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PDC 2008: Boku for Xbox Teaches Programming to Kids

By Michael Calore October 29th, 2008 Categories: Events, Programming

Los Angeles — Boku, a simple game which teaches kids the basics of computer programming, will be released in early 2009, Microsoft has announced. It will be available for both Windows and the Xbox.

The simple interface is designed to make it as easy as possible for kids to learn how to program, but hidden under the hood is a powerful gaming engine. Using only an Xbox controller, kids can creating complex, interactive games within custom-built worlds.

Matt MacLaurin, who leads the Boku team at Microsoft Research, showed the latest build of the game on stage at PDC 2008 Wednesday morning. We first took a look at Boku about a year and a half ago (here are some older screenshots and a video demo of Boku I shot last year). The game is much more detailed and rich now. Players can create multiple characters, each with separate programs, then execute the code and watch the characters interact.

There are complicated collision rules, and character behaviors can be tied to vision, hearing and time.

The characters can shoot at each other now, too. Since the audience is for kids ages 7 and up, MacLaurin said he wrestled with the decision to introduce violence into the game. But play-testers — mostly 7-12 year old girls in a study at UCSB — made it very clear early on that the ability for characters to shoot at each other and blow stuff up was absolutely mandatory.

The game is genius. Kids use the Xbox controller to build programs — there is no keyboard. Also, it uses a very simple language to construct the programs. Even though kids are creating variables, constants, loops and routines, there’s no tech speak. Everything is presented in a vernacular that children can understand and grasp immediately.

There are some great videos on the press site at Microsoft Research. I’d embed them here, but they are only in downloadable Windows Media format. I’ll update this post once somebody puts them on YouTube.


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PDC 2008: SensorMap Is Some Hot (and Cool) Tech

By Michael Calore October 29th, 2008 Categories: Events, Servers

Los Angeles — Microsoft has already left its mark on software, consumer devices, gaming and the web. Next, the company is turning its attention to green technology, environmental research and effects climate change.

At its annual Professional Developers Conference, the company debuted some new distributed computing technology the Microsoft Research team has created to collect data on energy use, transportation efficiency and global climate change.

During Wednesday morning’s keynote, Microsoft Research’s Feng Zhao showed off the pocket-sized devices his MSR SenseWeb team created to monitor any number of environmental factors. Microsoft has deployed hundreds of these sensors, each no bigger than a cell phone, around downtown Seattle, Singapore and Taipei, in the mountains near Davos, Switzerland and glaciers in Juneau, Alaska.

Each sensor records information about wind speed, temperature, humidity and other metrics. The devices are customized for each location — the sensors in Davos are connected to high-tension power lines, and they measure shortwave radiation. The ones in Seattle have cameras and study traffic patterns. The sensors on the Alaskan glacier measure water discharge.

Anyone can go to the SensorMap website to dig in to the sensor data, view time-based graphs and generate custom reports. The site will remain a public source of data for tracking changes in the environment.

As Microsoft Research’s director Rick Rashid quipped, “We’re using the cloud to keep track of clouds.”

It seems purely altruistic, but there’s a practical reason for Microsoft’s investment — the company is using the same tech to monitor the data centers which will power its new Windows Azure cloud computing platform. As the company builds the physical infrastructure for Azure, it’s also been installing sensors and feeding data into what it calls the Data Center Genome project. The sensors measure energy usage, heat and power distribution and efficiency within the warehouse-sized server complexes.

Zhao showed what the Genome data looks like. He revealed that hundreds of sensors had been deployed throughout the Los Angeles convention center, which is hosting the conference. On the stage’s jumbo screen, he showed a satellite photo of the building with a overlaying grid marking the energy sensor array.

He played back the collected data as an animated heat map, sped up over time, to show heat rising in parts of the building as attendees filed in to view the previous day’s Windows 7 keynote, then fanned out into the sessions and the expo hall afterwards.

It gave a detailed view of exactly how efficiently the air conditioning system cooled the building — including huge blue spots where the HVAC vents were pumping chilled air into areas of the hall that were entirely empty and devoid of people for hours.


