Windows Phone 7 is here and I’ve been putting it through its paces for over a week now and let me start by saying I am very impressed. We finally have a product worthy to be discussed in the same realm as an iPhone. And NO it does not outperform or outclass the iPhone 4 (in its 4th generation). I did not expect it to, neither did several others given the 4 year lead time. But what surprised me was the refreshing new user experience which was not imitative of anything out there while still satisfying on so many levels and more importantly the level of polish/refinement/performance they managed to deliver with just the version 1 of the franchise reboot.

Background:

Windows Phone 7 is a start over for Microsoft in the mobile space – it is a do or die moment. As an ardent Windows mobile user since the 2001’s – beginning with buying a Compaq iPaq (giving up my Palm 100) and then the very 1st Windows mobile phone in the US – Motorola MPX200 (see link1 & link2), I’ve been disappointed to see Microsoft slowly give up what was a commendable growing market share in the 2005’s. As it is always in history, this was a result of the lack of a worthy competitor in the early smartphone days and inadequate pace of innovation in software wherein release after release became an evolutionary one building on the success of the previous release and no true game changers. Apple with the iPhone changed everything. It truly revolutionized the mobile world and made the smartphone a device that did not require smartness on the part of the end user – giving literal meaning to the phrase “even my mom can use it”.

None in my family with the exception of me and my nephews were tech savvy and all others detested smartphones or any phones that had anything more than 9 buttons to dial with – they viewed the Windows Mobile 5x and 6x phones as mini-computers that were uncomfortable operating. It all began with my wife for whom I got an iPhone 2G 2 years back as she wanted an iPod when she works out at the gym.  The Zune was considered but with the Zune she’d have to carry 2 devices – both her Zune and her cellphone. She reluctantly accepted the iPhone 2G but over time grew to love it. But beyond the phone and music, it is our 5 year old son (3 back then) who was (and still is) the heaviest user of her phone playing games with great finesse & ME installing apps by the boatloads with the hope that my wife may one day use it. My parents (both of whom are back in India) watched my more tech savvy uncles and nephews use iPhone’s with such ease, that my brother managed to finally get my mom an iPhone 3GS on her 50th birthday for the same reason – it’s a great portable media player and she loves listening to music. And finally the most technology averse individual in my family – my dad was also finally open to owning one of his own after enjoying countless hours of game play on my mom’s iPhone. As a result I just gifted him an iPhone 4 for my parents upcoming big wedding anniversary. So my family pretty much owns (or owned)  every iPhone model ever made — my wife: iPhone 2G, my mom: iPhone 3GS, my dad: iPhone 4 and I briefly owned an iPhone 3G (see here for my experiences and why I gave up).

Now let’s jump into the Windows Phone 7 review.

Boot and first launch experience:

The first thing you notice when you switch on the Windows Phone 7 device is how fast it boots up (significantly faster than any iPhone) from cold boot. It starts by asking you to provide a Windows Live ID – which on the Windows Phone 7 device is what lights it all up (Facebook ID would be an alternative) . It is what is used to make app purchases in the Windows Marketplace (AppStore equivalent). This is also the one ID you will need if you are a social butterfly i.e. use Linked In or Twitter or Facebook as Windows Live can serve as an aggregator of all social network activity once configured (you can do so here – Paul Thurott of WinSupersite has elaborate instructions on how to do this here). Assuming you’ve set this up (if not, I highly encourage you to do so before you setup your Windows Phone), you will be able to view all of your social activity and that of all of your friends on any of those networks you’ve linked with Live on  Windows Live Messenger, live.com and now on Windows Phone 7 integrated right into the people hub and photos hub – it is pervasive. Now if you are uncomfortable with linking your social networks with liveID, you can for now link your Facebook (only social network currently supported – and in most cases suffices as it is the most popular) to your Windows Phone 7 device directly and get an almost similar experience.

Once you provide this minimal information, the phone takes you to the new home page which is an array of tiles – Microsoft calls them Live tiles. Initially you may be taken back by the non-iphone-like experience (assuming you’ve used an iPhone or Android) and initially I wasn’t convinced I’d like it. But after 2 weeks of usage, I can tell you that it definitely grows on you and you begin liking it (as several other WP7  reviewers have also mentioned). It takes a different approach from the iPhone and I find myself going into a hub/app only if the Live Tile shows anything of interest – new count of items, new pictures, etc.

