Gabor Ratky

You can queue up your tweets if you don't mind them going out later. A UI reload will happen anyways if you move between continents. AutoTweets get queued up for instance so you're in control whether you want them to go out.

Let me just say basically, that I said 'exactly' exactly 427 times (no, I did not count it. yet.)

for those who not only want to build addons with addon studio but also want to work with MPQ, BLP or FrameXML files and code away, go over to codeplex and leverage as much as you can and let us know if you have any questions!

GertD,

I am looking at the CTP of the GDR right now, but before I dive into, I wanted to specifically ask about better support for CI and not just using Team Build.

I had a day of issues with the OTB VS2008 Database Edition project type on a build machine that had TeamCity running. Most disturbing was the requirement of the registry key for the user that was running MSBuild for the design DB. I have found forum threads discussing this and workarounds that can work but it was still a hassle and without innate knowledge of MSBuild (and sometimes even Reflector ), this would be really hard.

I'm now considering moving up to SP1 Beta1 and your June CTP and hope for the best, willing to spend another half day being bleeding edge but I still wanted to get the half-technical/half-marketing answer from you on what can we expect in the future.

Here are my current pain points:

 - No simple deployment of MSBuild targets, GAC assemblies (Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data[.Tasks].dll), etc. on build agents. Had to install VS2008 on my build box, even though I wanted to avoid that.
 - No way to configure the DB server instance name for the DesignDB through MSBuild properties, registry keys are super ugly under HKCU when my build agent is running under some obscure non-interactive user account. I know this is going away, but is the end-to-end story going to be better.
 - MSBuild error messages shouldn't point me to the build properties tab in VS and I wouldn't want to rely on generated .dbproj.user files just to be able to figure out what am I missing.

oh and most importantly, what is the timeframe for the RTM GDR? Can I expect it to be released 1-2 weeks max after SP1 RTM or maybe even earlier?

Thanks,
Gabor

Good luck Dan @ Channel9! How about that AddOn Studio for WoW Channel9 video now?

kettch wrote:

I haven't watched the video yet, but I cheered out loud when I saw Anders. He's just cool.


Yeah, that might have been kind of creepy. I'm done now.

I did the same and laughed out loud when I read your post. Way to go Anders!

It was really interesting to hear Anders talk about intentional programming and what he thinks the core problems are. I think the 'common building blocks / baseline' that are missing between domain-specific expression is what might be the biggest issue. A friend of mine also made an interesting notion on how there is no exact notion of what 'debugging' would mean in an environment like this. Would you debug on the concrete level? Would you try to debug on the abstracted, problem-class solving level? I'm not even sure what that would mean.

It will be really interesting to see where this goes.

and re: functional languages, just take a look at python, ruby, boo, F# getting into the .NET ecosystem. The common building blocks are all in place and it will be really cool to be able to not just choose between general purpose, imperative languages for problem solving but between classes os languages, such as functional languages and combine those with existing and well-known methodologies.

It's a fun time to be a developer / engineer

As I expected, most of my questions were answered by Blaise. My other question is that are you already leveraging the 1.0 final draft of WMP (Windows Media Photo)? Not sure what is available in that space today..

If you are planning to really publish an API for all this technology (something I didn't expect), create well-designed PIOs (Primary Interop Assemblies) for the API. Well, if you don't then I will and push it out into the public commons but still, sometimes I am shocked at how different groups at MSFT design COM APIs in 2006 with absolutely NO consideration in regards to how that would work and interoperate in a managed environment. Even if the COM API uses constructs often used in the unmanaged world such as in/out parameters, shared buffers, etc., it is not a hard work to come up with a nice wrapper / interop class. Been there, done that.

Anyways, can't wait to see this in action and see how it deals with spaces that are not as wide and open as St Peter's. How would this work with an apartment that is put up for rent? 5mpx images for all rooms, all details. I bet you thought about that too.

The technology is amazing but I would like to see some proof that this works in real-life circumstances too (I have not seen this c9 video yet, sorry if blaise explained it all )

My questions:

 - How does photosynth deal with different light conditons? Not only day and night (which is fine, you can have two 'worlds' one is day, other is night) but 11am and 5pm.. Clouds and sunshine, rain and snow, wear and tear. Paintjob and graffitis.
 - How much work is put on the user to group the right photos together?
 - What cluster do you think would make the most sense for a global database of 'photosynth space'? Country? City? District? etc? You are not going to match all pictures in the world against all.. are you?
 - As a research company, when are you publishing the algorithms used to match pictures together?
 - Is the demo WPF based? (I see DirectX mentioned with seadragon so maybe not. Whe are you not yet on the WPF bandwagon? )

that's all for now. Blaise, I couldn't find a biography of you, although I saw your work related to the Gutenberg Bible.. So cool what technology enables. Probably the Princeton Physics and Applied Math background helps Were your born in the US or in Europe?

Gabor

I love the poster behind Anders:

B#
C#
J#
I#

Stay #

He is the best.. Awesome video, I can't wait to throw out my O/R mapper of choice.. I would be curious how the developers of NHibernate feel now.. NH 1.0 has just been released but has no support of C# 2.0, such as generics and man, I've grown grey hair using NH.. LINQ is the way to go.

Gabor

I only watched 14 minutes of the interview but I already want to post here, although my questions might be answered later on I haven't looked at Monad deeply since Beta2, I only saw the PDC demonstration which of course had new stuff since the last Channel9 video but didn't satisfy my hunger for more

Jeffrey, you talk a lot about LINQ and Anders Hejlsberg's efforts with the 'future'. It seems to me you imagine those concepts to be an integral part of Monad and how we will use Cmdlets and Providers / Provided Objects.. Does that mean Monad will be a C# 3.0 based platform? Are you now bridging the gap between C# 2.0 and the 3.0 features with an infrastructure that revolves around MshObjects or as you call it, synthetic objects? Or is C# 3.0 that close? I remember Anders talking about bringing the basic concepts of data access into the language and how data access should change a long time ago. I can't wait to look at LINQ as I've grown grey hair using O/R mappers although I'm young enough to not grow grey hair just yet

Did you ever think of bringing Monad to not just the IT Pro crowd but to anybody who wants to do automation on Windows? I would love to see Vista have something like Scheduled Tasks is today, running Monad scripts. As I literally already have access to everything through .NET, COM interop, WMI, etc., this will just get even better by us writing Cmdlets for literally everything. I want a Cmdlet that sends SMS. I want a Cmdlet that sends an IM message through Windows Live Messenger and I would love to see some sort of integration of this in Windows Vista, or if not on the consumer side, definitely on the server-side.

Later..