andthennothing.net

I just finished watching IronPython: Python on the .NET Framework which is a demo of IronPython. I remember when it first was announced, one or two years ago, and thought it was neat but didn’t see the need when there already are CPython and Jython. But it’s nice to see who well it integrates with the .NET framework as well as the Python libraries (does it support C extended Python libraries as well?). You can use the whole .NET framework and even extend it in your Python script (which shouldn’t come as a surprise since it uses the CLR), and you can embed Python into “normal” .NET applications. You can even debug using Visual Studio, set breakpoints and introspect variables (without there being any IronPython support in Visual Studio, again thanks to the CLR).

IronPython is currently at a pre-alpha stage suitable for experimentation but not for serious development work.

Channel 9 is pumping out some very interesting videos about the PDC.

Anders Hejlsberg – LINQ

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and in a nutshell, it makes query and set operations, like SQL statements first class citizens in .NET languages like C# and VB.

This one is really cool! Searching generic collections of generic objects. Amazing that they are able to this kind of declarative programming in a static programming language. However, there is a line when you’re trying too hard to be a dynamic language, and they are awfully close. The examples provided by Anders could easibly have been done in Ruby, using blocks, where it feels natural and not a paradigm mashup. Still, very cool!

(Did I manage to get a buzzword bingo?)

Julie Larson-Green – Diving into the new Office 12

Julie runs the team that did the research that led to the came up with and designed the new Office 12 user interface. She gives us a great runthrough of what Office 12 does.

The new UI of Office seems to be a lot slicker. It’s incredibly pleasant to see that simplicity is something that Microsoft is embracing even in feature packed applications like the Office suite. Nice new UI concepts, like no standard menubar, live preview of all changes, “floatie” – the shy toolbar, and shortcut overlay (hopefully the only thing they’ve borrowed from the Notes UI).

Shell Team – Exploring and Using Windows Vista

Now, what does the Shell team do? They make the Explorer and do a variety of other things. You will not want to miss this video because you’ll get a good look at Windows Vista from both an end-user perspective as well as a developer perspective. You’ll get to see just how powerful the desktop search feature is that’s built into Windows Vista.

The main interesting thing is that Microsoft seems to have continue on the no more silo route. That’s a Good Thing.

Kam Vedbrat – Looking at Windows Vista’s user interface

Kam Vedbrat is a lead program manager on the AERO team which redesigned the User Interface of Windows Vista (the next version of Windows). We spend half an hour looking at the user interface.

Mostly eye candy.

Manuel Clement and others – Introducing Sparkle

Here we meet the Expression Interactive Designer team last week as they were having a late-night pizza dinner (code-named Sparkle) and then sit down for a lengthy demo.

Tool for creating XAML basically. Cool! And some eye candy.

Adam Nathan – Light up an app with WPF

Adam Nathan is giving a talk at the PDC on Thursday about making an application “light up” on Windows Vista. To prepare for the talk he created WinFXHearts.com. Very cool version of the Internet Hearts game. Here we visit his office to get a good look at his application and what developers can do with Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly known as Avalon).

Eye candy and descibes how to integrate WPF in legacy apps.

Kenneth Spector – Coding without seeing the screen

Kenneth is working as an intern here at Microsoft for the summer on the Office team as a tester. He uses Visual Studio to find bugs (and to code on his own time). He writes emails in Outlook. Does all the usual stuff that most developers or testers at Microsoft do. With one difference.

He can’t see the screen because he’s been blind since he was three years old.

Very interesting!

I’m now looking at the WinFS video over at Channel 9. WinFS together with the RSS support planned for Windows Vista seems to me as a major shift. Most Microsoft applications are silos which makes it really hard to extract the data (like the problems I’ve had with migrating from Outlook). But will they open up the data from now on?

Oh, and there’s the issue of open standards for Word etc, but that’s for another day.

ps. WinFS seems to be really useful for a lot of applications and it will be interesting what comes out of it. My main worry is cross-platformacy since most other platforms don’t have the same thing.