Below is the pretty lock screen that is consistent with Microsoft Live Tiles model for WP7 (get in and get out, glance and go mantra) and shows the most relevant information at a glance – the time, what/where your next meeting is and count of new unread messages or emails you’ve received – something that the iPhone lacks and I find annoying it doesn’t.

People Hub:

Windows Phone will automatically detect all your contacts on these networks and populate your People hub (Contacts list on the Windows Phone 7) with their numbers and their recent activity.  The ability to view all your contacts and their activity (including their recently uploaded pictures) is so darn impressive that you wonder how you’ve lived without it. It makes the Apple iPhone look ancient. The big downside I saw with the People Hub was the lack of support for syncing with Outlook Contacts/Calendar on the PC (i.e. without using cloud). This one is clearly baffling as pretty much all smartphones support this – the iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc. How (or why) did Microsoft decide to not support the traditional sync with  Outlook account on a connected PC – which should not be uncommon if Windows Phone 7 customers are Microsoft customers using Office. While this has not impacted me much since I decided a few years back to add all my personal contacts to my Exchange Address Book, I can clearly see this to be an issue for several of my friends and family members. My suggestion to them thus far has been to import their contacts & calendar into Windows Live and sync with Windows Live (use ‘Add People’ under link).

Another really cool aspect of the People Hub was the fact that the phone tried to avoid duplicates and linked together contacts that it saw as duplicates across Exchange, Live and Facebook. Note: This is not merge and that’s what made it useful and special. It integrates the information across all of the contact and just displays them as one and shows with a visual cue that shows how many sources were used. You could also customize which picture to use for the contact (say the one on Exchange instead of Facebook – though by default it uses the picture from your social account). It also provides an ability to link contacts together that were missed in auto-linking. You could select any contact and link that to another contact – this is useful when the names are very different in Facebook, Exchange or Google and the phone did not integrate the duplicates together. The whole experience in the People hub is magical.

Photo Hub:

Next up is the Photo’s hub. Again unlike the iPhone wherein you would need to plug the phone to iTunes and manually move over some photos to the iPhone to make it truly display anything beyond sample pictures – the Windows Phone 7 device goes much beyond. It automatically brings down and displays all the photo albums you have on Facebook and on Skydrive (photos.live.com) – AND that of your friends too!! — on the device without any additional setup or prompting – starting off with thumbnail previews for everything. On navigating into the album, it downloads the picture for display and the speed at which it does depends on your network speed (more on this later). But when you are on Wifi or 3G this whole experience is like magic – to see all your precious memories readily available on the device — for your own viewing please and/or to show off to your friends/family within 5 mins of booting up the device – no setup required.

Facebook phone – a la social device

Windows Phone 7 is the first social phone. I’d even call it a Facebook phone as the level of integration with Facebook may make many think Microsoft owns Facebook (which it does but just 5%). Ability to post your latest status update on what you are thinking on Facebook or all your social networks by just clicking on your “My” tile (if you’ve setup Live social network aggregation and granted permission for live to post on your behalf to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) – no apps to launch or sign into, ability to view your Contacts from Facebook in your People hub (contacts list), Pictures from Facebook (both yours and that of your friends) in your Pictures hub, Activities of all your friends on Facebook – all integrated so seamless across the phone.  In fact the level of integration is so high that you will hardly find the need to use the dedicated Facebook app.

Email Hub:

Next up is the Email Hub. The implementation here is flawless. This is clearly an experience that is much superior to that on the iPhone. Multi select, deletion, flagging of messages, search are also so intuitive. Add to it the panoramic scrolling to get to  Unread messages, Flagged messages, you find it all so compelling that you wonder why someone had not thought of such a simple way to manage and view your emails before. The email client on the Windows Phone 7 is clearly a highlight of the platform – an almost flawless implementation if it only had Copy/Paste support (coming as an update in early 2011 apparently) – a glaring omission considering Windows Mobile 6x devices supported it for years now. There is also no unified inbox – not something I care for as I prefer having my email accounts separate.

