So here we are at Microsoft TechEd for IT professionals, I think. It's the second part of TechEd here in Orlando, Florida. And I'm an IT guy for sure. Absolutely. One can tell. Let's talk about servers. So speaking of you being an IT guy, why don't you introduce yourself? I'm Brian Goldfarb and I work in Microsoft's developer division. And we look after sort of our .NET platform business. So .NET, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and the related aspects of technologies in that space. And of course we have James Governor here, which you may remember from previous episodes, of course. So the first thing I wanted to ask, so Silverlight 2 is coming out sometime soon. And we were just talking about it before we were starting to record, that there's been sort of like a very sort of consumer JavaScript focus, JavaScripty as it were. JavaScripty, yeah. Sort of focus on the first release. But what are you guys doing with the second release? We shipped the second beta of Silverlight 2 just the other day. And it's a big leap forward compared to the original version that we shipped, which was very focused on consumer media scenarios. Right. With Silverlight 2, though, we're making a big leap into much more line-of-business scenarios, much more deeper application scenarios, or true RIAs, if you will, both enterprise RIA and consumer RIA. Right, right. And we do that in a number of different ways, right? We do that by bringing .NET, the full power of .NET platform, managed code, and dynamic languages to Silverlight. So much, you know, better coding model, much higher quality focus, with a lot of history, right? The ability to do intelligent data binding, to have great communication stacks, data stacks, other integration makes it much more application-friendly. But also invested in controls. So the first version of Silverlight didn't come with any pre-built controls, whereas this version will have over 100 by the time when they're shipping. And by controls, you mean sort of a GUI toolkit, like a scroll bar? Yeah, scroll bars, radio buttons, text boxes. But having a multi-line, having a multi-line text box control, that supports Logan Globe, all built in, is kind of nice. Or the combo box. Combo box, sliders. Right. Imagine reporting, charting. Sure.
2:00It's limitless. It's just a limitation of our imagination. We'll have all those controls baked in. So really building a forms baseline of business apps is going to get a lot better through sort of applications. So that's been the big sort of dramatic change. We've also improved our media and other consumer-focused things. Sure. You know, Deep Zoom. It's gotten super high quality improvements in the video stack. Can you talk to the customer reference that was here yesterday, or was that just for the analysts? No, no. I can absolutely talk to it. You mean Hard Rock? Yeah, we saw a pretty cool demo. Hard Rock Cafe came in. Hard Rock International. Hard Rock International. Yes. Let's get the branding correct. Basically putting all of their memorabilia in an online archive, so that you can basically kind of go through and go into real depth about. I mean, they had sort of, you know, letters that Madonna had written. They had a first-class plane ticket that Jimi Hendrix took to London, and just this sort of interesting stuff. We're actually at an interesting inflection point around the way archiving and navigation works, and Hard Rock kind of illustrated that really well. I saw another cool demo actually at Jabba One where son, Neil Young, has put his entire archive onto Blu-Ray, and it'll be updated actually online as well. But the richness of it, you could really see that this is substantive and different. You know, in getting people access to their giant collection of memorabilia, you know, over 70,000 items in stores all across the world. And one of their big business challenges was how do you make this real? How do you make it tactile? How do you make it feel like you're there without actually being there, and protect some of these things? And so by using Silverlight and Deep Zoom, which is a technology, Silverlight that gives you access to super high-resolution imagery. You know, we're talking petabytes of imagery. See, that doesn't really mean anything. Because when you say super, that's no good. You need-- Barry? Well, I don't know. You need like Ultra? Ultra? Peta? Mega Zoom. Mega Zoom. Let's just say like a four gigabyte image. How's that? We'll be very specific. And making that work on any connection super smoothly with an ICY model of smooth scrolling
4:02and zooming. And great access to metadata and all kinds of pieces sort of in real time. One thing actually about the linking, because this was interesting. Yesterday it was said that you could just link to these things. It does do support deep linking. So even like to a Zoom that I've gone in specific, that is linked? That's correct. Mmm. So as you're Zooming, it's updating sort of a deep linking model and SEO model. So you can copy a URL, send it to somebody and say, "Here's the exact pixel I was looking at." At any given moment. If you look at things done with the Library of Congress and the British Library, we've done a lot of technology in the same vein of bringing archives online. Using our full .NET Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation. So there's been other efforts on this. I know that LOC and others are actively exploring Silverlight and what it brings to the market. You know, and having HardRock out there and kind of giving designers and business folks the ability to see this for the first time and go, "Whoa, that's cool." Like the HardRock experience, they have all these pin collectors. They made little custom made pins who saw this memorabilia collection and now they've asked to go and create a whole dynamic exchange for these millions of custom made pins. So a business they didn't even think about that's emerging from the creativity and possibility that people saw. So do you guys have any thinking or early customers who have been applying that kind of stuff to more business or enterprise concerns? Whether it's like, you know, here's 10,000 of like legal discovery documents or something. We've been talking about it. And things like that. Or do you think that that scenario even really exists in the business world? It's hard to say. You know, it's really hard to say if that scenario exists or not. Do you need to wire up super high resolution, very high resolution, incredibly high resolution. The funny thing that contains like the whole red monk high resolution. The whole real life thing is we'll get to the stage, "Oh, it's a filing cabinet." Exactly. Didn't we already have that? Yeah, exactly. I don't know. You could have it on a... With metadata and collections. I mean, you could actually sort their filing cabinet automatically instead of having to do that over the course of many hours. It's hard to say. There is a lot of document management and imaging needs in the enterprise.
