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To wrap up a rather eventful day here on MSFTKitchen, check out the following reference I just spotted while surfing around Microsoft’s events website. The event, Energize IT 2010, will be held in Canada on March 30, 2010 and the session is titled “From the Client to the Cloud V 2.0.” Here’s a screen shot of the first part of the event’s description:

In more detail:

Windows Azure. Office System 2010. Visual Studio 2010. Windows Phone 7. The Microsoft-based platform presents a bevy of opportunities for all of us. Whether you are an IT Manager, Developer, or IT Pro knowing how these will impact you is critical, especially in the new economic reality.

To start the day we will explore the Microsoft-based platform through a scenario that will demonstrate different points of view – from developer to IT Pro; from consumer to the information worker. From the client to the cloud, this fun-filled demo-intensive exploration will excite you about the possibilities of the Microsoft-based platform. You’ll see how to build next generation applications with technology like Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. You will find out how to consume those applications on a variety of devices, like mobile devices running Windows Phone, netbooks and PCs running Windows 7, as well as the web. You will learn about how the Microsoft-based platform allows you to connect with your colleagues no matter where you are –office, coffee shops, or your own living room. You’ll also see how you and your colleagues can be even more productive with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

In the afternoon we will split in two tracks focused on managing and deploying infrastructure, and the development process. These tracks will help you answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from my current reality?” You’ll learn about the technical details required for you to be ready to implement some of the technologies demonstrated in the morning sessions and help offer a clear learning and experimentation roadmap, and action plan.

EnergizeIT: From the Client to the Cloud is your opportunity to learn how to harness the power and flexibility of the Microsoft-based platform from the client to the cloud.

This lends to the notion that Microsoft is indeed going to confirm Windows Mobile 7 sometime in the coming weeks, contrary to the, “trust us, we know what we’re talking about” vagaries coming from news sites on the web who say otherwise. Additionally, it was noted at PDC 2009 that Windows Mobile 7 would be making an appearance at MIX 2010. I’m going to jump out on a limb here and say it’s all but 100% obvious at this point that Windows Mobile 7 is going to rear its ubiquitous head here in the next few weeks and I absolutely can’t wait.

Link: Windows Phone 7 @ Energize IT 2010

-Stephen
http://www.msftkitchen.com

Another day, ano……. oh, wait. I keep saying that every time I find one of these things. lol. Basically, I’ve run across YET ANOTHER road map (the second one in Korean) that further solidifies the ~2012 release of Windows 8 Server. Let me clarify, all of these road maps I’ve found – ALL of them – resided in Windows Server 2008 R2 slide decks. None of these are in relation to client, but since Microsoft has made the decision to align Server and Client release dates, it may be fairly safe to assume that these cadences apply to Windows 8 client as well. Either way, here’s the latest of the onslaught:

Since I’ve found so many of these things now, I’m going to go ahead and recap the others below. Click each of the following road maps to be taken to their respective posts, if you’re interested:

 

 

 

 

And that’s it! Stay tuned for more road maps. Even though it’s pretty damn obvious that Microsoft is shooting for a 2012 release date, I’m going to post every single one of these I find. =)

-Stephen
http://www.msftkitchen.com

Well, on this day of PDC 2009, since I won’t hear anything about Windows 8, I took it upon myself to see what I could scrounge up. It looks like a bit more is being announced to partners where Windows 8 Server is concerned… well, in the context of a roadmap, at least. The information all says the same thing I’ve been reporting via other roadmaps: Windows 8 being released around a time frame of 2012. Perhaps the whole, “end-of-the-world” thing in 2012 really has something to do with Windows 8. Or not. lol. Either way, here are the additions to my ginormous roadmap collection:

 

Although that second roadmap doesn’t have anything listed for a name, it’s once again the same old song: Windows 8 ~2012.

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

Two months ago, I posted an extensive list of Windows 8 features and considerations. Amongst all of the information in that post, there was one person in particular who had listed on her resume a feature suggestion straight from the Hyper-V team that was shelved for Windows 8 inclusion. Well, I just ran across another profile on LinkedIn which contains a supporting mention of Hyper-V features going into Windows 8. To quote the profile directly:

Working on Hyper-V features for Win8 in the Platform and Management Extendability team, which is part of the Windows Core OS Kernel Group.