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PDC 2008: Look Out Google Docs, Here Comes MS Office for the Web

By Michael Calore October 28th, 2008 Categories: Events, Software & Tools


Microsoft still has a few tricks up its sleeve in the battle of the online office apps. On Tuesday, the company demonstrated new, stripped-down online versions of its Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications that run in the browser.

These “Office Web Applications” will be released as part of Office 14, the next version of Microsoft’s desktop suite of productivity apps. Office 14 is expected in late 2009 or early 2010.

The public demo was given at the end of the morning keynote at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. During the demo, both IE and Firefox were used. The apps are built entirely in HTML and JavaScript, but add-ons will be made available to add Silverlight content. The apps are also designed to degrade gracefully for smartphones.

It’s important to note that unlike purely online offerings from Google and Zoho, these lightweight Office apps aren’t intended to serve as replacements for Microsoft Office. They offer live collaboration features and auto-synching of changes to the desktop or remote storage services. They also have user interfaces that very closely match those of their desktop counterparts. But they’re missing some of the more powerful features of the native apps.

We can be certain Microsoft will still ship a new version of Office for the PC desktop — the suite has proven to be its most valuable cash cow behind its Windows desktop and server products.

Another interesting point: Microsoft has already released a beta of Office Live Workspaces, a collaborative online environment for sharing office docs and doing some lightweight editing. How will that offering differ from these web apps coming in Office 14?

There’s no real strategy yet, and it’s very confusing. It seems as though Microsoft’s Live Services team and its Office team have been doing a little too much independent thinking. If they put their heads together around the online Office strategy, they could come up with a monster.

Most people who edit and share docs online (including us and most of the editorial team at Wired.com) love Google Docs and Zoho. Those free products give us everything we need in an online office app. But we’re early adopters. If Microsoft were to offer a paid version of Office — or even a free, ad-supported version — with a UI that mirrors what’s in the desktop version, it could finally bridge the gap for those who’ve been stubborn to move their workflows online.

In short, watch your back, Google. Microsoft is a believer in web apps, too. It’s just being more cautious and deliberate about them.

See Also


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PDC 2008: Microsoft Debuts Sleeker Windows 7 on a Netbook

By Michael Calore October 28th, 2008 Categories: Events, Operating Systems

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, Microsoft gave the first full public demonstration of its sleek new Windows 7 operating system to developers. The new operating system is a redesigned version of Vista so streamlined it was demonstrated on a low-powered netbook.

The redesign is an attempt to leave much of Vista’s more infamous features — like clutter, bloat and those annoying alert pop-ups — in the past. The release also contains several user interface enhancements like an updated Taskbar, new animated desktop effects, context-sensitive menus and a smarter desktop search tool.

The demonstration was made at the opening keynote for day 2 of Microsoft’s annual developers conference — this year’s event in Southern California. Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie and senior vice president of Windows engineering Steven Sinofsky took the stage to demonstrate just what was done to Vista to meet the demands of today’s operating system.

As far as performance goes, Sinofsky isn’t willing to offer any hard benchmarks, but he claims Windows 7 shows an across-the-board performance boost over Vista. In fact, Sinofsky demoed the OS using a netbook with a 1-GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. After booting it, half the machine’s RAM was still available.

Windows 7 may be built upon Vista technology, but this time around Microsoft joins the 21st century by building an operating system that utilizes underpowered and low-cost netbooks and cellphones, sleeker interface interactions and web applications.

“It’s getting harder to find things that haven’t been impacted by the internet in its brief life,” says Ozzie. “To date, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how we can use the PC to extend the value of what we do on the web. It is our objective to make the combination of the PC, the phone and the web of clearly more value to our customers than just the sum of their parts.”

Where Windows 7 stretches to meet this goal is where the biggest change in Microsoft’s traditional way of thinking becomes apparent. In the past, Microsoft has supplied a soup-to-nuts user experience out of the box, with all of the tools for sending e-mail, managing photos, listening to music and editing video included. But for Windows 7, these apps have been stripped out in favor of web applications. Rather than include an e-mail client or a desktop photo manager with Windows 7, Microsoft is encouraging users to make the switch to its Windows Live services, which offer both of those as hosted web apps. New features in Internet Explorer 8, which will ship installed on Windows 7, allow offline access to these apps on the desktop.

