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This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Clint Rutkas where we discuss the week's top developer news, including: - Channel 9 Live at PDC - Three days of live streams with big names including Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, Scott Guthrie, and many more. - Microsoft PressPass - Microsoft acquires Teamprise which means Martin Woodward is a blue badge! - Microsoft SDK for Facebook, now officially supported by Facebook - Bing Maps Silverlight Control Interactive SDK - New Amazon Web Services .NET SDK, via Greg Duncan - Channel 9 adds Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Windows Server R2 Developer courses with videos and hands-on labs - Thomas Lewis - Devil's Field Guide to the PDC (2009 Edition) - Steve Marx - How to use the Azure CDN for a custom domain - Anders Hejlsberg - the Visual Studio Documentary - Sync Toy 2.1 Available for download - Access 2010 - Access for SharePoint Web databases Picks of the week - Dan's pick: Dragon Age Origins the game and the awesome toolset and developer wiki for... - Jeff Sandquist

The Channel 9 team is excited to announce that they will be broadcasting LIVE and unscripted from the PDC Big Room for all three days of the Professional Developers Conference 2009. Who will be on Channel 9 Live at PDC09? We'll be publishing the full schedule very soon but for now here's a taste of some of the awesome guests we have lined up: Mark Russinovich, Patrick Dussud, Steve Marx, Bob Muglia, Dave Campbell, Yousef Khalidi, Ray Ozzie, Erik Meijer, Kurt DelBene, Scott Guthrie, Don Box, Chris Anderson, Gary Flake, Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell (.NET Rocks). Plus your favorite Channel 9 personalities including Charles Torre, Scott Hanselman, Robert Hess, Mike Swanson, Jennifer Ritzinger, Nic Fillingham, Dan Fernandez and Jeff Sandquist. When will this take place? Tuesday (Immediately following the Day 1 keynote) 10:30AM – 5:30 PM Pacific Standard Time Wednesday (Immediately following the Day 2 keynote) 11:00AM – 5:30 PM Pacific Standard Time Thursday 10:30AM – 3:30 PM Pacific... - Jeff Sandquist

Dave Campbell is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and long time database architect. Today, Dave works on the hardest problems facing SQL's foray into the new world of cloud computing. His latest project in this space takes the form of SQL Azure. What is SQL Azure? What's the different with the cloud and what we already experience with SQL server running in a clustered environment and reachable via the Internet? How does this focus on cloud computing and impact the evolution of database design? What's going here? What's next? Erik Meijer, de facto E2E host and language designer, interviews Dave to ge answers to some of these questions. Erik works for Dave, by the way, and as you can see that doesn't stop Erik from asking more than softball questions. Dave will be presenting at PDC09 in the Technical Leaders track. His talk will focus on ambient data and what this means for the evolution of ways to understand and shape the data this all around us using software. You should attend his... - Jeff Sandquist

Call me a sucker for a good design, but I love Dell’s new candy-colored mini computers. New for this year’s holiday season the computer manufacturer has just launched a line of desktop PCs with small form factors…and surprisingly, quite a lot of power too.  Called the Dell Inspiron Zino HD, these mini machines offer up to 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB of hard drive space, a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e CPU, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4330 GPU, a Blu-Ray drive, DVD burner, HDMI out, a 4-in-1 card reader, four USB 2.0 sockets, a pair of eSATA ports, Wi-Fi, and a wireless keyboard and mouse. The PCs start at $229, but if you trick them out with all the options, the price can end up being a lot more. If you can wait to purchase, the line will soon feature a TV Tuner option as well, although that won’t be available at launch unfortunately. The Zino PCs run Windows 7 and come with a wireless remote, too. You can learn more about the line on Dell’s website here. - Jeff Sandquist

On Wednesday, Zune HD owners got a nice surprise: new 3D games! According to a post on Zune Insider, there are now six new titles available, including Project Gotham Racing, Audiosurf Tilt, Vans SK8: Pool Service, Lucky Lanes Bowling, Piano, and Checkers. This addition brings the number of Zune games to a little over a dozen now. Best of all, the new games are entirely free. If you want to see the games in action, Crunchgear has posted a video demonstrating some of the more interesting titles on their Zune HD device. And on the Mobility Site, they’ve reviewed a few of the new games including PGR, Lucky Lanes, and Audiosurf Tilt. In order to download the new games to your device, you’ll need to do the following: Connect your Zune HD to your computer and sign into the Zune software. Click on Marketplace, Apps. Select the game or app you want, then click Download. Go to Collection, Apps, and drag the games and apps that you want to the Zune player icon to sync them. Finally, to access... - Jeff Sandquist