Calendar:

Windows Phone 7 supports calendars from Exchange, Hotmail (or Live) and Google to name a few and displays them together using a different unique color for appointments from each of these calendars. You can also choose to selectively disable the display of these calendars in the Calendar hub – say you use Google email but do not want to use Google contacts or Google calendar, you can disable them. This is neat and valuable. The calendar supports the Outlook type All Day view, an Agenda view and a monthly calendar view. One thing missing is the week view – which while may not be easy to read in portrait mode could be useful in landscape mode.  Another delighter (wow) feature that brings a smile your face is the dedicated “I am going to be late” icon when you bring up a meeting invite that when pressed brings up an pre-filed email that notifies the attendees or just organizer (u are given an option) that you are on your way and running late. This is extremely useful considering how often this is the case with my back to back meeting schedule and interestingly I even called out the inability of the iPhone 3G, 2 years back, for not supporting reply or reply all on meeting requests for the same reason. This addressed that problem and goes a step further. Sweet!

Music & Videos Hub – Zune connection:

The Music hub brings up the top notch Zune experience (from which the whole Windows Phone 7 UI was built on top of). This is one of the few apps that can run in the background. I also love the subtle touch as to how you control the music playing in the background – just press the volume up or down button and a minimal set of controls will show up at the very top which will allow you to change the song, pause it, etc. Pretty intuitive and in many ways easier to get to than on the iPhone. One of the other compelling value proposition of Zune and now Windows Phone 7’s (and even the Xbox 360 with the Nov 1st update) is the Zune Pass – unlimited music downloads and listening for a fixed monthly subscription – something the iPhone does not offer and something that Zune Pass owners will vouch for as being a terrific service.

Camera:

The built-in Camera app is minimalistic with not much edit/customization controls. Microsoft chose to let the OEMs customize and provide the controls they desire to expose. But how you invoke the camera and what happens when you take a picture is where the magic is. Regardless of what screen you are on and even better – even if the phone is locked – picking up the phone, pressing and holding the dedicated camera button on the phone for  2 seconds will bring up the camera and you can click pictures immediately. This is most convenient when you have the phone locked with a pin (which is required for most using Exchange Active Sync). So in less than 3 seconds you can be clicking pictures without the need to unlock the phone — effectively making every Windows Phone 7 device,  a 5+ mega pixel Camera first, a phone 2nd! Even better when you take a picture, the phone offers (for the very 1st time) to automatically upload the pictures to Skydrive (default – can be changed to Facebook) immediately on image capture for the viewing by yourself, yourself + friends or everyone. Once you set this up, you will find that any and all pictures you take on your Windows Phone 7 device from then on is automatically uploaded to the “Skydrive Camera roll” folder on photos.live.com. Pictures that you manually upload from your phone to Skydrive, shows up under the “Mobile photos” folder. Based on the permissions you set these photos could be made visible to  just yourself or just your friends or anyone. I found this extremely useful on my recent India trip for my Dad’s surgery wherein I configured the permission of the folder on Skydrive to just me and my wife & so every time I took a picture of anything, she (and my 2 sons) could see it online within a few seconds – it showed up on her facebook wall, her Windows Live Messenger status update feed and on her photos.live.com page. I even used this feature to shop for a saree for her for our upcoming 10th wedding anniversary. She in real time (in USA while I was in India) used comments on Live to comment on and indicate what saree she liked.  “Like it!”. You could alternatively use the “Share” option to send the picture over email, MMS or alternatively “Upload to Facebook”. You can change the default upload location by going to Settings, pivot over to Applications, select Pictures and set the default upload to Facebook.

The other annoyance outside the minimal camera controls is the lack of support to upload videos directly to YouTube. The omission is glaring considering how seamless both Android and iPhone make this possible. The only way currently to get movies off of the device is to sync with the Zune client on the PC and then upload to YouTube from there. Another big missing feature is Video Chat – considering Microsoft’s assets with Live Messenger, Lync & Kinect, this is another glaring omission. Currently I don’t see any 3rd party video chat experiences either (a la Yahoo messenger on iPhone that supports video chat). So not sure if this is a platform limitation.

