LOS ANGELES--After spending much of Tuesday in the clouds, the second day of the Professional Developers Conference on Wednesday is expected to be far more grounded.
On tap is a discussion of the Office 2010 beta as well as the first details on Internet Explorer 9, although Microsoft is not providing code. Microsoft is also talking about Silverlight 4 and releasing a beta of that product.
8:30 a.m. PT: Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky takes the stage.
Sinofsky said that Microsoft approaches Windows 7 like building a movie theater. Microsoft's job is to provide "great seats, great sounds and maybe a concession stand" while developers make the actual movies.
Although developers were interested in hearing about IE 9, the most popular part of Steven Sinofsky's talk was when he announced that paid PDC attendees were getting a free Windows 7 laptop.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)8:35 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is talking about the Windows 7 development process from before the code was publicly released through beta testing and release.
He's hitting on familiar refrains--trying to be more predictable, talking about features only when they are fully baked, and all of the "telemetry" Microsoft uses to get automated feedback.
Sinofsky is talking about the different mechanisms Microsoft uses from Windows Error Reporting, or Watson, to its Software Quality Monitor. Sinofsky notes that the monitoring tools require the user's permission in the final versions of Windows.
During the beta process, though, "we opt you in automatically," he says. (Not to quibble, but technically that's known as opt-out.)
Semantics aside, the shift to automated feedback has had a major impact on the way Windows is developed. In the past, Sinofsky said, bugs got fixed, in large part, based on "whoever screamed the loudest."
Sinofsky said it was basically "testosterone-based bug fixing."
With automated mechanism, Microsoft can see which problems are affecting the most people most often.
8:40 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is sharing some numbers about the Windows 7 beta.
Microsoft got 1.7 million feedback reports, or one feedback report every 10 seconds in the first two weeks after beta. There were 8.1 million installations of the beta, including 4.3 million installations of the release candidate.
There were 10.4 million error reports, which resulted in 4,753 code changes. The start menu was clicked 514 million times in the past six months, while the new Aero Snap and Shake features were clicked 46.4 million times during the same period.
8:45 a.m. PT: Sinofsky is talking about usability studies Microsoft does to test new features, and showing some examples of user feedback on the User Account Control dialog box.
First up, is a mother of a 5 year old who said that when she finally gets time to sit at the computer she'd rather not be interrupted. Instead, she suggested it would be better if there was a place she could go to find all the messages (not too different from the action center eventually included in Windows 7).
Now he's showing some testing of the Aero Snap and Aero Shake features that help manage multiple open windows.
"Get on down... I like that," said one user.
8:50 a.m. PT: If you haven't already, check out CNET's Ray Ozzie interview that posted this morning.
8:53 a.m. PT: Sinofsky brings out Mike Angiulo, who heads up Microsoft's dialogue with the "ecosystem"--folks like PC makers, software, and hardware developers.
He shows off Sony's super-thin, super-light Vaio X. I'm playing around with a demo model of this machine. People are really amazed with this computer. It's so light, some of the people I've shown it to could barely believe it was real.
Microsoft thought it would be good to learn how a laptop is made. It worked with Acer to build a 3.79 pound laptop with multi-touch, preloaded Office, etc.
"It was great for us as members of the ecosystem," Sinofsky said. The best news for those at PDC-- they are making the laptop available to paid PDC attendees for free.
That got the crowd excited. "Not this one, this one is mine," Sinofsky said, clutching the one he is showing off.
The laptops won't be ready for pick-up until 12:30 though. I encourage you to stay here for the rest of the talk."
9:08 a.m. PT: Talk shifts to Internet Explorer.
"There's a balance between standards and real-world," Sinofsky said.
Sinofsky talks about where Microsoft is headed with Internet Explorer 9.
We're about three weeks into the Internet Explorer 9 development, he says.
Sinofsky acknowledges some areas Microsoft needs to do better. One is the Acid 3 benchmark, IE 8 got 20 out of 100 on that test, while IE 9 is at 32 out of 100.
Performance, particularly JavaScript performance, is another area. He shows WebKit.org's SunSpider benchmark which shows IE 9 in the same ballpark as test versions of other leading browsers. Earlier versions of IE performed much worse on SunSpider than other browsers.
"We're getting very close to basically being a wash," Sinofsky said.
