PDC - In a few bullet points

Last week I was at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. It really felt like a huge BorCon. The "geek quotient" was very high :-). There were several high-level themes that permeated the whole conference:

• Windows Azure - "The Cloud." Cloud computing with high-level tooling and initial support for managed code. Will eventually support native code. Meh :-/
• Parallel Computing - "No magic bullet" - As a reminder, Moore's Law is about transistor density not clock speed, folks! Moore's Law is still going strong, only now it is about cramming more cores into the same space. Until the heat/power problem is solved, clock speeds will continue to stall. Now the focus is on doing more things an once. The "free lunch" is over. With the new interest in parallelism and multi-core, classic imperative programming models don't lend themselves to automatic parallelism. In other words, we're a long way from that magic compiler switch called, "make my program parallel and faster." Thus there is a keen interest in data immutability and functional languages (F#, Haskell, ML, Caml, OCaml, etc..) and adding functional programming constructs to existing imperative languages (LINQ, PLINQ). The former is nice for greenfield projects or for portions of an application, but the latter is most likely going to the route taken by the mainstream languages. Consider that the forthcoming C++0x is introducing Lambda expressions, C# has LINQ & PLINQ, and even Delphi is moving in that direction with Prism and Delphi native (LINQ in Prism, anon methods in native).
• Windows 7 - Pay no attention to the Vista in the corner... Look at Windows 7! Admittedly, it does look nice. They've done a lot of homework and are working very hard to "fix" the usability issues with Vista. The Driver Model is remaining largely unchanged from Vista so all the investment in getting good Vista drivers up an going can be preserved. They seemed to hint that much of the perceived "instabilities" of Vista (aside from the usability issues) were due to the extensive reworking of a lot of the driver model, most notably the Video driver model and DX10. A lot of the hardware vendors were just not ready at launch with solid driver support. Apparently, it's getting better and by the time Win7 is released, the hardware vendors will have ironed out those problems. When will it be released? The statements made were "3 years from the general availability of Vista" which puts it into the last half of 2010. I suspect the move back to a version number from years (98, 2000) or names (XP, Vista) is a way of "starting fresh" and shedding some of the negative baggage that is Vista.
• Multi-Touch - Windows 7 will support multi-touch out of the box. They also had a whole bunch of Surface PCs. It is interesting to note that the Surface PC is all vision based using a camera placed underneath the rear projected display, while all the Windows 7 APIs are based on the more traditional touch screen technologies (resistive, capacitive, etc...) WPF will eventually have some "unifying" APIs that will map those two APIs to a common WPF layer. This is not until .NET 4.0, which is apparently after Windows 7 since they keep talking about Windows 7 shipping with .NET 3.5 SP1. No word on native Surface APIs. Windows 7 touch support is all native at the lower level and even has some really nice intrinsic support for "manipulators" and "inertia."

Then there was the big Embarcadero/CodeGear announcement of Delphi Prism. Now that we've gone public with information about Prism and Embarcadero's relationship with RemObjects, I can certainly talk about how I was able to spend time with some of the guys from RO. They're booth was setup right next to the Embarcadero booth. I ended up staying the same hotel as the RO guys, so I spent a good amount of time getting to know them better. I met Carlo Kok, the Delphi Prism compiler engineer, for the first time. I certainly enjoyed hanging out with marc hoffman, Mike Oriss, and Carlo Kok. We will be spending a lot of time looking at ways we can not only leverage each other's work, but also work together on advancing the Delphi Object Pascal language in ways that make sense for each market and platform.

Overall, there was a lot of really good information. I didn't come away feeling like there was any kind of overall "buzz" around any particular topic. If I had to pick one "buzz-worthy" item, it would have to be the whole Azure thing and the "cloud."

One personally interesting item was that they gave out a little Freescale USB "badge" sensor board to demonstrate the both the unified sensor API coming in Windows 7, but also the new user level driver model. This little technology demonstrator has a ColdFire V1 microcontroller, which is a MC68000 derivative CPU, with lots of built-in I/O ports, timers, USB port, SCI, I2C, A/D converters and 128K flash Memory and 64K of ram. The board had a 3-axis accelerometer, ambient light sensor, 8 proximity touch switches, Lithium-Ion rechargeable coin cell and charger circuit. It came with all the drivers, on board firmware, trial versions of the C/C++ compiler for the CPU, and the Windows 7 driver code and some demo applications. They said it would only work with Windows 7. Hogwash, I say! It's just a USB HID (Human Interface Device), and well, guess what? Within the extensive JEDI-VCL library is an HID component. There was also enough documentation to describe the 64-byte data packets that the board sends out with information about the accelerometer, light sensor and 8 proximity switches that I was able to write a little Delphi application to read and interpret the raw data stream. Sure, it's using the raw data streams from the device without the nicely unified Sensor API from Windows 7. I played with it over the weekend and got it all working on my Windows XP Dell D820 laptop.