Powered By Cloud : Up coming seminar

Folks,
Here is information about one of the rare sessions on "Cloud Computing". Its difficult to find such a great set of industry experts expressing their vision on latest technologies like Cloud Computing. This program is happening in London.

If you have a chance my advise is don't miss it. Here you can find further details about the session and registration.

http://www.poweredbycloud.com/programme/programme.aspx

Its targeting the below audience:

CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, strategy heads and senior executives of:
- cloud computing providers
- potential clients of the cloud industry
- hardware equipment and packaged software vendors
- the wider telecommunications industry
- Internet service providers
- data centres
- leading cloud-computing start ups
- private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund investors
- business and technology media

Dates of Conference :
2-3 February 2009

Thanks to Philip (philip.low@broad-group.com) for informing me about this seminar. Reach him for any discounts with my reference :-)

Happy Learning !!!

KODU - Programming Language for Gaming

KODU - Design your own Video game -

How about designing the video game you imagine. This cool feature is being researched by Microsoft under name "KODU".

This is a visual programming language for creating games. Even children can develop a game under KODU and run on XBOX.

Some features of it are as below....
It is entirely Icon Based and has programming user interface.
You can design a game basing on rules, conditions and actions. You can add Vision, hearing and Time control characteristics.
Uses Xbox 360 controller for gaming input.
You don't need a Keyboard. I think the first programming language in the world which doesn't need a key board !!!!
20 different characters with different abilities.

So Game lovers, start imagining your own game, create it and play it !!! Its all yours.......

F# Language

Microsoft Cambridge Research center is coming up with a new language called F#, where F stands for Functional.

I was going through Microsoft Research blogs and found this one interesting. So here are some cool things about F#:

F# is all about leveraging the benefits of both typed functional programming and .NET.

F# is Interactive with Visual Studio. This allows F# users to develop fast, accurate code using Visual Studio’s background type-checking and Intellisense.

F# lightweight syntax inspired by Haskell and Python.

F# is functional language like BASIC, simplicity is the core concept.

A good functional program is like a beautiful poem: you see the pieces of a ‘solution’ come together. - Don Syme MS Research, Cambridge.

F# really enables the .NET platform to reach out to new classes of developers, and appeal to domains where .NET is not heavily used. This is especially true in data exploration and technical computing. We’re also exploiting functional techniques in parallel programming.

Many programmers choose to explore a problem in F# because it lets them focus more on the problem domain and less on programming itself.

In his interview, he gives an example of Scientist using F# to solve his functional domain problem.
Happy Learning !!!

Microsoft Blueprint

In continuation to my effort of bringing new age technologies from Microsoft, here is the latest "Microsoft Blueprint".

Microsoft is working on a new Factory based architecture that is nothing but MS Blueprint. Infosys is also partnering with MS on this new architecture development.

A software blue print is a step by step guidance and code generation capability for different layers like Data Access, Security, Smart Client etc.,

Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is the predecessor for MS Blueprint. The basic use of this is to build guidance packages and make them available within Visual Studio Dotnet.

MS Blueprint has an advantage over GAT with versions. Whenever a new guidance package is available with GAT we have to uninstall old one and install new one. But with MS Blue Print you can get updates like RSS feed. It will check over Internet for newly available factories and makes it available integrated with Visual Studio.

Blueprint gives tight integration with windows work flow foundation. Each phase of work flow can be integrated with MS Blueprint. Guidance is build on top of the WWF.

Writing code generation logic in C# or VB.NET makes it simple than the GAT XML structure.

Infosys Work on MS Blueprint: Infosys created a silver light software factory demo, which internally contains three additional blue prints, Silver light Blueprint, WCF Blueprint, LINQ Blueprint.

Infosys Silver light blueprint gives factories/Guidance to implement logic layer of Silver light.

LINQ blueprint is for data layer. WCF Blueprint is for service interface layer.

Happy Learning !!!