“This really represents what we think of as a complete communications and sharing experience across the phone, PC and web,” says Sinofsky.

The user interface enhancements to the Windows 7 desktop are largely intuitive, and they go a long way toward making the OS easier to use. There’s an integrated desktop search tool that learns the more you use it, bringing your most frequent queries to the top of the list. The new Windows Taskbar, which incidentally looks and behaves a lot like the Mac OS X dock, is more customizable. Users can drag and reorder the program icons. The icons are bigger, and hovering over an icon shows a live thumbnail preview of the window. Click on a Taskbar icon and a list of choices specific to that program pops up (Microsoft calls these Jump Lists).

See our companion article, The 7 Coolest Features in Windows 7, for an in-depth look at the user interface enhancements.

There are also some new mouse tricks with the Aero interface that automatically resize windows or make them transparent to expose the desktop. Again, there are no clicks or little icons to drag around — just sweep the windows to the sides or top and bottom of the screen to make them change shape.

Home networking, printer sharing and file sharing, all of which cause nightmares for some, are simplified by a new feature called HomeGroups. Put multiple Windows 7 PCs on a single network and they’ll all find and connect to one another, forming a HomeGroup. Users can then browse all of the media stored across the multiple PCs as though they were all on the same hard drive. Sharing within any folder can be disabled for security reasons.

Sinofsky says Microsoft focused on fundamentals like boot speed and responsiveness in particular, really looking at the Start Menu and Taskbar and performing kernel-level tweaks to make searches and menus respond instantaneously.

The pre-beta version of Windows 7 was released to attendees of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. A first beta is expected in early 2009 with a final version released later in the year.

See Also:


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PDC 2008: The 7 Coolest New Features in Windows 7

By Michael Calore October 28th, 2008 Categories: Events, Operating Systems

Microsoft debuted Windows 7, its newest desktop operating system, on Tuesday. The release is only in prebeta stage and won’t arrive until early 2009, but developers at Microsoft’s PDC conference in Los Angeles got a first look at the new desktop.

Microsoft is rushing this release in order to gain momentum lost with its previous Windows Vista release. While much of the improvements in Vista and Windows 7 are behind the scenes, in many ways the newest operating system interface picks up what Vista lacked.

The most-wanted feature is customizable security dialogs that cut down on nagging the user for permissions — a much-ridiculed feature in Vista. Other advancements take and expand innovations from other operating systems, like window management via invisibility and taskbar innovations that make it easy to launch your most-used applications.

Here are the most impressive user interface enhancements we can expect in Windows 7.

The New Windows Taskbar

The Taskbar, the strip along the bottom of the Windows desktop that shows active applications, has been redesigned. Now, it feels and behaves a lot more like Mac OS X’s dock. You can reorder applications by dragging them. You can further customize the Taskbar by dropping in icons that launch your most-used apps. And, you can see live thumbnails of what’s inside the window of each open application right there in the Taskbar. If you have multiple tabs open in your browser, you’ll see each browser tab in its own thumbnail, and you can jump straight to the tab you want. If you’re listening to a song or watching a movie, hovering over the thumbnail will bring up cover art and controls to pause or resume playback.

Jump Lists

These context-sensitive menus are available for each program in your Taskbar and your Start Menu. Click on the programs’ name or icon to get a list of the most recent or frequently-requested tasks. For example, you can click on the Internet Explorer icon in the Taskbar and see your recent browsing history or choose from a list of your most-visited websites. Or, click on your MS Word in the Start Menu and see a Jump List of your most recently viewed documents.

Aero’s New Moves

Microsoft first debuted the glossy, animated Aero user interface environment in Windows Vista. At the time, many noted that several visual cues within Aero seemed borrowed from the Mac OS X desktop. Aero returns in Windows 7 revamped and pumped-up. One of the new enhancements, Aero Peek, seems to borrow from Mac OS X’s own animated window manager, Expose. Hover your mouse over the far right side of your Windows Taskbar and your active windows become transparent, exposing the desktop.

The new Snap feature lets you expand and maximize windows simply by dragging them to different edges of the desktop. Drag a window’s top edge to the top of the screen to maximize it, and drag it away to restore it to its original size. Line up any window’s edge to either side of the desktop and that window will snap to fill up that half of the screen. Do the same with another window on the other side and you’ve got two equal-sized windows on either side of the screen.