Xbox Live & Games Hub:

Windows Phone 7 device gets to me the first and most likely only platform to support Xbox Live! This is genius on the part of Microsoft to leverage their strengths in integrating xbox live. Basically every Windows Phone 7 device is now a Xbox-2-go device. The quality and graphics of the initial games are extremely promising and receiving rave/solid reviews. While the # of games available seem to be limited compared to the Apple iPhone, the comparison itself is unfair given Apple’s 4 years lead time and numerous apps that have been developed in this time. There are some unique games on the Windows Phone 7 device as a result of Xbox Live. I expect this to only grow. I’d consider it a huge success if we could get just the  top 10% games (free+paid) on the iPhone platform to Windows Phone 7 – we don’t need all of them. Considering I’ve already  seen and played a few like Flight Control even before the official US launch, I am optimistic that this is just a matter of time.

Internet Explorer:

The browser on Windows Phone 7 is pretty slick, works with almost all sites, renders pages pretty well and is extremely performant – comparable to Opera Mobile and Safari on the iPhone. It is especially day and night when compared to the poor mobile IE experience we’ve seen in prior Windows Mobile devices. Similar to Safari on iPhone, WP7 does not support Adobe Flash or Silverlight plugin at launch but plans to add support in early 2011. What is most impressive about IE on Windows Phone 7 is its reliability and stability – it is top notch – especially when compared to the early days of Safari on iPhone 2G and 3G which was terrible and notorious for crashing and restarting (one of the primary reasons I returned my iPhone 3G). The favorites, multi tab support and switching between tabs has all been implemented with great simplicity and pretty intuitive.

Office Hub:

I am not an avid Office user as I don’t work on my phone beyond emails. The office integration bring Office mobile to the Windows Phone 7 platform. The unique addition here is the sharepoint integration. I also find myself using One Note (due to absence of Outlook Notes functionality) and syncing my One Note on my PC to my Phone using Sync and Skydrive. The integration is flawless but not very easy to setup or intuitive as I’d like it to be. Microsoft may want to provide for a wizard or plugin to move folks using Outlook Notes to One Note if that is the direction they’d like  us to go. I have some very useful and pertinent information in my Outlook Notes that I cannot be without. So I managed to workaround the  limitation by importing the Outlook Notes to OneNote using a third party download and then moving the OneNote to Skydrive and syncing across PC and Phone.

Marketplace:

The Martketplace is the Windows Phone 7 equivalent of the Apple iTunes AppStore. The marketplace is also the place to purchase Games (including Xbox Live games), Apps, Music & Podcasts for both Windows Phone 7 and Zune. Using the Marketplace requires you to establish a sync relationship with a Zune client on a PC prior to purchase. The Marketplace on the phone provides most of the features you see on iTunes AppStore and Android store like Categories, Top Free Apps, Top Paid Apps, etc.

The same cannot be said of the Zune client for the PC. It has a lot of rough edges and has a lot of growing up to do. The marketplace on the Zune client is pretty basic and lacks several features. It does not provide for a way to easily view previously purchased Apps or easily reacquire or reinstall aps. An experience that was extremely frustrating (and does not seem to have been thought through) was around reacquiring of apps to a new phone as a result of a lost phone or reset phone or swapped phone in warranty – something that is seamless on the iPhone. Here is my experience — I had to replace my phone and when I got the new phone and tried to connect and re-download the apps, the phone did not download them when connected to Zune client. Trying to click on Apps in the Marketplace on Zune, kept telling me “you have already purchased this app” but did not allow for me to re-download the app – why not do what the iPhone does and re-download the app to my phone when connected even if I already have it. Interestingly enough Windows Phone 7 does support application re-acquisition (in fact on up to 5 devices) but it is the implementation that I found, after a lot of trial & error, to be flawed. Basically you need to first connect your phone to Zune client on a PC and establish a sync relationship but when connected to the PC over Zune, the Windows Phone 7 device does not reacquire or redownload apps. Once you disconnect it, it will only then begin download of the apps over 3G or Wifi one by one automatically – in the process the reacquire/re-download process is extremely slow as well. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future update. That said the overall sync experience with the Zune is pretty fast especially when compared to the iTunes+iPhone which seems to take forever every time I connect my wife’s iPhone to the PC.