9:14 a.m. PT: Sinofsky shows another feature of IE 9--the ability to easily do rounded corners.
More importantly, the IE 9 rendering engine will shift text and graphics rendering to the graphics chip. That allows smoother text and faster performance. Although some browsers shift a bit of 3D work to the graphics processing units in PCs, Microsoft says IE is the first to tap hardware acceleration for standard text and graphics.
Sinofsky shows a few examples, including Bing Maps, where unaccelerated graphics rendered 14 frames per second, while hardware acceleration in IE 9 allowed upwards of 60 frames per second.
Geek detail: The IE logo on the taskbar for IE 9 was gray, as opposed to the blue logo of IE 8.
9:26 a.m. PT: Developer Division head Scott Guthrie on stage talking about Silverlight and Silverlight 4.
Priorities for the next version include improved media features, such as access to Webcams and microphones on a PC and output protection for those with premium content.
Developer Division head Scott Guthrie followed Stephen Sinofsky on stage on Wednesday, showing off some of the features of Silverlight 4.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)Guthrie demos a photo booth application, including video and still capture as well as different pixel shader effects, such as a crayon filter. The technology probably allows a lot more, but Apple fanboys would be right to point to the photo booth application on the Mac (though this is a concept app and Silverlight 4 is browser-based technology, not a desktop application).
Another focus for Silverlight 4 is improving Silverlight outside the browser.
9:37 a.m. PT: Guthrie's having a little trouble with some of the Silverlight demos, showing IIS server's support for creating iPhone-capable video.
"If someone is backstage and wants to kick the browser, feel free to," Guthrie said. "We'll try one more time."
9:40 a.m. PT: Guthrie is talking some of the technical features of Silverlight 4, including a new text editor that supports Roman fonts, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, and Kanji, among other alphabets.
9:45 a.m. PT: Guthrie shows a Silverlight-based video jigsaw puzzle. Turns out it is a video of the infamous Rick Astley video. "You've all been rickrolled," Guthrie said.
Also, for those who want to see the IIS smooth streaming on iPhone demo that Guthrie struggled to get working, it is on the Web here.
9:50 a.m. PT: It's getting code-heavy now, as Microsoft demos how to create Silverlight stuff in Visual Studio 2010. Meanwhile, there's some more detail on Microsoft's IE 9 plans in this blog post.
9:55 a.m. PT: Microsoft hasn't started talking about the Office 2010 beta yet, but it looks like you can start getting it from Microsoft's Web site.
10:04 a.m. PT: Still no Office talk on stage, but the beta is live and Microsoft has posted an article noting that Office Mobile 2010 is also in beta and available for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones via the Windows Mobile Marketplace.
The beta also adds an Outlook Social Connector, which allows users to bring in Windows Live and other social networking feeds into Outlook. LinkedIn is the first that will take advantage of it--early next year--but there is a software development kit for others to do so.
10:15 a.m. PT: The beta of Silverlight 4 is now available for download, Guthrie says. The final release is due in the first half of next year.
10:17 a.m. PT: Office unit senior vice president Kurt DelBene is introduced to talk about Office 2010.
10:20 a.m. PT: DelBene talking about efforts to bring Office not just to the desktop, but also via hosted services.
By the way, while I've been live blogging, we've also posted a story and photo gallery looking at the Windows Azure data center container that is on display at the PDC show floor.
10:35 a.m. PT: DelBene notes that the Office 2010 beta is now available, as are betas of the Office Web Apps for businesses as well as office Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5.
"I hope that you will all download (Office 2010)," DelBene said.
As I note in my story on the Office 2010 beta, though, the Web Apps remain in their current Tech Preview form on Windows Live. There's no time frame for when they will get updated to the beta versions, which include Word editing and the OneNote Web app.
10:45 a.m. PT: Lots of Sharepoint demos. Lot's of coding. I'll spare you the details.
Ahead of a broadcasting conference that starts later this week in Amsterdam, Microsoft on Tuesday shared a few new details on the next version of Silverlight.
In particular, Microsoft said the next version of the Adobe Flash rival would support its PlayReady digital rights management technology for offline content. That feature should allow studios to offer extras commonly found on DVD and Blu-ray discs on movies that are distributed digitally, Microsoft said.