I guess at this point, I’m curious as to if these are features that are going to go into client, server, or both (most likely, only server). All the roadmaps I’ve seen so far with Windows 8 getting a mention have all been related to Server, so… as always, this is all speculation for the time being. We all know just how much plans change internally.

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

Alright! I’m currently sitting in LA, prepared for PDC 2009. I’ll be in the company of folks such as Rafael Rivera (withinwindows.com), Tom Warren (neowin.net), Mary Jo Foley (zdnet.com/microsoft), Paul Thurrott (winsupersite.com), Long Zheng (istartedsomething.com), Ed Bott (zdnet.com/Bott), and many others! Those folks will be live blogging again this year, so be sure to check it out if you’re interested.

As for me, my plan is to keep all of you updated on things I find interesting/relevant via this very post. I’m going to keep it up top, so you can either bookmark this page directly, or you can simply visit my site via the main URL and you’ll see this post right up top throughout the duration of the conference. As I update content, I’ll ping content servers and post to my Twitter, so if you don’t want to keep refreshing this page or whatever, you can simply await the content to fall into your RSS feeder or Twitter page.

I’ll be taking plenty of video and pictures to post here, so you’ll be able to see the hijinks that take place when the lot of us get together. In the past, we (I) have thrown wet toilet paper out of a window 20 stories up at unsuspecting people below and if you’ve never done that before… it’s highly recommended. lol. But that was years ago when I was just a young whipper-snapper.

Well, that’s it for now. I just wanted to kick off my official PDC 2009 post. I encourage you to get involved via the comments section below! Let me know some things you guys and gals would like to see and I’ll try to accommodate however many requests I find feasible. More soon!

-Stephen

Update 01: I’ve been snapping photos like crazy since the flight here. These are pictures that are everything from a sunrise to a cool Predator recreation out of metal at Santa Monica to a bunch of us sitting here in the press room today. I’ll just keep adding pictures to this space as I snap them throughout the length of the conference. Hover your mouse over the images to see a description and click on them for a larger version.

-Stephen

Update 02: Well, today was fairly lengthy and boring, unfortunately. It was not my day for the conference, but I hope tomorrow will be better with mentions of IE9 (hopefully) and *maybe* something beyond Windows 7 (SP1 is all it would be at the most, I’m sure). Regardless, I have pictures to share from the past couple of days. Before I post those, though, here’s a really awesome video of an Alien vs. Predator demo running on an AMD machine with ATI’s latest DX11 GPU. This video doesn’t quite capture just how awesome it looks in person – but, hopefully, you’ll get the idea. Check it all out:

And even though today was extremely uneventful for me and my interests, it was a very fruitful day for my blog where Windows 8 content is concerned. Here’s a recap of the posts I made today:

Short: Windows 8 is Definitely Getting the Hyper-V Treatment
Forrester Research says: 1% of 653 Businesses Surveyed will Wait for Windows 8
Windows 8: More Roadmaps

More soon!

-Stephen

After a long bout of silence regarding Windows Mobile 7, I’ve finally stumbled across some recent information (where, “recent” = August 2009). Back in May of this year, I posted a slide which contained a Windows Mobile 7 device release date of April 2010, which – at the time – jived well with what Mary Jo Foley had previously reported. According to an Office 2010 presentation recently given to partners, there is a slide maintaining detailing (see update below) a Windows Mobile 7 Spring 2010 RTM time frame.

Also included in the slide designated for, “Office Mobile 2010″ are a couple of, “Office Mobile 7” UI prototype images. They greatly resemble the long-ago leaked Windows Mobile 7 UI prototypes to a, ‘T’. I can’t imagine that Microsoft has chosen to stick with that UI up to this point, so I’m going to take a wild guess that those images are equally as old as aforementioned leaked images they so closely resemble. Not to mention, with Mobile UI concepts like these floating around, I have high hopes for a stunning Windows Mobile 7 UI the likes of which we have yet to see.

