miseldine

Insightful. I've been looking into the Globus toolkit and the OGSA spec for a while now, and although Microsoft are a sponser of the technologies, they don't seem to be in anyway vocal about Grid computing benefits, unlike IBM for example. This talk highlights many of the benefits Grids hope to achieve...

I know Microsoft are pushing the service-oriented Business Framework, which deals with some grid-esque functionality, but is the Globus vision something Microsoft still subscribes to?

Thanks for the info guys. Just the focus I wanted to hear!

-one happy Channel 9 viewer

Any impressions on Sun's Looking Glass project? I remember seeing it, thinking "wow! that's so cool!" then imagining trying to find my windows in 3D space when I seem to loose them in plain old 2D...nevermind worrying about which way around they are or at what angle

It'll be interesting to read (or see!) the practical applications of 3D on the desktop from your Shell team.

On a quick note about WinForms, its certainly great technology (reminded me of Delphi), but why didn't it ship with the controls to build modern GUIs which users of XP, Office 2003 etc. start to feel comfortable with? I've had to use 3rd party controls to achieve standard functionality like icons in menus. It was something that really frustrated me, so will XAML etc. make UI development more open to any leaps in UI functionality (I'm thinking of, say XP sidebars)?

"whether Avalon will be the technology that Microsoft uses to replace the Web"

What extent do those involved in Longhorn (or marketing) etc. believe uptake to be? I think questions like the above are totally dependent on who actually has the technology on their box.

Do you see business, the home, or both, craving to shift to Longhorn as quickly as possible (say, like the Windows 95 launch, where even our newspapers ran front page adverts for 95) or do you see a more skeptical and more cautious audience to slowly win around?

Interesting video btw. added some clarity to the future

Can anyone say why product development can't be more of an iterative process, with new features and updates being introduced bit by bit rather than in large, one-off releases? I'm thinking here specifically of Visual Studio.NET, where we've received very little in terms of fixes and improvements for several years now. And when we did, it was packaged as a new edition, with a new box, or a new upgrade CD.

In the "old" days (i.e. before the explosion of the Internet), it still made sense to push new releases which would appear in our local computer stores. Nowadays however, we have the ability to distribute software via the Internet, so the physical limitations are reduced.

Once new features are tested and available, out they go to the world. Doesn't this make sense? But, at the same time, would a progressive approach also cause compatibility problems, and general confusion? Not to mention deployment issues, where a new feature X could rely on feature Y which can't be shipped because feature Z doesn't work on machines with feature A (I ran out of letters!)? 

Any thoughts, as always, gratefully received