6:03It's certainly worth exploring. And that is a pretty tough thing to get into, I imagine. I imagine that people who control the gates of getting into that market are pretty controlling of it. It's not my highest priority. Right, right. Of course, the whole question about, you know, managing your marketing and brand assets. Sure. That stuff is really hard to manage. So, we need new metaphors for... There's a thing called the Interactive Media Manager. It's a combination of SharePoint and Silverlight. It's focused on the media industry and managing broad sets of media assets across time and space in many ways. And so, that's, I guess, one step in that direction. Right, right, right. And that was sort of built as a vertical solution by Microsoft for a comm sector customers. Right. I imagine we'll start to see partners in the ecosystem building out sort of targeted solutions that combine CMS and document management and, you know, ERP and, you know, who knows. And using Silverlight as glue on the front end. That's really the way to think about it, right. This is an amazing presentation tier that provides you rich access to some sort of complex back-end systems from an enterprise perspective. It does that easily and does that in an open and interoperable way. What about the scripting languages? I mean, I was actually kind of surprised that you're supporting some of the scripting languages that, you know, people don't necessarily associate it as being Microsoft. Sure. Well, you know, because we don't, we don't, we didn't build everything. We just like to support things. I mean, the reality is we have a technology called the DLR, the Dynamic Language Runtime, which is effectively a way to break down the common glue that defines dynamicism in language. Well, we built two reference languages on top of that. We built Iron Python, which is a Python implementation, very 100% compatible with Python as it exists today, just running on top of .NET. And we're building out Ruby as an open source project called IronRuby. And that will be very highly compatible with Ruby. You can run Ruby on Rails now on top of it, just to give an example of the compatibility. And it's potentially possible to build other languages too. Hopefully those will do that.
8:03Silverlight does, and what makes this really interesting is traditionally Python and Ruby are server-side development languages. I write on the server, it co-jends something out, HTML, whatever, and it just works. We're bringing that power to the client. So you can throw a JavaScript out, which is going to make every Ruby developer really, really happy. And they can write Ruby code in the browser. I don't think it'll necessarily make every Ruby developer really happy. I think it will. A lot of them, 80% of them. In the beta, my understanding is that most people who write Ruby and Python don't want to write JavaScript in the browser. They'd much rather use the language of their choice there. And that's one of the things we're trying to do, is bring language choice from the server to the client. Sure. And that's the fundamental key. Do you guys have a public date for Silverlight 2, or is it just... So beta 2 is out right now. Sure. We'll ship the final version before the end of the year. Right. That is the public date. Indeed. So we're... Before January '09. That's right. Before then. And so unlike... We can throw darts at the board and maybe pick a real... Oh, sure, sure. No, no, no. That's a granular... One key thing to know is the beta 2 has a full, complete commercial go live license. So you don't have to wait to build and deploy applications today. I mean, the Olympics is going to be using beta 2, so... Right, right. And Hard Rock International. Is already using beta 2. So, you know, you can make those decisions on your own. But I feel like that release is incredibly high quality. Sure, sure. Well, great. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk about it. You bet. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. Okay, cheers. Sorry to make you a swivel head there.