More From PDC: Sensors, Surface, Mesh and Multi-Core

Tag : sensors

While I was mostly focused on the keynotes and technical sessionsat the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, I saw some ofthe most interesting things on the show floor. Within this "BigRoom," I saw some very interesting demos of sensors, meshnetworking, Microsoft Surface, and parallel processing, not tomention a large number of tools aimed at developers.
One cool demo from Microsoft was how Windows 7 is now directlyenabled to take advantage of sensors. A demo board that included alight sensor, accelerometer, and touch sensor was plugged in to runan application on Windows - for instance, controlling a game bymoving the board; or changing the view in a text reader dependingon the brightness of the environment. Another demo showed how abuilt-in GPS could drive Virtual Earth or even the integratedweather gadget. Now none of this sounds all that new; an individualapplication could do much of this before. But what is new is thatthis is built into the operating system, giving developers a morestandard platform to write for. We've seen lots of mobile phonesimplementing features like this - notably the iPhone'saccelerometer and GPS-enabled maps on many phones, but this bringsit to the PC platform.


There were a number of Microsoft Surface Tables, along with a"scavenger hunt" game that seemed designed to get attendees tryingout the table in lots of places, in order to get a t-shirt. Surfacestill looks like a niche market, but the multi-touch surface workedvery well.
On Live Mesh, the big new feature is the ability to synchronizefolders now on more platforms, including a Mac, Windows Mobile, ormost mobile phone that run a browser. This is still a technologypreview mostly aimed at developers, but it's good to see it on moreplatforms. Obviously, there are a number of other applications forsynchronizing data across the cloud to multiple platforms, aimed atconsumers. But again, this is part of the Windows Azure developmentplatform, so it can more easily be used by developers within theirown applications. One very interesting future scenario would beusing the federated services to manage identity and policy betweenbusiness and personal use.
Microsoft Research showed off Auto Collage, a method forautomatically creating collages from your photos and BLEWS, anapplication that automatically categorizes news stories accordingto their reception by conservative and liberal blogs.
Many companies showed interesting web development tools, methods oftracking code, managing it, or helping create it. It's been so longsince I programmed that I'm not up on this market, but I wasimpressed by the diversity of tools.
AMD and Intel were both talking a lot about how to optimizeparallel code to run better on their respective hardware. Each hasspecial software or instructions designed to take advantage of theunique things in their architectures. In a world that isincreasingly moving to chips with multiple cores and servers with 2or more processors, this is only going to get more important. Oneimpressive demo was from AMD, which showed a Mandelbrot calculationthat took about 8 seconds when run as a single thread, but thatwhen parallelized took only 0.27 seconds running on a 8-processor,32-core server, based on the firm's upcoming "Shanghai" chip.