I spent a bunch of time over the holidays getting to know F# a bit better. I think I now consider myself to be truly dangerous with it.
A couple of things which repeatedly bit me as I stumbled through learning F# as a n00b. Read the rest of this entry »
The dates and venue for next year’s agile conference have been announced.
Agile 2010 is the leading international conference on agile methods in software development. Agile 2010 will be held in Nashville, USA. The conference brings together many disciplines in the fields of information systems and software development and bridges communities that rarely get a chance to exchange ideas and thoughts.
The conference will examine the latest theory, practical applications, and implications of agile methods.
And yes, that’s me on the right of the conference homepage playing with my laptop! This year there will be better Wi-Fi, I already bent the Conference Chair’s ear about it.
On another note… Why the ominous silence on the blog front. Been busy writing code. I now know enough F# to be truly dangerous. More on this real soon.
While I was at PDC Tibi Covaci interviewed me as part of his Five Minutes with… series. You can see the full interview here.
Ade Miller, manager of the Patterns and Practices group talks to Tibi about the history and possible future of parallel programming and how it will affect developers going forward…
Other than sharing my thoughts on parallel programming; past present and future you learn that; nuclear reactors may be less safe than you thought and five minutes with me is quite long enough.
Need to know how big the caches are on your processor? You could wade through the copious documentation on Intel or AMD’s web sites. It turns out this is no fun at all. I did this last week and still didn’t have the answer after skimming several white papers.
Turns out there’s a useful little Sysinternals tool for figuring this out; Coreinfo.
I have an opening on the patterns & practices team for a developer. These don’t come up very often and they tend to get filled pretty fast. If you’re interested then read on…
You can find out more about p&p by visiting our developer center; who we are and what we do. Our upcoming releases will give you an idea of the sort of projects you might work on in the coming months; ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, WPF & Silverlight, Azure, SharePoint and parallel computing. In short; you can be a part of some of the most exciting things coming out of Microsoft. Almost all our deliverables ship source code—often under the Ms-PL open source license—as such, code is very much at the forefront of what we do.
p&p developers are very much involved with customers. We work in an agile way; forming small multi-disciplinary teams, involving both our customers and Microsoft product groups. We work in state of the art team rooms delivering code every two weeks. p&p Developers play a big part in leading projects and managing and coaching other team members.
Developers at p&p meet with customers most weeks and frequently present at conferences; like the p&p Summit, PDC and Tech.Ed. The blog, podcast and discuss their work frequently and ask for feedback from our customers. If you like working on your own in a dark room then p&p probably isn’t for you!
One of the questions which came up in the Q&A panel at the end of our parallel patterns workshop on Monday was “Do we really need 512 cores, or even 24?” This is completely valid point. If I had that much compute power on the desktop what would I do with it?
In the past decade desktop computer power has doubled with each generation of processor and developers have always found new ways to give their users more valuable features or more responsive applications. I don’t see that trend changing.
It turns out that when I got back from PDC 09 to my hotel this evening my theory was confirmed beyond any doubt. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury; I give you “Exhibit A: The computer controlled toilet”. Yes… really… seat temperature, bidet water temperature. Do we need a toilet with more computing power than the first space shuttle. No. But someone figured out it was possible and created a market for it and built a profitable business around it. Now I have one in my bathroom at the hotel.
The key is to drive down the cost of investing in concurrency. Make it easier for developers to create concurrent applications and they and their users will find ways to use the compute power. I’m spending a lot of time at PDC learning about some of the things Microsoft has planned in the parallel computing space.
I was speaking at our PDC Workshop today. We had a couple of hundred attendees and finished up with a great Q&A session; so many excellent questions that it actually overran. We didn’t leave the Conference Center until gone 6pm.
I’ve posted Patterns of Parallel Programming Primer. The other PDC decks and videos will be posted shortly, as soon as we can get things organized. I’ll post again and tweet when we have them online.
The other book I mentioned was C# 3.0 Design Patterns
I’m speaking at Much Ado About Agile 2009 in Vancouver today. You can find the deck here.
I’ve given versions of this talk before to various groups and a lot of details are covered in the white paper I wrote last year. The white paper covers most of the content from the talk in more detail can be downloaded from MSDN. Since writing it I’ve also written a series of blog posts on some of the new ideas we’ve discussed since.
Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices (MSDN paper)
Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft Updated (blog updates)
I’ll probably be updating this post this evening to add links based on questions and feedback I get during the talk. At some point I’m hoping to go back and have time to do a second version of the paper too.
We’ve been busy working hard on our decks for the PDC Patterns of Parallel Programming workshop. You can see the preliminary agenda in the slide below. As you can see we’re planning to have plenty of time for questions and hope to cover a lot of ground.
One of my goals for the workshop is to get feedback from attendees as to what their biggest challenges are around parallel computing and what we can do to help. Herb Sutter—who’s speaking at the workshop—has a short poll on concurrency. If your attending the workshop you can also fill out the workshop survey.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229P7LCF47G
Looking forward to talking to people in LA in a couple of weeks. Hope to see lots of you there!
There’s still time to register for PDC and get a $300 discount if you sign up before the end of October.
Now Windows 7 has finally shipped I thought I’d update my series of posts on getting Windows 7 RTM (Release to Manufacture) up and running on the Samsung NC10.
So here we go… How to get Windows 7 running on the NC10…
After installing Windows 7 Enterprise and running Windows Update I installed the following drivers and applications. Several of these are newer versions that the ones I used in my Windows 7 RC post.
Update! Samsung have released some NC10 drivers for Windows 7. I’ve updated the list below to reflect the latest versions.
Thanks to Jonas and Nick Rich for pointing out the newer drivers from Samsung and Synaptics. Post comments here if you have feedback or further tips on getting Windows 7 on the NC10.
Easy Display Manager 4.0.0.2 (from Samsung’s Windows 7 drivers) – Installs the hotkeys for sound volume and screen brightness.
Easy Battery Manager 3.0.3.5 (from Samsung’s Windows 7 drivers) – This installs the “Samsung Optimized” power plan and sets it as the default.
MS Hotfix Common Win7 1.0.0.3 (from Samsung’s Windows 7 drivers) – Hotfixes for KB974204 and KB974719 and some other things. Windows Update may cover this for you automatically.
There are some other tools/applications for the NC10 on Samsung’s site but I’ve not installed these yet.
Synaptics Touchpad v14.0.6.0 Vista x86/64 – This version has a built in two finger scrolling feature so no need to install any additional scrolling tools.
Realtek HD sound drivers for Vista,Windows 7 R2.33 – Needed to get the microphone working
Play Camera 1.0.0.31 – Camera application (optional).
Why am I using Windows 7 Enterprise? Firstly because I use this netbook at work and Microsoft’s IT group support this version (I need a version which will be able to join a domain). Secondly because I’ve not had any issues running the higher end versions of Windows 7 on the NC10. Obviously I could have opted for Home or even Starter if I wanted to for just home use.
Have fun and as usual post comments here. For previous posts there’s been lots of good feedback and people have got their issues worked out.
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my climbing web site and blog.
