I am now getting Beta 1 of Windows 7! I just noticed it on MSDN. Outstanding. I have a few computers I will be putting this on.

UPDATE – DON’T DO THIS FIX AS IT WORKED FOR ONLY A SHORT WHILE. IT RETURNED BACK TO THE SAME PROBLEM AS BEFORE. YOU CAN DO THIS TO TURN YOUR ZUNE OFF FOR THOSE THAT ARE REPORTING HEATING PROBLEMS, ETC.

UPDATE 2 – It seems this update will work if you want to use your Zune for a short while. It has to do with the clock on the Zune it seems. You can do this and it will work, but once you plug it into charge in your computer – it will fail again.

UPDATE 3 – Microsoft has posted their fix: http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm. You need to wait till after noon Jan 1 2009 to use your device.

------------------------------

If your 30GB Zune is a brick --- here is what I did to fix the problem. Please be advised that I am just telling you what I did and I am in no way responsible for you messing up your own Zune if you did what I mentioned here!

So, I posted earlier today about this. If you own a 30GB Zune, it probably turned into a brick today and just shows the startup screen and nothing else. None of the buttons will work and there is no way to turn it off. To fix this problem, you will have to first open the Zune case.

STEP 1 – Open the Zune case

You will need to get a small flat-headed screwdriver and pop off the black plastic item that surrounds the area where you plug in your Zune. Once you pop this off, you will then find two small screws. You will need a small screwdriver (obviously) so if you have a screwdriver for glasses or something – then this would work. Once you have the screws out – you can then pop off the cover (the top part will come off last).

Opening it up, you will find two battery connections at the top of the Zune.

STEP 2 – Disconnect battery connections

You will need to move these up. Start with the left one and move it up till it is half-way disconnected. Then do the same to the right side. Your connection will be something like the following:

Wait at least three seconds and then you will want to reconnect them by pushing down on these connections.

From here – reattach the case cover. You will notice that your Zune as rebooted and will now work.

Hope that helps.

Well, according to Neowin.net, Windows 7 Beta 1 will be released on January 7th, 2009. I think the "7" for the date might be there for a reason! :) Microsoft released an Alpha version of Windows 7 to the attendees of PDC this year, but it was missing the new skin that we will see in Windows 7. I have been rather down on Vista (as many others were) as I could only use it for my book writing, but was unable to effectively use Vista for my normal work at Thomson Reuters for many reasons not worth going into at this moment. But I have to say, I have been running Windows 7 on "bare-metal" now since PDC and I am convinced that this is the OS! It is fast, great on performance, and very user friendly.

I was rather disappointed that the PDC build wasn't the fancy that was presented at the keynotes of PDC - but there was a promise to attendees that there would be a version of the OS that would be there for us in Q1 2009. When someone says that, you automatically think March 31st, 2009 --- so I am REALLY glad to see this potential January 7th date.

This weekend, I had some free time, and what does every developer do with this free time - I went to my TechEd 2008 DVDs to watch some sessions. But in loading the DVDs, I realized that they wouldn't work as I thought. I was only getting a reminder that I needed to install the Beta 2 version of Silverlight (the RTM of Silverlight 2 is out now).

Tim Heuer put up a nice blog post stating a solution to the problem and he also has a little Silverlight application on his page that allows you to search the sessions.

Basically, you will need to just Explorer the DVD and get to the folder of the session that you want. Within the folder, you will find a Player.wms file. Opening this file will open the session for you in an skinned instance of Windows Media Player. You can also find a list of all the sessions (so you can translate the cryptic session codes) here.

Presentation by Anders Hejlsberg.

It is 10 years later since they started C#

C# 1.0 was about introducing the general concept of managed code. C# 2.0 was about finishing C# 1.0 but didn't have time to do.

C# 3.0 is really about radical new thinking in the language - LINQ. They learned a lot about functional programming through this exercise. Today is about C# 4.0.