Windows Live, the social homepage that connects you to all your online activities including email, news, photos, social networks, and more, has just added 19 more “activity partners” to their line up. In case you’re unfamiliar, the activity partners are the websites you can add to your network feed – an always-updated source of information about what your friends are doing around the web. It’s sort of like Facebook’s News Feed except that it includes updates about what you’re doing on Windows Live as well as on other websites around the net including Facebook. Here, you can configure your page to get updates from social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, Yelp, and Pandora, and tons of others as well as from blogs and RSS feeds. You can pick which ones you want to see by editing your settings from your home.live.com homepage. As of this week, you now have access to 19 more web activities partners, including, most notably, YouTube, CNET, and Break.com. The other sites being added... - Jeff Sandquist

At 12PM Pacific Standard Time (PST), Mike Swanson, Jennifer Ritzinger, and special guest star Nic Fillingham will do the Countdown to PDC show live! To watch, go to: www.microsoftpdc.com The show will be interactive and you can get your questions answered live by replying to @ch9live on Twitter. FAQ: Q: Do I need anything special to watch the live stream? A: You just need Silverlight installed. Q: How do I watch the live stream? A: Go to www.microsoftpdc.com at 12PM PST Q: How can I participate? A: Send questions or comments by replying to the @ch9live Twitter account during the live broadcast at 3PM Pacific Standard Time.  Q: Will the content be available afterwards? A: Yes, we’ll be uploading the recording for anyone that can’t tune in during that time. Q: Will you do it live? A: WE’LL DO IT LIVE! - Jeff Sandquist

Patrick Dussud is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who is the author of .NET's garbage collector (GC) - the automatic memory management infrastructure that makes up most of what is managed in managed code execution. How does GC, work, generally? Why is it important? The GC inside of the CLR is of a specfic type - ephemeral, concurrent (the server version has always been concuurent and now with Background GC on the client in CLR 4, GC is concurrent on the client as well, but there are differences...). Patrick takes us through the basics of GC up to the current state of the art in this outstanding conversation with one of the fathers of .NET. Of course, given the other expert in the room - programming language designer Erik Meijer, we have to talk about the impact that dynamic and functional languages have on the design of general purpose GCs as well as future directions of the CLR's GC, generally. What's Patrick working on these days? Patrick will be presenting at PDC09 in the the... - Jeff Sandquist

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth Introduction: This screencasts covers the new Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks debugging windows in Visual Studio 2010. It demonstrates the sample code from the MSDN Magazine on this topic which you can read here: Debugging Task-Based Parallel Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - Jeff Sandquist

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC which help with integrating your application with the Windows Restart Manager.  This is done by implementing handlers for restart and crash recovery, and by integrating an auto-save feature that uses the document-view architecture to save intermediate temporary copies of your document.  This is implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.  Check out Pat's screencast tutorial on implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering - Jeff Sandquist

Windows Embedded is a general purpose OS, based on the Windows codebase, that is highly modular and fine tuned to run on a number of devices ranging in size and complexity (but less powerful and kess general purpose in nature than your average PC) that are x86/x64 powered (casino gaming consoles, retail kiosks, hand-held devices, etc). The next version of Windows Embedded will arrive some time in 2011 - thus the name Windows Embedded 2011. We figured it would be a good idea to meet some of the developers who write Windows Embedded to get a better understanding of, well, exactly what it is and where it is going. Here, we meet and chat with Windows Embedded developers Oren Winter, Jon Parati, Mike Moini and Milong Sabandith. What are the key new features in Windows Embedded 2011? What is Windows Embedded, exactly? What's Windows CE, again? How is Windows Embedded related to Windows proper? Windows Embedded 2011 is built from the same sources that makes up Windows 7? What's different... - Jeff Sandquist

Is it just me, or has the culture around meetings in the workplace spun out of control? Meetings are like a plague at large companies like Microsoft, and I've just about had it. I'm constantly holding back my twitching index finger from clicking "Decline" when someone turns an ongoing email thread into a meeting invite. Cornering people in a room in front of a whiteboard isn't going to solve the problem. That’s because meetings don't solve problems — people do. And they all do it differently. Solution vs. Consensus A meeting is supposed to facilitate a solution. Maybe even the "best" solution. Sometimes this process takes a few minds, but let’s not kid ourselves. How often do you think to yourself on your way to a meeting, "This meeting is definitely going to help us arrive at an awesome solution"? Probably not very often. In fact, most people I know sigh in resignation on their way to meetings. This is because meetings seem to have devolved into a consensus-building and CYA tactics... - Jeff Sandquist

