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Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2: RTM and FTW!

 XBox 360-style achievement: "Achievement Unlocked: Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 RTM'd" Windows 7 logo

Windows 7 Released to Manufacturing

It’s been announced on the Windows Blog: Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing!

Brandon LeBlanc explained that “RTM” happens only after it’s been signed off. One of the release candidate builds becomes a contender for release to manufacturing after it goes through significant testing and passes all the validation tests for RTM including having all languages for that build completed. Build 7600 crossed all those hurdles and got signed off today.

The beta and release candidate period for “Seven” was quite unusual. Rather than hand it out to a closed group of beta testers, it was made available for download and I was given piles and piles of DVD-ROMs to hand out like candy. And strangely enough, people were asking for it. At the EnergizeIT installfests this spring, we played to packed rooms of people who took time out of their Saturday mornings and schlepped to Mississauga to install the beta. Even people with Macs, who ran it under Boot Camp or Parallels. It’s unusual for an operating system in beta – especially one from The Empire – to be in such demand.

I’ve been using the beta since January and the release candidate for the past few weeks as my primary operating systems with nary a hitch, glitch or blue screen. I’m looking forward to getting the final version of Windows 7, which will be the first of many new goodies coming from The Empire over the coming months,

If you’re a developer with an MSDN subscription or an IT pro with a TechNet subscription, you’ll be able to download the English Windows 7 RTM on August 6th, with other language versions on October 1st. Windows 7 will go on sale to the general public on October 22nd.

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 logo Windows Server 2008 R2 was also released to manufacturing today. As they state in the Windows Server Division Weblog, the simultaneous release is no coincidence but a design goal. “R2”, as I prefer to call it, boasts a lot of features such as Hyper-V, Live Migration, File Classification Infrastructure, an improved Active Directory, Pervasive PowerShell, IIS 7.5, server scalability, DirectAccess, BranchCache and improved Remote Desktop.

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John Udell DemoCamp / Science 2.0 Double-Header in Toronto Next Week

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

John Udell

Jon Udell – the developer, information architect, author who wrote about social software before we started calling it that, blogger and Senior Tech Evangelist at Microsoft – will be in Toronto next week and he’ll be at a couple of events that I’m attending.

DemoCamp Toronto 21

DemoCamp Toronto 21

On Tuesday, John will be at the 21st edition of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell event for people in the Toronto tech community, where entrepreneurial developers, designers, marketers and businesspeople get together to talk about what they’re working on, exchange ideas and get to know each other. We’re about using the power of technology and creativity to make Toronto (and the world) a better place to live, work and play. And yes, Yours Truly will help host the event.

Watch this blog for more details about next week’s DemoCamp, including the demos and Ignite presentations that will be featured that night.

Science 2.0

"Achewood" T-shirt featuring Roast Beef: "What We Need More Of is Science"

On Wednesday, John will be at Science 2.0, a conference exploring the ways in which computers and the internet are changing the way science is done. Speakers and presentations at Science 2.0 include:

  • Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
  • Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
  • Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
  • David Rich: Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
  • Victoria Stodden: How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method

John will have a talk at Science 2.0 in which he’ll cover the elmcity project, a community calendaring system running on the Azure platform and how it “tackles the challenge of social information management and aims to democratize the computational way of thinking that enables us to wire the web.”

I’ll be taking notes at both events and will post them on this blog.

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Coffee and Codes This Week: Guelph and Toronto

"Code Monkey" coffee mug

One quick announcement: I’m going to be at a couple of Coffee and Code events this week:

  • I’ll be at tomorrow’s (Tuesday, July 21st) Guelph Coffee and Code, which takes place at the Albion Hotel…
  • and at the Toronto Coffee and Code on Friday, July 24th at the Dark Horse Cafe on Spadina.

Be there!

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Thrive for Developers: Microsoft’s New Site for Developers Looking for Work

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Motivational poster: Sad "Star Wars" stoprmtrooper sitting alone on a train: "Unemployment: Sucks when your job gets blow'd up"

If you’re a developer looking for a job – or if you already have a job and are looking for a better one – you’ll want to check out Microsoft’s new Thrive for Developers, which describes itself as a one-stop community hub for advancing your career, enhancing your skills and connecting with your community. Having stuff like this has always been important, but it’s even more so in the middle of what I like to refer to as “The Econopocalypse”.

