*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

 Saturday AtomicInternet (Brad Lloyd) hosted a PC LAN party in his basement in Farmington Hills, MI.  Since I was in Livonia after attending the CodeMash conference I was able to make the four mile trip from the hotel to his home.

Saturday morning I caught up on work email and then about 2:00 headed over.  When I got there, Chris Lacross, a good friend from Ann Arbor who used to play with us when I lived in Ann Arbor, had gotten the computers we were going to play setup.  It just so happened I got there just in time 🙂  Ron was already setup along with Risner.  Later The Kelley’s blessed up with their presence along with Duane and Dan Davidson.   Keith Weinbaum showed up amazingly early along with Scott Huggins.  Needless to say we had a packed basement. 

I was personally looking forward to playing Battlefield 2142, but due to technical difficulties we couldn’t play.  What little I did play, I can see why everyone gets hooked on it.  We did play Far Cray, Unreal Tournament 2004, some Quake 3, Fear, and at the end some of them were playing Starcraft.

It is funny how most of the games we play have a lot of the same themes.  Most of them are built around team play where you play different characters like an engineer, sniper, soldier and then your goal as a team is to either protect your base or capture the other team’s base.  Either way most all of these are based on what we knew as team fortress years ago.  If I have to choose, I like to play the engineer role or the sniper role. 

You can view pictures that I posted up on Flickr here:  Saturday LAN Party Pictures

Brad also put together a time elapsed video with his Gnome Cam which takes pictures one every five minutes. He posted it to Google Video.  I included it below.

I wanted to post a few interesting thoughts real quick on what I noticed about the CodeMash conference that made it different for me.  When you go to a conference a lot of the time you know who is going to be there.  If it is a PHP conference, for the most part those that are heavily into PHP are going to be there.  The same can be said for Java conferences, Microsoft conferences and so on.  

People From Different Walks Of Life

When I was putting together my Who’s Who post for CodeMash it hit me why it was so different.  I suddenly realized there was no other conference where you would see so many people from so many different backgrounds and technologies in one area.  If I would have explored more I could have gotten lots more pictures of names from different areas that would have surprised you.  As I was putting together my post on who was there this really became apparent.  Even though the attendees were from different backgrounds, everyone was extremely open to learn.  If there was anything to take away from several of the keynotes it was learning how the other half lives is a good thing.

No Buses and No Shuttles

The other thing that made the CodeMash so different was where it was held.  For larger conferences you are going to stay in a hotel.  The hotel may be 5 minutes away or 25 minutes away, or as it was in Boston at Tech Ed, an hour away.  At very large events where you stay in a hotel you really have to plan your day.  Going back to the hotel could cost you several hours.  Sometimes you really want to go back to the hotel to either clean up or drop off swag or your laptop before a social event in the evening starts.  CodeMash made this so easy I took it for granted over and over and over.  The organizers booked the speakers as close to the conference as they could and it honestly took 30 seconds to walk from my room to the conference.  Wow, that was awesome.  For others that were in other areas of the resort, they were only a minute or two away.

I Never Left The Building

Once we arrived at the Kalahari Resort we never left.  Not even once.  There was plenty of things to do, places to eat, and more.  If you don’t believe me, check out this video posted by Alexey Govorin where the attendees are trying to surf in the water park.  And for those wondering, this is the video I was showing at the end of the conference on the screen.  It was great to just stay in one place and not have to travel around in taxi rides, buses, subways, etc.

I got the rest of the pictures updated on the who’s who at CodeMash post.  Even if you saw it previously, you probably will want to check it out again as it changed considerably.

CodeMash kicked off this morning with Neal Ford doing his keynote on Domain-Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm.  Neal presented some very interesting explanations of DSL types such as Waffle house having their own domain specific language when ordering hash browns:  covered, smothered, chunked, etc.  The idea behind domain specific language is we as humans describe complex abstractions in domain specific languages.   Yet a lot of developers don’t translate their domain specific language to the problem they are trying to solve.  Neal gave several examples of this in Java and C# where he created a Car object in code one way, and then applied DSL to the code which made it easier to understand, even for someone that doesn’t know how to read code.  Very interesting.

A lot of Neal’s talk was built around Ruby on Rails and Ruby because of the lack of syntax in the language is great for domain specific languages.  Lastly he went on to talk about Language Workbenches.   Checkout his slide deck which will be posted to CodeMash if you aren’t at the conference.