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is now using the computational engine known as Wolfram Alpha to answer some of its users’ search queries. Wolfram Alpha is an entirely different sort of search engine than anything that Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo offers – it’s built on top of Mathematica, a program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields. As with Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha can handle math questions input into its search box, but it can also answer queries about physics and chemistry, nutritional information, weather, census data, financial information, and more. Although its scope is more limited than a traditional search engine, when asked a question it understands, it gives a real answer instead of just a list of linked search results. Of course, the challenge for any newcomer to search is gaining awareness and then getting people to remember what the engine can be used for and when to use it. An often better solution, as it turns out, is to integrate a unique... - Jeff Sandquist

According to a post from the Windows Mobile Developer blog, the Marketplace for Mobile now has a new home: the web. In addition to coming pre-installed on all Windows Phone handsets, you can now browse through all the available applications right from your PC in the new online Marketplace. But this new site doesn’t just display what applications are available – you can also download them right from the store itself. To do so, you’ll need to configure your account settings including your billing preferences and device settings. These options are available from the “Account Settings” link at the top of the page. If you’re not able to select your device, it’s because you haven’t yet signed into the Windows Marketplace for Mobile from your Windows phone yet. You have to do that first. Once set up, you can browse by category or search through all the available applications for your phone. The site also highlights the most popular apps, the new apps, and showcase apps, just as the... - Jeff Sandquist

In addition to the newly announced Wolfram Alpha integration, the Bing Search Team is also launching a number of new features that live up to Bing’s promise of being a “decision” engine and not just a search engine. These features include improvements to their travel, weather, and shopping options as well as the “previews” feature which are the little sidebar pop-ups that appear when you hover your mouse over a search result. Combined, these improvements represent a major step forward for the new search engine, even leading some to dub the offering “Bing 2.0.” Improved Travel Features Travel is already one of Bing’s more useful capabilities thanks to an acquisition of a company called Farecast whose service helps travelers determine the best time to fly in order to get the best price. Now travel searches will be even easier. Once rolled out, you’ll be able to hover over the “Travel” link on the homepage to get a pop-up task-focused menu with options to “search flights,” “search... - Jeff Sandquist

One of our most popular PDC speakers, Steve Marx, joins us today to talk about Azure and the cloud as he teases his PDC sessions. Think there isn’t much new in the last year, or that the news around Azure is purely going to be about the business model? Think again, and let’s get nerdy! And don’t forget about our LIVE show on Friday, November 13th at noon PST. We’ll be taking your questions from Twitter…live! You can ask for tips and tricks for getting the most out of PDC, recommendations for favorite sessions or special events, or perhaps you’re wondering if it’s okay to wear white pants after Labor Day. Get all your burning questions answered! To participate in the live Q&A: Tune-in to the live stream at http://live.ch9.ms/ at 12pm PT on Friday, Nov 13. You will need to have Silverlight installed to view the program. Send your questions, comments and cheers to @ch9live. If there’s room, include the #pdc09 hash tag in your tweet, so people can find it in their PDC09 search. - Jeff Sandquist

Join Danny Shih as he introduces the TaskCompletionSource<TResult> type.  He’ll cover basic usage and walk through a full scenario Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center. See all videos in this series. - Jeff Sandquist

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders). We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday. In Chapter 7, Dr. Meijer teaches us about Higher-Order Functions. A function is called higher-order if it takes a function as an argument and returns a function as a result: twice :: (a -> a) -> a -> a twice f x = f (f x) The function twice above is higher order because it takes a function (f x) as it first argument and returns a function (f(fx)) Dr. Meijer will elaborate on why higher-order functions are important and there are some really interesting side-effects of higher-order functions such as defining DSLs as collections of higher-order functions and using algebraic properties of... - Jeff Sandquist

Today Microsoft released a Facebook SDK to make it easy for .NET devs to use the Facebook Open Stream API. The SDK supports apps in Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Forms. The Windows Developer Center has the download, how-to guides, a wiki, and sample code to get you started. Now go create something cool (and let me know when you do). - Jeff Sandquist

This is the second episode of The Access Show with Steve Greenberg & Ryan McMinn. They just came back from the sold-out SharePoint conference in Las Vegas where they launched Access Services and wanted to give you an update as well as introduce some customers that have been using the technical preview and building web databases.  Robert Hogg -  Black Marble Consulting www.blackmarble.co.uk Michael Matloub – Connolly, Inc. www.connolly.com Check out the Access 2010 Intro series at the Access team blog. - Jeff Sandquist