Unified Search

The old Start Menu gains a greater amount of utility in Windows 7. The clunky nested menus are gone, and they’ve taken with them all the guesswork involved in finding your favorite apps. A search box in the Start Menu offers lightning-quick suggested search results as you type. Search extends into contacts, e-mail subjects, names of documents, playlists, song titles and even the names of individual settings in your Windows Control Panel. It also learns from you, bringing the things you use the most to the top of the results.

Fewer Annoying Pop-ups

Remember the famously intrusive User Account Control system in Vista? The feature that constantly displays yes/no prompts asking you to approve system status updates, butting in all too often like a nagging nanny? How could you forget, right? As expected, Microsoft has scaled back the pop-ups for all users. Furthermore, advanced users with admin rights can set a slider based on their own preferences. That way, only the most important messages get through, and notifications for things like the built-in firewall can be disabled.

HomeGroups

Put multiple Windows 7 PCs on a single network and they’ll all find and connect to one another, forming a HomeGroup. Users can then browse all of the media stored across the multiple PCs as though they were all on the same hard drive. Sharing within any folder can be disabled for security reasons. You also get location-aware printing — click print and the system will pick the printer closest to you.

Device Stage

Windows 7’s device manager gives you a single window for interacting with your various gadgets. Plug in your cameras, MP3 players and printers, and you’ll be able to see all of them listed in the Device Stage window. Click on a device to get details on its status — battery charge, available storage space, the time and date of your last sync and so on. From within the same interface, you can sync it, manage your photos, music or ringtones you have stored on it, or any other device-specific task. We haven’t tested Device Stage, so we don’t know how well it will work with iPhones and iPods, but for cameras and Windows Mobile smartphones, it looks very cool.


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PDC 2008: The Surface Scavenger Hunt

By Michael Calore October 27th, 2008 Categories: Events, Software & Tools

The Microsoft Surface team has set up a cool little game here at the PDC developer’s conference.

It’s a scavenger hunt. The Surface crew has set up a number of its table-top computers with touch-sensitive screens around the convention center. Participants are given plastic business cards with a unique pattern on the bottom (it sort of looks like a ShotCode or an Aztec Code). You place the card on the Surface table, and up pops a ring of photo thumbnails. The object is to match the thumbnails around your card with the images on the table. When you spot a match, you drag or toss the photo over your card to add it.

Check out the video:

The corresponding photos are distributed among all of the stations, so you move from station to station, playing your card and collecting the photos until you have a full set. A filled card can be redeemed for a Surface t-shirt.

Video 2:

After watching for a bit, I learned a simple cheat. Rather than studying the photos and trying to discern which ones are matches, just put your card in a clear spot on the table and indiscriminately toss every available photo across your ring. The ones that match will stick automatically. There’s no penalty for mismatches, your ring just glows red for half a second. It’s all the shirt-getting goodness without the waste of brain power.

How To Cheat at the Surface Scavenger Hunt

There’s also an air hockey game that I tested, but either it wasn’t working properly or there was some odd bug in the software. Because I rule at air hockey and I found the Surface game pretty much unplayable.

If you want one of these fancy table-top Surface units, you can purchase one, along with an SDK, for $13,500.


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PDC 2008: Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider

By Michael Calore October 27th, 2008 Categories: Events, Platforms & APIs


Microsoft’s Windows Live service will also become an OpenID provider, the company said Monday. With the announcement, Microsoft has put its full support behind the emerging OpenID standard.

What this means is that you’ll soon be able to use your Windows Live account to sign into any site on the web that supports OpenID — sites like Plaxo, Technorati and Ma.gnolia, plus service platforms like LiveJournal, Movable Type and 37Signals.

Your Windows Live ID login is what you currently use to sign on to Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Spaces or any of Microsoft’s Live services sites.

The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) framework is now available as a technology preview. Users won’t be able to to use their Windows Live ID at OpenID sites just yet, but the service is available for public testing right now. The official release will be in 2009.

Kim Cameron made the announcement at the PDC developer event here in Los Angeles. Cameron is the Chief Architect of Identity in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division. He also independently runs a blog on internet identity.