Making and Receiving Calls:

Now let’s talk about the most important reason for buying a phone – to make and receive calls. So how does Windows Phone 7 do? It does what it does pretty well but is basic in nature (seems unfinished in places) and is adequate at best . To make a call you tap the Phone icon (1st at the top — it is not a hub and that’s a let down) and then make a call by either bringing up the onscreen keypad and dialing a number (or) by bringing up the address book – which brings up the People Hub. You can alternatively just go directly to the People hub (which is what I find myself doing), pick the contact, select the number and make call. You can pick the contact, either through scrolling until you find it (or) by clicking on the alphabet to get to the contacts beginning with that alphabet (or) the most common way you will find yourself doing it is using search (or) alternatively by swiping right to go to your Recent Contacts and call from there if present there. All pretty simple and works well. Another unique way to access a contact is to have their contact card pinned to start – just click and hold on the contact until you see the “Pin to Start” and clicking on it will allow you to get the Contact pinned to the Start screen the same as any other application – this is pretty neat and allows you to treat Contacts as 1st class citizens in the platform and make a quick call by just going to Start (pressing Windows key) and then selecting the Contact you want to call. BTW the ‘Pin to Start’ can be done with Maps, Directions, Webpages, Pictures or Videos – and is very useful.

So what’s missing? Favorites and Visual Voicemail are the most glaring omissions. There is no Favorites in the People Hub or in the Phone console (you instead get to use the ‘Pin to Start’ which while unique is not the same experience as having a separate Favorites pivot in the hub). Also missing is Visual Voicemail which by now is standard on all other competitive platforms – apparently this is a feature that is up to the Carriers to implement – not sure why neither AT&T nor T-Mobile have it implemented – and neither sure why it is not required a la iPhone. Also disappointing is how basic the Phone app/console is. When you launch it takes you to the Call History (missed calls & previously dialed calls) and shows options for 1) checking your voice mail, 2) bringing up the keypad for manually dialing a number and 3) opening the address book – which brings up the People Hub. Now if you do click on a missed call in the Call History log, it does NOT dial the number, it brings up their Contact card and expects you to select the number. I have several times picked the wrong number  (i.e. mobile instead of home since I don’t know where they called from) and found myself going back to the previous page to determine what number they called from (home or work or mobile) and redialing that number. Extremely annoying and a lot of wasted calls!! Why not call the number that is shown in the Call History (and provide for the option to bring up the Contact card if needed)? This would be more intuitive and similar to what most other platforms (iPhone, Android) do as well. But that’s not the case here. [UPDATE: Someone on the WP7 team contacted me to tell me how this can be done – just click on the small phone symbol next to the name in the Call History and it will call them at the number the call came from or was made to, instead of bringing up the contact card. Duh! It’s definitely not intuitive but I am relieved to be able to know how to do this. A better option would have been to swap the 2 – have the default make the call to the last # and clicking on the  small address book symbol bring up their contact card]. Also the call history does not segregate Incoming Accepted Calls, Incoming Missed Calls and Outgoing Calls separately but instead collapses them into one flat list – while this is adequate, it would have been nicer if there was an option to just see the missed calls. The other minor annoyance I see is that when you are in a Call, there is no Picture of the contact you are talking to and most of the Options (Hold, Speaker, Bluetooth transfer, Mute & Conference)  are all hidden by default and only shown when you press the drop down more options button. Considering how often I find myself bringing up the More Options and how much real estate is available (bottom 60%+ is black) when you are in a Call, I find this a baffling design decision. Also the  end call button is too small for your fingers and placed weirdly — should have been bigger, more prominent and closer to the bottom of the screen that would make it more friendly to one-handed operation.

But the most annoying of them all is the inability to make a quick call (assuming you did not know Speech feature existed or if it did not recognize your accent well). There is no shortcut  (that I know of) to bring up the phone app/console and dial a call without going to Start home page (using Windows key)  and if in the Home page already, scrolling to the top of the home and then going through the Phone app or People Hub (for unpinned Contacts) and then picking the Contact Card of the individual you want to call and then selecting the number (mobile or work or home) you want to call. It would have been nicer if there was some kind of shortcut to get to the phone app and make a call without having to bring up the Contact Card every time.  For example to call a friend on his mobile (assuming I did not pin him to the Start) , I find myself having to navigate through 4 to 5 clicks/screens.

In the course of writing this review, I discovered an excellent feature that has not gotten its due — speech recognition on Windows Phone 7 that clearly helps workaround this limitation – assuming the phone recognizes your accent -  which it does a pretty good job of in my case including non-American names. So far the voice dialing has been 90% effective and I can use this to call someone by just holding the windows key (even when the phone is locked – a setting that needs to be enabled) and then saying “Call Rob mobile”. Bam! That’s it and you’ve made the call.