Microsoft has not said when the new version--Silverlight 4--will ship. Silverlight 3 was launched in July at an event in San Francisco.
At that time, Microsoft said it is aiming to have Silverlight on half of all Internet-connected devices by next year. That's still a far cry from Adobe's Flash, which is almost ubiquitous on PCs and on a growing number of cell phones as well.
Also on Tuesday, Microsoft said it would release in the next 30 days its Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 3.0, which allows so-called "Live Smooth Streaming" of content. The technology has already been used in beta form since May to offer coverage of events such as the French Open tennis tournament, the Tour de France cycling event, and the Michael Jackson memorial.
The developer of the Moonlight software that enables Silverlight applications to run on Linux computers said on Monday that he is ready to start publicly beta testing an update to the software.
In a blog posting, Miguel de Icaza said the beta of Moonlight 2.0 is available from the gomono.com Web site.
Moonlight 2.0 is aimed at achieving compatibility with sites written for Silverlight 2.0, but incorporates the media pipeline and a few other features of Silverlight 3.0, de Icaza said. Microsoft released Silverlight 3.0 last month.
The beta is available both as source code and as a plug in for the Mozilla browser.
Work on Moonlight first started in 2007, with a beta of the original version released late last year and the final version released in February.
SAN FRANCISCO--By next year, half of all devices connected to the Internet will have Silverlight, says Microsoft's Walid Abu-Hadba.
That will still be just a fraction of the number of phones and computers that have a version of Adobe's Flash, but Abu-Hadba said that it will be enough to really start changing the mindset of those who create content for the Web.
Abu-Hadba
(Credit: Microsoft)"It's a totally different game," said, Abu-Hadba, who leads Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism efforts. Abu-Hadba noted that Microsoft now has a set of features that can appeal to both those streaming large-scale Web video content, as well as software developers aiming to create programs that run inside of businesses.
His comments came following Microsoft's launch Friday of Silverlight 3, the latest version of its technology for rich media applications. The new version allows for programs that work in and out of the browser, supports up to 1080p streaming, and lets users pause and rewind a live video stream.
One of the areas where Microsoft still has work to do is on the phone side. Microsoft has long talked about offering Silverlight on phones, even hoping to bring it to Apple's iPhone, but today it is not commercially available for any phone.
"It's taken a little bit longer than we would have wanted, absolutely," said Abu-Hadba.
However, Abu-Hadba and fellow developer unit executive Scott Guthrie say that Microsoft has also taken the approach that it wants the Silverlight experience on the phone to match that offered on the PC, as opposed to having different versions as Adobe does with Flash. Also, Guthrie said, the landscape for the phone has changed dramatically, with more phones adding the kind of graphics chips necessary to do hardware-based acceleration.
"We want to make sure people have a 'wow' experience," Guthrie said.
Microsoft is beta testing its phone software for both Android and Windows Mobile and announcements are expected at this fall's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.
"You are going to hear a lot more details about it later this year," Guthrie said. (For more on Guthrie's take on Silverlight 3, check out the video embedded below.)
For his part, Abu-Hadba said he doesn't wonder if Silverlight will be around 10 years from now, but rather whether his rival will. He said that Adobe has committed itself to moving from a design-oriented company to one that aims to offer a general purpose Web platform, something he said the company doesn't have the resources or experiences to make happen.
"I don't believe they have the assets or the organizational structure," he said. "That's what we do for a living at Microsoft."
Abu-Hadba said Adobe would be better off picking a specialty and sticking to it.
"I don't think they will exist in 10 years in the form they are today," he said. It's a bold statement, he agreed, but added how unthinkable it would have been to predict in 2000 that Sun Microsystems would go away.
I'm checking in with Adobe. I'm thinking it might have a somewhat different take on the subject.
Microsoft Senior VP S. Somasegar notes that the early posting of Silverlight 3 to the Web was an accident and not a "clever marketing ploy."
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft kicked off its latest effort to challenge Adobe's Flash by launching Silverlight 3 at an event Friday.
The code actually made its debut a little early, hitting the Web on Thursday.
In his opening remarks on Friday, Microsoft Senior Vice President S. Somasegar made reference to Silverlight's premature release.
"I can tell you it wasn't a clever marketing ploy," Somegar said. "It was sort of a small mistake that somebody made and we decided to let it go."