Some of the trends that have shaped their thinking on C# 4.0.

• Declarative
• Dynamic - resurgence of dynamic programming languages
• Concurrent - multi-core processing

Declarative programming. When we write programs today about what we want done and how we want it done. JIT compilers have a big issue figuring out what the developer actually wants to do so it works through everything step by step.

C# is about moving to a more declarative style of programming.

Dynamic vs Static programming languages

• Dynamic languages
  • Simple and succinct
  • Implicitly typed
  • Meta-programming
  • No compilation
• Static languages
  • Robust
  • Performant
  • Intelligent tools
  • Better scaling

Concurrency - Moore's Law has delivered what it said - every 18 months of increased density. CPU has fallen flat and hasn't kept up with this since heat has become an issue. The thing that is interesting about the multi-core revolution - separating a logical set of work into multiple sets of work. This doesn't mean that you just make everything work in parallel. There are some important consequences that you are going to have to be aware of.

Co-Evolution - there are no differences between the users of VB and C#. We are going to co-evolve the languages going forward. This means that if we introduce the features in one - then we will work hard to make that feature available in the other.

C# 4.0 - the broad theme for this release is Dynamic Programming. Talking to things that have no static .NET classes backing them. This could be JavaScript, REST services, things that don't feel integrated into the language. Things that don't have a schema.

C# 4.0

• Dynamically typed objects
• optional and named parameters
• improved COM interoperability
• Co- and Contra- variance for interface and delegate types

.NET Dynamic Programming

• Dynamic Language Runtime - something we have been building. The DLR extends the CLR fabric to allow dynamic languages to run on the top of .NET. Optimizations on poll-side caching.
• On top of the DLR, we are building implementations on top of IronPython, IronRuby, and others
• We will have an Object Binder and a JavaScript Binder, Python Binder, Ruby Binder, and a COM Binder - the DLR will provide a unified view of working with all of these environments

Dynamically Typed Objects

Calculator calc = GetCalculator();
int sum = calc.Add(10, 20);

What if you didn't know what was being returned by the GetCalculator() method?

C# 4.0:

dynamic calc = GetCalculator();
int sum = calc.Add(10, 20);

• Statically typed to be dynamic
• Provides dynamic conversion
• Dynamic method invocation

Anders asked if he is crazy as he promoted against this in the past. The reality is that there are many things out there that are dynamic in nature, that have no schema, that have dynamic entry points in the cloud. There is lots of dynamism in the world. We are trying to more natively integrate this into the language.

You can declare things whose compile time type is dynamic

dynamic x = 1;
dynamic y = "Hello";
dynamic z = new List<int> {1, 2, 3};

IDynamicObject - new interface in .NET 4.0

Possible to write your own dynamic objects - you can create your own interpretations of dealing with dynamic objects.

Optional and Named Parameters - It is now possible to specify default values in method declaration.

public StreamReader OpenTextFile(string path, Encoding encoding = null);

This improves COM interoperability. Instead of ref missing, ref missing, ref missing ... etc ... you can just pass in what you need - doc.SaveAs("Test.docx");

Improved COM Interoperability

• Automatic object --> dynamic mapping
• Optional and named parameters
• Indexed properties
• Optional "ref" modifier
• Interop type embedding ("No PIA")

Last new feature is co- and contra- variance

string[] string = GetStromgArray();
Process(strings);

void Process(object[] objects) {
   objects[0] = "Hello"; // OK
   objects[1] = new Button(); // Exception

C# 4.0 supports safe co- and contra- variance Until now, C# generics have been invariant.

Variance in C# 4.0

• Supported for interface and delegate types
• "Statically checked definition-site variance"
• Value types are always invariant
  • IEnumerable<int> is not IEnumerable<object>
  • Similar to existing rules for arrays
• refs and out parameters need invariant type

These changes will have no effect on existing code

Preview of beyond C# 4.0 -------

Stuff in the lab that MSFT will ship as soon as they can.