How many times have you tried to copy a huge number of files only to accidently hit space or escape cancelling the transfer and you don't want to re-start from scratch? Well there's a better way to sync files between directories and drives, SyncToy. You might remember this from the XP PowerToys days, the ease of use makes it a very popular download. Deepa from the Sync team stopped by to show us the latest version, SyncToy 2.1. You can find out more here, download it here, or give the team feedback here. - Jeff Sandquist

If you're a developer looking for a drop in monitor for coding Windows 7 Multitouch applications, 3M has a kit for you. This 19" monitor may seem very pricey at $1499, but keep in mind this is huge for a capacitive display. Normally monitors this large will have an optical tracking system for the touchpoints, leaving you with 2-4 touch points at best. This capacitive glass-front display is good for a full 10-point multi-touch experience. Check the site for more details and videos of the monitor in action. - Jeff Sandquist

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use various concurrency-safe Collections classes. Collections and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010. Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center. - Jeff Sandquist

There’s a new application that integrates the Windows Live SkyDrive service into Windows Explorer. Simply called “SkyDrive Explorer,” this software turns your SkyDrive folder into just another location you can access directly from Windows. Once installed, as with local folders, you can drag-and-drop files into your SkyDrive folder or you can copy files hosted in SkyDrive back to your PC. Using SkyDrive Explorer After running the downloadable executable, you have to connect to SkyDrive by clicking on the icon that appears in your Windows Explorer window and signing in with your Windows Live ID. After that’s complete, you can then navigate through your SkyDrive folders and move content around through copy and paste operations. You can also rename or delete groups of objects – something that’s much easier to do from within an Explorer window than on the web. Another handy feature is the ability to right-click on SkyDrive files or folders to access the SkyDrive URL which points to its... - Jeff Sandquist

If you're looking for a drop in monitor that supports Windows 7 Multitouch applications, 3M has a kit for you. This 19" monitor may seem very pricey at $1499, but keep in mind this is huge for a capacitive display. Normally monitors this large will have an optical tracking system for the touchpoints, leaving you with 2-4 touch points at best. This capacitive glass-front display is good for a full 10-point multi-touch experience. Check the site for more details and videos of the monitor in action. - Jeff Sandquist

The Visual Studio Documentary Part One and Part Two. S. Somasegar's Full Length Interview Jason Zander Full Length Interview Tim Huckaby Full Length Interview Scott Guthrie Full Length Interview Anders Hejlsberg is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division. He is an influential creator of development tools and programming languages. He is the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the Microsoft .NET framework. Since its initial release in 2000, the C# programming language has been widely adopted and is now standardized by ECMA and ISO. Before his work on C# and the .NET framework, Hejlsberg was an architect for Visual J++ development and the Windows Foundation classes. Before joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was one of the first employees of Borland International Inc. As principal engineer, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal, a revolutionary integrated development environment, and chief architect of its successor,... - Jeff Sandquist

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer with a rich history in both operating system design and distributed computing. Yousef is responsible for the overall design of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system (which includes the Azure development platform in addition to the "OS", aka Windows Azure). Windows Azure is an operating system in the sense that it supplies a host of core services, process scheduling and management, identity management, etc, that we typically expect from a general purpose operating system. In this first installment of C9 Conversations (we sit down with various Microsoft technical leaders to discuss a wide range of topics related to general purpose computing; all in high quality video and audio (big thanks to Tina Summerford for producing this new series)), the topic is cloud computing. What is it, exactly? Why does it matter? What are the challenges involved in taking software to the cloud? What does that mean, exactly? Is Windows Azure an operating... - Jeff Sandquist

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to safely cancel tasks in a parallel task execution scenario. CancellationToken and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010. Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center. - Jeff Sandquist

John Durant just returned from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference where a number of new SharePoint features were announced. In this episode he shares some of those features with us and describes how they can help developers in a variety of ways. John will be doing a couple sessions at PDC09 which will also cover some of these features: Making a Killer Office Developer Demo Developing .NET Managed Applications Using the Microsoft Office 2010 Developer Platform And here are some PDC09 sessions based on some of the other topics we discussed: Developing Solutions with Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Overview of SharePoint 2010 Programmability Document Assembly and Manipulation on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Word Automation Services and Open XML - Jeff Sandquist

Today a new experiment comes out of Redmond in the form of a new toolbar for Internet Explorer that analyzes the web pages you are looking at and applies what it sees to your social networks. This means the proper nouns and contextual references in the sites you're looking at are matched up to the things your friends might be talking about. So if you're browsing a movie review, you may see what a friend wrote about that movie as an inline contextual update. Emre Kiciman and CK Wang from Microsoft Research joined us at the Channel 9 studio to talk about the Social Web toolbar and how it works. You can download the Social Web Experience Toolbar for IE here. - Jeff Sandquist