OK, so I went to the conference Truth be told, it wasn't *only* because of the W7 - I wanted that too, but I read something intriguing about F# and wanted to check it out.

Now, for some background - I am back in school pursuing dual majors in Computer Science and Mathematics. I plan on doing graduate work in Financial Engineering, or another discipline that makes use of both Math and Computer Science, if at all possible.

Now, F# is a programing language for Mathematics. Yes, I have heard of Mathematica, and Maple, but this is different - it is developed by M$, and the beauty of it is that the underlying APIs and such is .Net - which means you can code in F#, compile, and then use the resulting class in any other VS language *natively*.

But it gets better - it allows for *direct* multi-threading for computational tasks. It allows for simple, lightweight coding (UI recognizes code based upon simple indenting, without having to end code with requisite ;;, and other minor things that make it easier to use - think Perl.

Finally - if you're a mathematician - it's intuitive. And at the same time, it has built in functions that make *complex* mathematics easy to code. about 40 lines of code, along with another 10 in C#, and the project was parsing out 30 days of stock prices for MSFT, ORCL, and EBAY, performing Standard Deviation calculations on the entire lot, and spitting out the results - in less than 10 seconds flat (for all three - and that is not by any means simply number crunching). On my machine it takes more like 3 seconds flat.

OK, now that that is done, let me say that Azure is kewl, pretty neat with what it can do - and the New VS 2010 CTP is showing the old skin - wait for the next refresh, cause ht skin goes WPF, baby. And it is *slick*.

Also, you can already get the WPF SDK from CodePlex *and* get the Office Ribbon UI SDK from Microsoft(you'll have to agree to a waiver / EULA like thing) and start making some really neat apps - all without knowing a single line of code.

Also, I won a prize for staying the entire time and completing the surveys. a 2 course on one of various topics (including but not limited to Silverlight, Troubleshooting Windows, WPF, WCF,....) from Wintellect - retail price, $499 - my price - $99 for the admission to the conference and $5 for parking across the street. Pretty good bargain, IMO....

If you have a chance in the next week to attend this conference, do it. M$ has a lot more up its sleeve than the general public knows about.

Finally - the W7 Beta is going to be shipped to attendees. I would say I am disappointed, but in truth I am not - as long as the Beta has 64bit I'll wait, because I refuse to install 6956 32bit....

Posted By: johngalt
16 Dec 2008