"Compiler as a Service"
Currently: Source File --> Compiler --> .NET Assembly

This is written in C++ (as C# didn't exist yet). You have no options of interacting with the compiler. MSFT wants to open up the compiler and interact with it in a better way.

Possibilities - meta programming, etc. Microsoft.CSharp will be an API that you can use in your API. This is the C# compiler written in C#.

I would like to first thank the academy .....

Thanks to Oracle and the award as the Oracle Enterprise Developer of the Year for 2008. This was announced today in Oracle magazine.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/08-nov/o68awards.html

This was about using ODP.NET and Oracle to develop and deliver top-of-the-line .NET financial applications. At Thomson Reuters, I work for Lipper, and we are using an Oracle backend system that gets its data delivered via a set of WCF services to a series of smart client applications and other offerings.

This session is by Scott Hunter, Program Manager at MSFT

In July 2007 - ASP.NET Futures was released
That was followined by an Extensions Preview of ASP.NET 3.5 in Dec 07
Then in March 08 - we started doing some new stuff - ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC and more

The ASP.NET will continue to release out-of-bound items. CodePlex is the main driver for that. www.codeplex.com/aspnet - This is where you will find the interim drops.

Currently there are ~1,000 downloads today

If you want to see all the latest and greatest stuff (current) then this is the site to visit.

• VS10 supports multi-targeting
• Use VS10 Advances when developing against FX4.0 or FX3.5
• FX4.0 maintains a high compatibility bar with FX 3.5 - if you migrate from 3.5 to 4.0 - you should not have a breaking release.
• ASP.NET investments include rollup of 'out-of-band' features

4.0 Themes

• Best platform for standards (CSS, HTML, Ajax
• Is a great LOB platform
• Support pattern based development models - MVC and TDD
• Re-invest in the core ASP.NET as well
• Investment in Web Forms, Core Infrastructure, MVC, Data and Dynamic Data, and Ajax

Web Forms

• Developers can manage control IDs that affect rendered client ID
• Remove ID bloat, and 'mangling'
• CSS:
• Ideally remove the need to use CSS adapters
• Defer to CSS styles and bypass existing style properties
• non-inline style attributes
• Support non-table-based HTML rendering
• URL-routing for web forms
• Friendly url handling for web forms
• configuration model for url routing
• View state
• Disable on the page, enable on specific controls - they will provide granular control of viewstate - today it is backwards
• Disable on control, enable on child controls
• GridView/ListView work better without viewstate
• ASP.NET dynamic-data

Ajax

• Continue ASP.NET Ajax innovation : RIA
• Appeal to JavaScript Developers
• Provide support for the page developer
• jQuery including Intellisense
• Templates and data binding
• Client side handling, REST or Web Services
• Covers page developer and component developer scenarios
• DOM manipulation, selectors ...
• Ajax higher-level components
• Ajax Control Toolkit is a part of the strategy - they will make the toolkit part of the overall ASP.NET package
• New controls
• Centralized script libraries and break-up for performance

ASP.NET MVC

• Appeal to those wanting separation of concerns, TDD, full control
• Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP
• Building on from ASP.NET MVC 1.0
• ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller)
• Asynchronous controllers
• Sub-controllers & Views
• Declarative controls

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

• Making building data-driven web apps easily
• Attacking the Ruby on Rails crowd
• Building on from FX3.5 SP1
• Dynamic-data and MVC
• Scaffolding, templates and data validation
• Support for abstract data layer
• Removes need for specific DL (SQL, entities ...)
• Allows scaffolding of objects
• Support for many to many relationships
• Dynamic data on MVC -- this is on codeplex today
• Built around something called field templates
• Enhanced filtering:
• Auto-complete, search filters

I need to check out Astoria data source controls --- cool demo.

ASP.NET Core

• Address customer pain points
• Improve scale and performance
• Cache extensibility and performance:
• Enable caching like Velocity