So, why support OpenID? And why now? Microsoft’s Jorgen Thelin offers this explanation on the Live.com developer’s blog:

All Windows Live product teams are committed to supporting open standards where such standards are relevant to our work and when they reach a sufficient level of maturity, and the Windows Live ID Team is no exception. We have been tracking the evolution of the OpenID specification, from its birth as just a dream and a vision through its development into a mature, de facto standard with terms that make it viable for us to implement it now.

Windows Live ID OP will only support the OpenID 2.0 protocol. Also, you can get a test account now (full details are at the bottom of the dev.live.com post) but those accounts are not intended to be used as permanent or reliable Open ID accounts.

Again, full support will arrive in 2009, and if recent research is any indication, there are still a few significant usability hurdles for OpenID to overcome before it sees wide adoption. So, test it now and let Redmond know what you think.

See Also:


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PDC 2008: More Nitty Gritty Details on Azure

By Michael Calore October 27th, 2008 Categories: Events, Operating Systems


From chatting with the independent developers leaving the Microsoft PDC keynote event on Monday, you can detect the buzz of excitement about Windows Azure, but there are also a number of questions. The developer sessions, which are spread out over the week-long conference, should answer many of those.

Microsoft has launched an in-depth website dedicated to the entire Azure platform. We had a chance to ask direct questions to a collection of Microsoft spokespersons. Here are some points of note:

  • The key to understanding Azure on the most basic level is to think of it as Windows Server 2008 running on the web. You can develop, debug and deploy your apps using your local server and local resources, then deploy that same code to Azure, connecting to the platform’s databases, storage and identity management resources.
  • The app architecture and development environments are the same, but once you move to Azure, you get the advantage of working without the constraints of your local infrastructure.
  • Moving a pre-existing or legacy app from your local Windows server to the Azure platform will require only minimal changes. A Microsoft rep says “Azure’s services have heritage in the Windows Server environment.”
  • Azure only runs inside Microsoft. It’s not available as a product you can use to create your own cloud environment.
  • Azure’s data centers are only in North America right now. Microsoft is investing in data centers now to increase its geographic footprint.
  • OpenID support will be available in Azure. For identity management, Microsoft LiveID is available now as part of the Live Services, but a rep says this is only the first step towards being a full OpenID provider. Update: Here’s the official word on OpenID support from Microsoft. We’ll have a follow-up post soon.
  • The SDK has support for VisualStudio right now. Support for Eclipse, Python, Ruby on Rails, and PHP is listed as “coming soon.”
  • Development tools include an isolated environment for testing with dedicated storage and processor resources. There are also command-line tools and VisualStudio plugins that will allow local debugging.
  • Pricing details have not yet been announced, but Microsoft says there will be a tiered pricing plan competitive with what’s already on the market. That means storage, processor resources and database size will be charged on an as-needed basis, just like Amazon EC2 except (most likely) on a much larger scale.
  • Unlike EC2, it’s unclear if the storage service will be persistent. So far, we know that once you deploy to Azure your data will be physically stored “close to your computational resources,” there will be triple replication for fail-safe performance, and you have access to your data via REST. A Microsoft rep says that data will be a “priced service node,” which the company isn’t ready to discuss. But it sounds like you’ll be able to choose between persistent and non-persistent data storage services, each at different prices.

Want to follow the buzz on Monday morning’s debut of Windows Azure? The best place to look is Twitter. Do searches for the hash tags #pdc2008 and #azure to see what the developers in attendance (and those listening in from afar) are saying.


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PDC 2008: Microsoft Aims for the Clouds With ‘Windows Azure’

By Michael Calore October 27th, 2008 Categories: Events, Operating Systems

Windows Azure
Microsoft threw its hat into the cloud computing ring with Monday’s announcement of its new Windows Azure computing platform. It’s accessible right now as a community technology preview. Microsoft developers can download the development kits at the Windows Azure website.

Azure is a web-based, scalable hosting environment for applications. Developers can build apps using one of Microsoft’s popular desktop coding tools, then deploy them to the Windows Azure platform, where they can be accessed by any computer or internet-connected mobile device. Microsoft supplies the storage, database server, identity management and processing power. As the demand for a particular app or service grows, the amount of resources dedicated to it can be increased or decreased on dynamically, stretching like a virtual elastic band.