Search:

Search is integrated pervasively throughout the platform in that we have a dedicated Search hardware button on all Windows Phone 7 devices. Clicking on search when on the home screen or elsewhere in an app, will bring up Bing Search and allow you to search anything on the internet. When you are in the People Hub (address book), clicking the Search button will allow for you to search within the People Hub for a specific contact. When you are viewing email, clicking on it will search within the emails for keywords you enter and narrow it down. When you are in the Marketplace, search will search within the Marketplace. Same with Call History. The Bing Search app also integrates the panoramic hub concept where in swiping right toggles between Web, Local & News. This is pretty neat as the Local Tab shows nearby locations of places with address on a map – extremely useful when u are searching for a restaurant or a place nearby. You can also search for something using voice search without using the onscreen keyboard. This works extremely well.

Voice Commands:

Windows Phone 7 supports voice navigation to Call someone, Find something or Open an app.   I discovered this during the course of writing this review and boy does it rock! It works extremely well in what it does. It does a few things but does them very well. This video provides a good overview of the feature that I did not know existed. Just say “Call Rob mobile” and the phone will  call Rob on his mobile number. You can also call a number by saying the numbers. You can say “Find Local Pizza” to launch Bing Search to find the local pizza places and display them sorted on a map. “Find Movie showtimes” command works even better and is so useful. The voice command functionality can be invoked by pressing and holding the “Windows key” (even when the phone is locked – a setting that can be enabled).  It works like a charm. This is the payoff from Microsoft’s 800 million TellMe acquisition several years ago.

Live integration:  http://windowsphone.live.com/

One of the  compelling features that has not got its due or attention  “yet” on Windows Phone 7 is it level of integration with Windows Live and all the features that light up as a result. This is basically the iPhone Mobile Me equivalent – but for FREE! Yes. It is free. Maybe charging $0.99 or $4.99 for it may make people see the real value of it. Once you’ve setup your new phone with a LiveID, you can navigate to http://windowsphone.live.com/and see all the possibilities – viewing Contacts on your phone, viewing Pictures taken on your phone, ability to Find your Phone when lost (make it ring, lock, erase or show its location on a map). I expect the feature list here to only grow and maybe integrate seamlessly with Zune Marketplace on the web as well (as I currently cannot see the Apps on the phone from this page).

Polish and Performance:

The overall fit and finish of the Windows Phone 7 UI and experiences is nothing like any other Microsoft software or device. The reliability and performance has also been stellar. The whole UI is fluid and the transitions/animations are just right and more importantly seem consistent throughout – something Microsoft does not have a good track record for in the past (w/ exception of maybe the Xbox). With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft shows that it can be done when we start over w/o the burden of app compat (something we’ve been unable to do with Windows client or server OS for the same reason – breaking app compat). While the overall feature set when compared against the current set of Apple iPhone or Android devices may seem less favorable, Microsoft seems to have chosen quality over quantity – instead focusing on polishing the feature set they chose to deliver the v1 OS with. Clearly the Windows Phone 7 experience seems way more polished, refined, solid and performant when compared with v1 Android devices. and even v1 iPhone devices (esp. performance/reliability)

So what’s missing:

As with any v1 device, there are few features that are missing – some critical, some annoying & some nice to have. Most were supported for years on the WM 6.x platform and hence omissions that may find itself back with the next set of updates or forever gone. They are:

• No support for sync with Outlook on the desktop,
• No support for sync of Tasks or Notes over Exchange Active Sync
• No support for Copy/Paste (coming in early 2011)
• No Voice Chat
• No Visual Voicemail (carriers slacking?)
• Limited multi-tasking support – btw I personally did not miss this much except when I had to switch from a game to check something on IE OR when I come back from a locked session (sometimes due to timeout of screen display).

Windows Phone 7 is truly a social phone – one that is meant to be always connected as it lights up with an omnipresent internet connection. But that comes with a downside – which hopefully many in developed countries or non-3G areas won’t run into. When you try to use the phone without a wireless data plan or even over Edge (as I had to do in India), the experience just sucks. A lot of thumbnails & data don’t load (lot of black screen), some of them timeout and the phone does not look pretty or performant. It just hangs trying to load things like activities when you go into People hub and pictures when you go into the Pictures hub. This is exacerbated and made prominent as a result of the “Hub” concept on the Windows Phone 7 devices and the tight integration with social activity. On the iPhones you will find the basic iPhone pretty performant and experience within the OS consistent over Edge, 3G or no data connection – reason is simple, it is App Centric and the failures will all show up only within the App. This is not the case with Windows Phone 7 and makes an average consumer view the Windows Phone 7 as lethargic or slow – god forbid if this was his first use experience, he’d be very disappointed.

