You can very quickly create your app, deploy it out there in the cloud for others to use. However for you business application you would like to keep your stuff on your own machines.

Now, what was shown in the demo, and maybe wasn’t emphasized enough, is the lack of needing to know where stuff is. It might be in the clouds or on your own machines, it might be in an Azure SQL Server database or in your own: it doesn’t matter. Simply by changing a root URI you can use the stuff from where ever it is.

So far I think Azure and the like is great stuff and I will certainly be thinking on how to use it. It is just not clear to me yet how I can use it in our software (which creates documentation solutions). But, maybe I should give myself a bit of time to think about that.

Bye,

Bart

Summary of my first day at the PDC

After a wonderful Sunday at Venice beach, having a beer and fish and chips at a Irish pub, the jet lag hit us and we had a hard time staying awake. It made us miss one of the parties of the PDC, but after all, we are here for work, aren’t we?

So this morning we got up at 6:30 AM but still didn’t make it to the start of the key note speech on Monday. But, when we got there, I felt we hadn’t missed much. Key note speeches don’t make a successful conference. We sat it out, but next time, I will leave early if the speeches are that boring.

I attended a (what turned out to be) basic demonstration of Sharepoint and having learned my lesson at the key note speech I did leave that early this time.

I visited the CodeGear booth, got a t-shirt, and was told the Prism DVD doesn’t have anything that I don’t already have. I got to speak to my family using Skype (which was a first to me) and was able to kiss my son to sleep which was a great bonus.

I had a chance to catch up with the ‘Partner manager’ for MS Surface and later attended a presentation on MS Surface. And to me, that was the absolute top of the Monday. The presentation was pretty funny, and the stuff the guys showed was really awesome. If you never had your hands on a MS Surface table: try to do so. It’s a fun and exciting experience.

The presentation showed what Microsoft has done to make the life of the developer easier and it appears they have done an excellent job on that. It is amazing to see how good the assembly for using the MS Surface library matches the things you know already about programming in the modern MS languages. It’s looks to be very easy to sit down and write your first Surface program.

And if you were there, you will get the Surface SDK and you can do so. And I for one will definitely will, because I have some great ideas for it. I will also try to use it from Prism (no reason why we couldn’t). I will let you know the results when doing so…

Bye,

Bart