BloomingVision

Hot! ...when will the 90/180 day key be available for Blend, Aug.P? My 'trial' is about to expire.   

WOW, the "Mixed-Type" technology sounds..... amazing. Did that make it into Orcas? Or, 3.5 I assume is the .NET release for Oracas? How does the managed runtime handle things like free/delete's, etc in the mixed typing scenario? Would I need to manually remove those or does it catch the call to free and handle it differantly? I would assume that I need to recompile against a 3.5 SDK to get this functionality, will any code changes be required?

In thinking about how you would do this in a way that doesnt require you to hack the entire os/stack... It sounds like the managed runtime would be starting up "native" processes in a Native-VM within the Managed VM? And then the new/malloc/free/delete's are handled by that VM and proxied out to the Managed VM? Do you find that introducing GC enhances performance? I would imagine it would since you dont have to free with respect to an accessible stack (i.e. freeing a series of objects outside the loop as opposed to handling each near the end of the loop).

Could the Quake II stuff run inside Rotor? I think it would be interesting to step through this and view the cross-system behaviour.

This is awesome. I am and have been amazed at the level of innovation coming out of Microsoft over the last five years. I keep telling other developers that I know about the stuff you guys are doing and no one seems to really 'get' it. It seems like the 'stack' of all these great things is emerging as a cohesive whole for which you now have a platform to build amazing things like popfly. I would imagine that projects like this would only accelerate as the knowledge and creative ideas around what can be done with these new technologies begins to proliferate throughout the company.

But honestly, not only would I say that Microsoft is the most innovative tech company currently on the block but, it's the most open which of course is key in accelarating and securing the adoption of the platform. I'm vaguely aware of things Apple and Google are working on only because I know a few people that love to talk about things that are 'Top Secret'. The first Core Animation Beta is set to release in about 3 weeks and still the major peice of information is a marketing video of a "3D Photo-Domino". I think by the same time in WPF's history there had been nearly a year of CTP's, ton's of docs, articles, blogs from the developers and evangilists on all major aspects of the platform and even a book on the market. This is why I hate to see Apple gain market share... I dont want to have to be in the unforunate position of having to design and write apps for a company that's run like the CIA when it comes to releasing developer oriented information.

The wiki-doc is interesting. Have you guys thought about opening both that and the general docs via public resolvable URI's... ideally if it there was a RDF like concept predicate (i.e. something like a SPARQLish "<doc-uri> <contains-concept> <http://ms.com/concepts/wpf-3d>")... you could do a lot of cool things with that.

-Brian

Cool interview. I will be getting the book but, not the goat.

I think it's good to harc back to the unmanged world once in a while. I havent lived in the land of native since around 2001 but, recently I did a project in C++ and ran into an annoying problem in creating a BSTR from a string that was already in a BSTR-esque format (Apparently Apple has something similiar that they propogate to their Windows APIs). Embarassingly and much to my dismay, it took about 3 days to solve what should have/would have been nearly obvious and instant (although I wasnt able to use a debugger, it was a plugin). But the entire time it felt somewhat like I had a labotomy (or, what I imagine a labotomy must be like), dazed and confused.

-Brian A.