With that said, here is a snap-shot of the Office Mobile 2010 slide, along with an image I threw together that includes a better look at the Office Mobile 7 images in the slide:

 

Office Mobile 7

 

If you will notice, those two mock-ups are a bit sloppy. In the left image, you can see the Excel icon sitting on top of the task bar. In the right image, the text in the task bar runs under the center button and outside of the inner gradient border. Despite those, “flaws” (they are mock-ups, after all), this is the first reference to, “Office Mobile 7″ I’ve yet to see. Likewise, this is the first time I’m aware of Microsoft actually showing images of this mock-up UI in a fairly public format. As such, I’ll certainly keep my nose to the grindstone and bring you any further information I can get a hold of!

UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley commented below and provided some valid insight:

The original roadmap showed phones preloaded with WM7 being available in April 2010. So if RTM of WM 7 is spring 2010, that’s about 6 months later than it was supposed to be. The big question is: If they RTM in April 2010 or so, how much of a lag will there be till the OS gets on phones? If MS can take this lag out, as they claim they plan to do, that will help them get to market a little faster.

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

Unfortunately, I don’t have a roadmap screenshot for this one but I’m sure one will make its way down the pike here soon enough. What I do happen to have is what appears to be an insider throwing out a mention of what the next version of Office will be code-named and when it is planned to hit the market.

On Fred Morrison’s popular SharePoint blog, a user with, “insider insight” (aka a Microsoft employee) responded to a post regarding SharePoint 2010 workflow development using WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) 4.0 with the following:

Couple of things on Office 14′s workflow you mentioned above:
- Office 14 (or SharePoint 2010 to use your words) won’t be supporting .NET 4 and WF 4.
- Office 14 still uses workflow foundation 3.5 and .NET 3.5 and you wont get the same benefits compared to when you use only .NET 4 solutions in custom development.
- The workflow platform for WF 4 was indeed rewritten from the ground up and is a much better platform, however, we will have to wait for Office 2013 (or Office 15) before we can use this for SharePoint development.
- WF4 does provide some out of the box sharepoint activities, but these are very different from SharePoint’s workflow and is built by the WF team, rather than the Office 2010 team.

Two things to note are that the comment was posted back in January, so the 2013 mention could be outdated by now, and even though he does indeed seem to be speaking via an informed perspective (aka a Microsoft employee’s perspective), this is merely an observation I’ve made and, ultimately, speculation until confirmed otherwise. I know it seems as though Office 15 was the obvious code name for the next version of Office (seeing it as Windows 8 is following Windows 7 and, “Office 2013″ would put the next version of Office right in line to meet the projected 3-year development cycle Microsoft adheres to), but plenty of people put their foot in their mouth when Microsoft randomly made the decision to choose Office 14 in lieu of Office 13 for superstitious reasons (which I covered in my article, “Why did Microsoft Skip Office 13?“).

As soon as I can dig up one of those roadmaps I’m so fond of running across, I’ll be sure to slap it up here! Let the speculation commence…

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

First in Italian, then in English and now in Korean! Adding to my shiny collection of Windows Server roadmaps with Windows 8 appearing on them, I stumbled across a Microsoft presentation in Korean that shows exactly the same data as seen on this roadmap and this roadmap. It’s a hideous port of a Powerpoint presentation to PDF on the behalf of the site I found it on, but, hey… it is what it is. Check it out:

There’s not much more to say that I haven’t already said in the previous two roadmap posts I linked to above other than to reiterate that this timeline appears to be pretty solidified, company-wide. And yes, I’m champing at the bit for Windows 8 anything and that will never be more evident than with my next Windows 8 post coming up. =)

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

With PDC 2009 right around the corner, you can probably bet the farm that Windows Mobile 7 will be unveiled there. Every PDC has consisted of major announcements and this one shouldn’t be any different. With Windows 7 out of the door, Office 14 all-but-complete, and Zune HD hitting the shelves soon, Windows Mobile 7 stands as the last really hot item to not be even so much as acknowledged by Microsoft. Well, I’m going to take it one step further and guess that Microsoft is not just going to reveal Windows Mobile 7, but they may even make a pre-release build of Windows Mobile 7 available at PDC. The reason I’m stepping out on that limb is comprised of 3 reasons:

1. Microsoft has a history of putting the bits of the technologies revealed during their keynotes into the hands of attendees at its conferences. If Windows Mobile 7 is revealed there and history is any kind of indicator, some form of the mobile OS will find its way into the hands of attendees.