Silverlight still has a long way to go to match Flash's ubiquity, with Adobe's technology found on nearly all PCs and a growing number of cell phones. Microsoft says Silverlight 2 is now on one in three Internet devices. That version launched nine months ago.
Silverlight has had a mixed record in its initial efforts to take streaming business from Adobe's Flash. It has scored key deals to power NBC's 2008 Summer and 2010 Winter Olympics sites.
It also won a deal to power Major League Baseball's Web site, but the league went back to Flash for the 2009 season, blaming stability and other issues, according to sources.
Among the new features in Silverlight 3 are the ability to create Silverlight applications that run outside the browser as well as support for a "smooth streaming" technology that allows video to be streamed at up to 1080p HDTV quality.
Microsoft announced a couple new customers for Silverlight on Friday including MGM which is using it to produce SGU: Stargate Universe site and Continental Airlines, which is remaking its reservation call-center application as a Silverlight application running via a Web browser. NBC also said it will use Silverlight for its high-quality video streaming across its sporting events.
As part of Friday's event, Microsoft also said version 3 of its Expression design tools will be available within the next 30 days. A release candidate version of one component, Expression Blend 3, was posted on Thursday to Microsoft's Web site.
The final version of Silverlight 3 has been released to the Web, a day ahead of the product's launch event in San Francisco.
The release, noted by enthusiast site Neowin, marks Microsoft's latest effort to take on Adobe's Flash.
Microsoft detailed Silverlight 3 at the Mix09 event in March, releasing a beta version of the software.
Among the product's new features is technology that allows the software to utilize a PC's hardware to accelerate graphics processing. It also allows for programs that run outside a browser on both the PC and Mac.
NBC has said it will use Silverlight to broadcast the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver. The technology will allow the Games to be broadcast in 720p HD quality as well as provide a TiVo-like ability to pause and rewind a live stream.
Netflix said on Wednesday that the next version of Silverlight shows some promise in helping ease recent issues that some users have had while trying to stream videos on lower-end computers.
"There are test configurations in our lab where we are seeing an improvement," said Kevin McEntee, vice president of Web development for Netflix. McEntee told CNET News that the company went out and bought computers such as an Asus Netbook that users had said were causing problems. In some cases, the low-end machines weren't able to keep up with the video and were dropping frames, McEntee said.
The next version of Silverlight holds promise, McEntee said, by allowing the load to be shared by the graphics and main processors, whereas the current version puts all the strain on the CPU.
"There was a significant improvement using Silverlight 3," McEntee said. "We think we can run on a wide range of lower-end machines that we don't run (well) on today."
However, those experiencing problems will have to wait a bit. Silverlight 3 just entered beta, with a final release not expected until sometime before the end of the year. A Silverlight 3-based Netflix player would come sometime after that, he said.
"I don't anticipate we would do it until Silverlight 3 is released as a final (version)," he said.
McEntee said that Netflix originally planned to use Silverlight only to create a Mac version of its streaming player, but decided to shift entirely to Silverlight because it lets them offer a single player that works on multiple platforms and on multiple browsers.
The biggest downside, he said, is that many people still don't have Silverlight, meaning customers have to download the program before they can watch their first movie.
"We're waiting for Silverlight to have more and more penetration," McEntee said. "We would love to be able to have (customers) push the blue play button and it just plays."
For now, Netflix is focused on offering streaming video for the PC and television rather than actively working on an option that would also get the content onto cell phones and iPods.
"We don't have any imminent plans for phones or iPods or anything with a smaller screen," said company spokesman Steve Swasey. "At some point--and we haven't said when--we would be interested in getting into other devices."
Microsoft has had a mixed track record with big-name customers for Silverlight. NBC used Silverlight to offer on-demand and live video from the Beijing Olympics. On Wednesday, NBC's Perkins Miller announced at Mix that the network would also be using Microsoft's technology for the 2010 winter games in Vancouver.
Major League Baseball, meanwhile, recently said it was dropping Silverlight for its video service and going with Adobe's Flash.
Microsoft's Scott Guthrie on stage at Mix 09, detailing Silverlight 3.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)LAS VEGAS--After a design-focused beginning, the talk quickly turned techie here at the Mix 09 event once Microsoft corporate VP Scott Guthrie took the stage.