The announcement was made by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie during his keynote at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. As Ozzie was quick to point out, “Azure is not something you install on a server. It’s a service, hosted and maintained by Microsoft on an array of distributed data centers.”

It’s the distributed app platform we’ve been expecting from Microsoft, as the company races to catch up to similar platforms from Amazon and Google. In fact, during his keynote, Ozzie praised Amazon’s EC2 platform, which was made generally available earlier this month, as a release which raises the bar significantly for cloud computing platforms. Amazon’s web services are used by small and medium businesses, including big name startups like Twitter.

Microsoft has definitely aimed high with Azure. We’ve seen hints of this strategy with previous releases like its Live Mesh storage service. But from what was shown in the demo during the keynote, Azure is an end-to-end platform suitable for hobbyists, enterprise developers and everyone in between. Microsoft smartly made sure Windows developers would be able to use their existing software tools and code to build apps for Azure. There’s full support for popular tools like VisualStudio, Visual Basic and the .NET suite, as well as support for third-party tools like Eclipse. Azure apps will also be able to use open web technologies like XML file formats and REST protocols.

Microsoft plans to push its own pre-existing cloud services onto Azure.

“Azure is designed to be the bedrock under all of Microsoft’s web services,” Ozzie says. Developers will be able to mix and match code and capabilities from Microsoft’s Live Services, .Net Services, SharePoint and its scalable database, SQL Services (formerly known as SSDS). Microsoft’s hypervisor virtualization technology is also baked in, so Azure developers can run virtual server appliances.

There were some quick demos during the keynote. The first, fittingly, was a “Hello World” app written in a few lines of code in VisualStudio, then deployed to the platform. You can view it at hellocloud.cloudapp.net.

Microsoft vice president Amitabh Srivastava, wearing a pair of vibrant bright orange sneakers, announced that .NET services are available right now as a preview, with the rest of the platform being rolled out over time.

See Also:


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Windows 7 Announcements Expected at Microsoft Developer Conference

By Michael Calore October 26th, 2008 Categories: Events, Operating Systems

All eyes are on Microsoft this week as the company hosts its annual Professional Developers’ Conference in Los Angeles.

Microsoft traditionally uses the gathering to show off all the new technologies and software releases it has in the pipeline, and the 2008 edition is no exception. The main event will be Tuesday’s debut of Windows 7, Microsoft’s next desktop operating system and successor to Vista that’s expected to be released mid-2009.

The anticipation surrounding Windows 7 is already high. Many are viewing the release as Microsoft’s big chance to improve upon Vista’s many stumbles, both as an operating system and as a business milestone. Vista, which was released to customers a year and a half ago, has been roundly criticized as a buggy and half-baked OS, with many a Microsoft customer choosing to stay with the older, yet more stable and user-friendly Windows XP rather than upgrade.

Indeed, from what we know of Windows 7 so far, it looks like the OS will amount to a revamped and updated “take two” of Vista. We got to see some Windows 7 screenshots last month which look a lot like Vista, yet more refined. Windows 7 will even be based on the same kernel that’s in Vista, though Microsoft has promised enhancements and speed bumps. Microsoft has also chosen to dump some desktop applications like a native e-mail client and photo editing software from Windows 7 in order to concentrate on developing the core OS features, instead directing users to move to web-based Windows Live equivalents.

The company has started a public blog to track the development of the new OS. Earlier this month, Microsoft software engineer Ben Fathi used the blog to break the news that his team will be scaling back Vista’s famously over-protective security features for Windows 7.

Also expected to make a debut at the PDC is Microsoft’s new cloud computing and web services platform, which Redmond will likely position as an alternative to similar platforms like Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s EC2, AWS and SimpleDB.

On Wednesday, before the conference wraps up, we’ll hear from Microsoft Reasearch’s Rick Rashid, who heads up the company’s globally-distributed network of “skunk works” research labs. Rashid will deliver updates on surface computing technologies and other immersive media software currently in development.

Webmonkey will be on site from Monday through Wednesday to bring you all the latest news from the PDC. Check back often, or just subscribe to the feed for our Events category on the Monkey Bites blog.


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