Ray Ozzie and friends presented computing in the cloud or Windows Azure as it is now renamed/rebranded to. It'll be interesting to see some of the Azure sessions and what it actually will do.

Windows Azure is an "Operating System for the Cloud" which is suppose to ease the development and more to ease the deployment and maintenance of services running in one or more data centers with load balancing in place and multiple servers cooperating. The intension seems to be that Microsoft will remove the plumbing part of service development or rather to make it work in the production environment - so that I as a developer cam focus on developing the business logic. In the same way as we develop rich clients today, we don't have to bother about the storage and other stuff that apparently service developer have to deal with.

They also talked about Microsoft Online Services where programs as SharePoint and Exchange is presented as a service "in the cloud" or perhaps it just some kind of hosting service. Well, Exchange is not a part of my daily development life, but since I've been on quite a large SharePoint project the last year I'll be investigating this further this week and I'll if I can find out the differences.

At first I was a little bit disappointed because the level was way to easy, at least way to easy to have categorized this session as "advanced". But after a while Phil Haack speeded up and showed the ASP.NET MVC Framework in a nice manner, and since I've just worked with one of the earlier CTP's it was nice to see the beta and to get a sense of where the product is now.

And as a bonus he called up Jeff Atwood, you know - the man behind CodingHorror blog. Jeff and a couple of more has built a new site, www.stackoverflow.com, with this ASP.NET MVC Framework and he shortly presented how he did it. It was relates to one of the Hanselminutes podcasts I did listen to on the flight to LA.

A common reflection here is that every demo or example of web apps so far here at PDC has some component of MVC in it. It may be accidental and due to some kind of hype factor, but it seem that even if MS say they will continue with WebForms their focus will be more on the MVC front in the future. Well and of course Silverlinght...

So, if you haven't looked at it buy now, it about time. Start at the ASP.NET MVC web site.

Oh, and during one of the breaks I got the opportunity to play with Microsoft Surface

... an over all really nice experience. I whish I could have one at home, or at least one in the office reception so I could do some test development.

The first hour David Callahan gave us an Overview and Architecture talk on the subject of concurrent computing and parallelism.

It was quite a good hour and I remembered some stuff from my school days, even though it has become more complicated since then. The talk was a little bit on the theory side of the subject and I just sat waiting for some real examples, but they never appeared.

The main idea was that we can not rely on Moore's Law to have faster applications in the future, instead we must take advantage of more cores and more processors that will appear in our computers. Today most laptop has a dual core processor and within a couple of years who knows how many cores there will be -  4,8, 64 ...?

The next hour Stephen Toub brought me all examples that I missed during the first hour. But the subject was narrowed down to Mechanisms for Asynchrony. He did a very good job on explaining the history of thread within .NET over the years and how it has evolved from v1 to today.

But as I actually had done some job with threads before, both within .NET as well as earlier with Win32, it wasn't that much new stuff. But it's most of the time nice to have some recap from time to time, and it's also nice to see that there's no big areas on this subject that I've missed during my years with simple ASP.NET applications and .NET based CMS systems - which not had been that much thread intensive...

So, when I've got back the feeling of being in control of the subject again it was time for Joe Duffy to talk about Topics in Synchronization. Stephen warned us about "brain melting details" and we got plenty of "brain melting details",not in a bad way though, but in a way that made me want to learn more. Actually I went to buy Joe Duffy's book Concurrent Programming on Windows during the break. We'll see when I'll got the time to read it, perhaps it just going to sit on shelf for a while and be acting as a reference, I mean it has over 1000 pages - it's not exactly what Ill bring with me nor on my commute neither to bed before sleeping.

Back to the pre-con it was time for Stephen Toub again, this time on Synchronization Best Practices. And again he delivered some good examples i VS.

For closing Joe Duffy talked about Design and Algorithms and Stephen returned with support for concurrency and parallelism in .NET Framework 4.0

Over all it was a good day of pre conference, not that much new but it made me eager to learn more on this topic. David Callahan wasn't that great of a presenter, but both Stephen Toub and Joe Duffy was excellent.

Well, at last I got to my hotel and today I'm struggling with adjusting to the time zone and to start making decisions on which sessions to see, but for tomorrows  pre-conference it's easy - I've already signed up for "Concurrent, Multi-core Programming on Windows and .NET" with David Callahan, Joe Duffy and Stephen Toub.

The intro text on this topic says:

The leap from single-core to multi-core technology is altering computing as we know it, enabling increased productivity, powerful energy-efficient performance, and leading-edge advanced computing experiences. The good news is that Windows and .NET offer rich support for threading and synchronization to take advantage of these new platforms. This session, presented by David Callahan, Microsoft distinguished engineer, Joe Duffy, author of "Concurrent Programming on Windows” (Addison-Wesley), and Stephen Toub, program manager lead for the Concurrency Development Platform team at Microsoft, will cover a broad range of topics, including mechanisms to create, coordinate, and synchronize among threads; best practices for concurrent libraries and apps; and techniques for improving scalability, including lock-free algorithms. Focus will be on .NET programming, including the next generation of parallel programming support within the Framework, but Windows internals and C++ nuggets will be discussed too.

It'll be a good start of this week to get a update on this because I think that this is going to be a problematic area for the coming years. Well, not for every application but for some and especially for those applications/projects that I want to participate in.