Some of the features on Thrive for Developers are:

  • Driving Your Career: A 32-week screencast series that takes a look at some skills that developers need to thrive in the current climate. The fact that they’re called “soft skills” suggest that many people don’t think much of them, but if you’ve seen my own personal example (laid off by a startup last September, invited to a dozen interview, hired by Microsoft three weeks later) or read books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you know that soft skills are valuable and anything but “soft”. Screencast Brian Prince will cover things like quick learning techniques, building consensus and the oft-difficult task of communicating with those pesky carbon-based lifeforms.
  • Connecting with Your Community: There’s a whole section that makes it easy to meet with other developers in your area or across North America, whether you want to find a job, join a user group, attend a developer gathering or catch a “nerd dinner”.
  • Developing in a Downturn: A lively 10-week podcast with stories, insights and real-world lessons from developers in all sorts of work environments – from small companies to multinationals – who share their top recession survival strategies.
  • Enhance Your Skills: Interactive lab sessions and resources covering both web development and Windows client application development.

Whether you’re looking to get into the game or stay on top of yours, Thrive for Developers is a great resource worth checking out.

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Open Source Language Roundtable Webcast: Wednesday, July 22nd

oscon_language_roundtable

O’Reilly’s conference on Open Source, OSCON, takes place this week in San Jose, California. One of the events taking place at OSCON is the Open Source Language Roundtable, the abstract for which appears below:

We all have our favorite languages in our tool-belt, but is there a ‘best’ overall language? If anyone can hash that out, it will be the members of this roundtable discussion, some of the stars of the open source language space. This wide-ranging session, hosted and moderated by the O’Reilly Media editorial staff, and broadcast live on the web, will try to identify the best and worst features of each language, and which are best for various types of application development.

The roundtable will me moderated by O’Reilly Media’s James Turner and will cover the following languages, listed below with the corresponding panelist:

  • Java: Rod Johnson (SpringSource)
  • Perl: Jim Brandt (Perl Foundation)
  • PHP: Laura Thomason (Mozilla)
  • Python: Alex Martelli (Google)
  • Ruby: Brian Ford (Engine Yard)

You can catch this roundtable even if you’re not going to be at OSCON because O’Reilly is webcasting the event. It takes place this Wednesday, July 22nd at 10pm EDT (7 pm Pacific) and is expected to run 90 minutes. It costs nothing to catch the webcast and you’ll even be able to ask the panelists questions via chat, but you’ll need to register.

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Damian Conway’s Talk, “The Missing Link”: Monday July 27th in Toronto

Damian Conway

Although I’m not a terribly big fan of the Perl programming language, I am a big fan of one of its best-known contributors and advocates, Damian Conway. There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation, which is equal parts pop culture, deep science, software engineering and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I make it a point to see him whenever he comes to Toronto, and that’s happening next Monday, July 27th to the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at University of Toronto to give another amusing, enlightening and most importantly, free talk. This one’s called The Missing Link, and here’s the abstract:

What do:

  • watching trees grow,
  • debugging debuggers,
  • Greek mythology,
  • code that writes code that writes code that writes code,
  • the hazards of LaTeX, successful failures,
  • the treacherous Vorta,
  • objective syntax,
  • anti-stacks,
  • Danish mind-control,
  • active null statements,
  • synthetic standup,
  • and the prospect of certain death

…all have in common?           

Watch as Damian Conway weaves them together into a new and improbably useful module that demonstrates the awesome power and beauty of Perl 5.10.

Even if you’ll never write a line of Perl in your life (which, IMHO, isn’t necessarily a bad thing), you’d do well to catch a Damian Conway presentation. His guided tours of his way-out-in-left-field thinking about life, the universe, programming and everything will turn your brain upside down, give you some good laughs, make you think about coding differently and might even make you a better developer.

Once again, the details:

  • When: Monday, July 27th at 7:00 p.m.
  • Where: Bahen Centre, University of Toronto (40 St. George Street), room 1160 (the major lecture theatre on the ground floor)
  • How much? Free!

Show up early to make sure you get a good seat. I’ll see you there!

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The “Name My Floater” Contest

floater

Over on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, I’m holding a “name my floater” contest. Get the back story, think up a name, win a gift certificate!