He’s almost done and I have to present on Smart Clients next so I’m off to get setup.  More to follow later on.  Stay tuned. 

I had sort of an epiphany tonight while I was watching an interview of Scott Guthrie on Channel 9.  Scott is “the” guy when it comes to all of the tools Microsoft produces for developers such as the CLR, IIS, Visual Studio, LINQ, WPF, ASP.Net etc.  There were a couple of things that jumped out at me during the interview that made me start to put together a puzzle that I think is right around the corner which could overtake the buzz of the iPhone.  Stay with me on this one as I explain my thought process.  In the end I’ll get to the point, see if you agree.

#1: WPF/E

Before I get into the interview with Scott that released this epiphany, let me explain what WPF/E is for those that don’t know.  It is important to understand this before we move on.  It stands for Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere.  The first part, WPF, is the graphics engine which is running in Vista that allows developers to write cutting edge user interfaces for their applications.   Instead of me telling you all of the technical details, take a look at a new application from Yahoo! that is leveraging WPF, their new Yahoo! Messenger.  Here is a video of the application to give you an idea what is possible with very little effort on the developer part.  WPF is very important because it is going to allow developers to push the envelope of their applications in terms of user interface.  Things that were technically impossible are now a reality.  The Everywhere part at the end takes the graphic engine and ports it to the web so developers can extend the richness of WPF into the browser.  Hopefully this makes sense because it is important to understand this in order to get where I am going.

During Scott’s interview he talked about WPF/E.  The first thing that jumped out at me was when Scott mentioned the fact they are working on C# for other platforms.  Rory, the interviewer, was caught off guard by Scott even stating this and asked if he wanted to cut the comment from the video and Scott declined.  Obviously this is a huge insight into where things might be going.  We are already seeing some of the efforts of this with WPF/E  running on different browsers such as Firefox as well as Safari on a Mac.  As Scott said, the same code base works on the different platforms so a developer can write C# for their WPF/E application that runs inside of a browser and it will in fact run on the Mac.  Being able to write once and run on different platforms is huge and it is probably coming.  With that said, now onto part two.

#2: WPF/E Is Only 1MB

The second thing that jumped out at me during the interview was the fact that the download to enable WPF/E in Safari is only 1MB.  I think that is pretty impressive, especially seeing some of the stuff that has already been built with the CTP release of WPF/E.   So if we take #1 and #2, add them together what do we have?

WPF/E + 1MB Download = Mobile Eye Candy

The fact that WPF/E is only a 1MB download got me to thinking and then it hit me.  Here is the “epiphany” part.  If WPF/E is only a 1MB download and it will run on lots of platforms Microsoft probably has the same plan for their mobile devices.   If that is the case, Microsoft is in a position to provide developers with the tools they need to create visually stunning mobile applications using WPF/E that will rival the iPhone in terms of eye candy.  All the pieces of the puzzle are in place for this to happen.  For me, the difference in current Windows Mobile devices and the new iPhone is just about eye candy.  Pocket PC devices have had touch screens for a long time as well as phones so this is nothing new.  However, what Apple has done with the iPhone is spend lots of time on the form factor and interface of the device.

Pocket PC Phones With WPF/E

Today Pocket PC phones do everything the iPhone does in terms of features (mail, videos, music, web surfing, sync contacts, calendar, etc) and even do things that the iPhone isn’t planning on doing, games.  Another difference between the two is the rich development platform Microsoft has built around its mobile line.  In typical Apple closed proprietary fashion, Steve Jobs announced yesterday that nothing will be installed on the iPhone unless Apple wants it to be there.   Closing the iPhone from developers and custom applications.  This is yet another reason the Windows Mobile platform is going to thrive because corporate America can adopt, customize and grow their mobile force.   Or anybody else for that matter.

Apple spent a lot of time on the interface of their phone.  The difference in the current offerings in Windows Mobile devices and the iPhone boils down to the software interface.  This is where WPF/E could play a major role in the future to combat the UI of the iPhone.  As Jobs pointed out during his keynote, the best interface is software.

This is all total speculation of course on my part, but imagine a Pocket PC phone running WPF/E.  Imagine all that would be possible.   If we are able to get WPF/E running on mobile devices with a touch screen things could really get crazy in the mobile space.  Of course Microsoft will come up with some very uncool name for it I’m sure but in the end this could be the response the Windows Mobile space needs to get an edge over the iPhone’s user interface.

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