After announcing a few different Web tools (which I'll save for lower down), the discussion shifted to Silverlight and Silverlight 3. Guthrie noted that so far there have been 350 million installations of Silverlight and said Microsoft believes there are now 300,000 developers targeting Silverlight.
Among the new features of Silverlight 3 is the ability to tap a computer's graphics processor to offer hardware acceleration of the video (both PC and Mac). The company is expected to make the beta version of Silverlight 3 available later on Wednesday, with some pieces of the product already having made their way onto the Web. (Update: Microsoft has officially announced the beta of Silverlight 3.)
NBC's Perkins Miller also took the stage to announce that his network will be using Microsoft's Silverlight to offer 720p HD streaming of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The technology will also allow pausing and rewinding of live TV, Miller said.
Before turning to the new version of Silverlight, Guthrie brought out Kevin McEntee vice president of Web Engineering for Netflix. McEntee noted that Netflix started considering Silverlight about a year ago as a way to add support for the Mac and for more browsers.
"Twenty percent of users that wanted to stream Netflix movies couldn't because we weren't on the Macintosh and we weren't on Firefox," McEntee said. In the end, Netflix went all Silverlight for its streaming player because it allowed them to use a single player that can work across multiple browsers and computers.
Another benefit, McEntee said, is the fact that the company doesn't need to do a new installer each time it updates its player. In the past, updates required users to re-install the Netflix application, something that 20 percent of users either could not or would not do. That kept the company from innovating, limiting updates to once a year.
"Every two weeks we are trying something new," McEntee said.
As for the other products, Microsoft announced a new version of its Expression Web tool that includes a "SuperPreview" feature that allows Web designers to see what their page looks like on a variety of browsers--even browsers that are on other platforms, by tapping into a cloud service. Microsoft also made a free standalone version of SuperPreview available to allow users to compare how Web pages render in the three latest versions of Internet Explorer--IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8.
Guthrie also announced a few new details on Windows Azure, reiterating that the final version of the Azure platform is due to launch before the end of 2009. Among the features being added is the inclusion of Fast CGI support, which means Azure will be capable of running PHP applications in addition to those written for Microsoft's .Net.
Update: Guthrie offered a few more details on Silverlight 3. The new version can be used to write programs that run outside the browser on both PCs and Macs. As for timing, Guthrie said the company plans for only a single beta. "We'll ship the final release later this year."
On the Mac front, Microsoft also said that developers will now be able to use Eclipse on Macs to develop Silverlight applications.
Bill Buxton addresses a crowd of Web designers and developers at the Mix 09 conference in Las Vegas.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)LAS VEGAS--To kick off its Mix conference, Microsoft went deep into its bench to find a speaker that could connect with the crowd of Web developers.
Rather than start with a product pitch, Microsoft began the event with a speech from Bill Buxton, a computing pioneer who these days focuses on design for Microsoft research.
Buxton's chat had a very un-Microsoft feel, as he ran back and forth on stage, gesturing wildly and speaking passionately about the need to create better experiences. Buxton encouraged the crowd not to get hung up on programming tools at first, but just sketch their ideas on paper.
"These things are far to important to take seriously," he said. "We need to be able to play."
That's not to say that Buxton wasn't there to tout Microsoft and its products. Indeed, Buxton talked about the growth of design within Microsoft, noting that the company has added user experience staff at twice the rate it is hiring technical people and now has about 800 designers and user experience researchers.
"We're walking the walk," Buxton said.
The product pitch is set to begin shortly, with Scott Guthrie expected to announce the beta of Silverlight 3, pieces of which started showing up on Microsoft's developer site earlier on Wednesday.
LAS VEGAS--Silverlight 3 just couldn't wait to make its appearance here in Vegas.
Microsoft is expected to demonstrate the software later on Wednesday, but pieces of the beta code have already started to make their way on to Microsoft's developer site. As noted by Ars Technica and others, the documentation for Silverlight 3 beta and other supporting bits of code are available on MSDN.
The new version of Microsoft's would-be rival to Adobe's Flash is expected to be a focal point of the first-day keynote here at Microsoft's Mix conference.
I'll be covering the morning keynote speeches from Scott Guthrie and Bill Buxton, and will likely have more to say on Silverlight 3 in just a little bit.