2. The following Windows Mobile 7 roadmap I posted back in May which verified similar info Mary Jo Foley posted about back in February of Microsoft planning for a release to testers in November (the same month as PDC, no less):

3. The latest work experience status from the following LinkedIn profile of a Motorola employee has a rather interesting mention in it: “Runtime Environment: Windows Mobile 7.0 (Beta)“ Hmm… Does that mean Windows Mobile 7 has already hit an internal stage of Beta 1?

The aforementioned gives me good reason to speculate that Windows Mobile 7 will not only be revealed, but it will also be put into the hands of attendees in *some* capacity. I say, “some” capacity because I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to strip it of certain features (or disable them) – just as they’ve typically done with the Windows pre-release builds they’ve distributed at past conferences. The only problem I see with that hypothesis of mine is the number of people who could actually do something with those bits. We don’t all exactly have a spare Windows Mobile device hanging around for us to install a build of Windows Mobile 7 on. Actually, that gives me an idea that maybe, “the goods” could include something that would serve the purpose of using a Windows Mobile 7 build… probably not, but it would be cool if so!

With that in mind, I’m also going to guess that Windows Mobile 7 will meet a similar fate as Windows 7 where conference-attendee interaction is concerned: Once it’s announced during a keynote on either day 1 or day 2, there will be a number of Windows Mobile 7-ready devices on-hand for all to see up-close and fiddle with.

How different do you personally think the UI is going to be from Windows Mobile 6.5? Do you think it’s going to resemble the old WM7 prototype images that have been floating around out there for quite a while, or do you think it will be completely revolutionary? I’ve heard rumors from a couple of people that its interface will be the same as the Zune HD’s interface. I guess we will all find out soon enough!

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

The Windows Mobile 7 Search and Windows Mobile 7 Browser teams are currently looking for internal testers, or, “SDETs” (Software Design Engineer in Test), to work out the kinks of the up-and-coming mobile OS. On Microsoft’s Career website, there are a couple of jobs posted, each stating the following:

Windows Mobile 7 Search: “The Windows Mobile 7 Search team is looking for a strong and experienced Software Development Engineer in Test to join the team developing our next generation of Search for mobile devices. There will be significant cross group interactions with the Bing team, so you should have experience with working cross team on complex engineering initiatives.” (Link)

Windows Mobile 7 Browser: “The Windows Mobile 7 Browser team is looking for a strong an experienced software test lead to own the team testing our next generation mobile internet developer tools and the underling document object models supporting those tools. You will be responsible for a team of test engineers building and testing the next generation IE mobile programming interfaces and tools. There will be significant interactions with the Desktop IE team and so you should have experience with working cross team on complex engineering initiatives.” (Link)

Also of note is a bit of information contained in a no-longer-existing-but-Google-cached Microsoft job posting that puts a lot of emphasis on just how important Windows Mobile 7 is to the company. Check out this quote:

“Windows Mobile 7 is a huge, important bet for the company and the team has benefited from a recent influx of senior talent from around the company.” (Link)

I knew WM7 was the next big thing from the company, but it almost sounds like WM7 is becoming the Windows Longhorn of their mobile OS! Windows Mobile 7 has been on the roadmaps for years now and that statement above sounds like they’re treating it as if it’s an all-or-none gamble.

Lastly, there’s a job posting from the MSN Mobile Search team, whose core mission is to, “deliver search experiences on mobile phones, with a mandate to push the space’s boundaries and to dazzle users in an high bar environment.” The person who fills that position is noted to, “drive relationships with partner teams such as Seadragon and Photosynth in Live, Virtual Earth in MSN and various image and voice recognition technology partners in research, as well as teams in MSN and Windows Mobile 7.” (Link)

And that’s it for my Windows Mobile 7 kick for the day! Be sure to check out the links to those job postings to get a bit more information regarding them… especially if you’re interested in applying for them. =)

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com