Closing Thoughts:

Windows Phone 7 is fresh, polished, reliable, performant and most important of all refreshing. It is like a breath of fresh air. Microsoft has got a lot right and very little wrong. Most of the gaps I see can easily be fixed with updates over the next few months – it is imperative that we release a regular stream of updates – minor update every 6 months & major update every 12 or 24 months would be ideal.

That said the biggest let down for the Windows Phone 7 at launch is its potential strength – the hardware. While diversity of hardware is something that provides for more choice, none of the 10 devices announced have overawed the consumer blogosphere. There is no buzz on the hardware. It is the Windows Phone OS that has impressed most reviewers – not the hardware. To add to it the battery life on iPhone 4 and some of the new Android devices are way better – 30% better. The oohs & aahs are still reserved for the iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S and few other Android devices. Don’t get me wrong, the Samsung Focus and HTC HD7 are solid devices but they have not taken the world by storm. HTC HD7 hardware is a 0.1 increment  update of the HTC HD2 that was released more than a year ago – disappointing on so many levels. HTC could have done so much more for a new platform. A yardstick I use is the “got to have it factor” – none of the current Windows Phone 7 hardware has the  got to have it factor that would compel an iPhone or Android user to give up with their phone and go get one (even if it were just for the device). There are several users (consumers) who more than they care about the OS believe in having the coolest device. I am big believer that it is the hardware that attracts consumers and software that retains them. If the hardware partners were to create the world’s thinnest phone or the highest resolution phone or best display that one-ups the iPhone 4 retina display AND they run Windows Phone 7, it would get people curious and build the excitement for consumers to go and get a Windows Phone 7 device and in the process win them over. Microsoft really needs to find ways to accelerate hardware innovation and partner with the phone device manufacturers on coming out with unique, innovative and first seen on WP7 new hardware for Windows Phone 7.

All said and done, Microsoft is off to a promising start on rebooting the Windows mobile platform. The smartphone wars have just begun and I cannot wait to see how this all turns out in 5 years from now. I do however know one thing – THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!

For more, check out the useful resource on Windows Phone 7 Features: How To

So where do I start and how do I summarize 2009? I already did in my blog post title. It was truly a year of bountiful blessings. Without any further delay, let me enumerate…

1. A new role, a new team & a new challenge: August 2009 will always be special. It was during this time (starting in July) that a major re-org came about in Windows (the org I was in). There were several individuals uncertain and frantic about what their new roles would be. There were several rumors and several pessimists among us who constantly fretted. Everyone knew change was in the air… a certain change several feared. I for one was strangely quite optimistic, calm and confident throughout the whole re-org. On retrospect it was as if I had found a new me. I am usually paranoid and fret about everything. But I clearly remember that I was unusually calm, well collected and confident during the whole re-org. I was well prepared too – thanks in large part to a man called Ross Smith. He kept me updated of the latest developments and gave me the much needed confidence boosters. He always pepped me up and made me feel special. He encouraged me to reach out, start early and be prepared for anything. He pushed me to go out there and seek out opportunities – something that I did. I ate up all his advice. Thank you Ross! Before I did reach out, I started by identifying what it is that is most important to me – who I work for or whom I work with or what I work on or is it the scope in the role I will take on and in what order of priority? Once I knew this, I was methodical in whom I reached out to and which teams I spoke to. The final decision was hard as I had several options on the table to choose from. But eventually I followed my gut and decided to take on the most challenging of all the opportunities &  give back to the very team that had given so much to me. That I was considered over several other equally deserving and respected individuals & veterans just made it all the more compelling. Again I was blessed – in being at the right place at the right time of my career. I should point out that my team and my directs stood by me throughout the re-org with tremendous patience. They are amazing. I have now inherited what is truly an amazing team of very capable & talented individuals. I look forward to giving back to them what this team has given me in my career — great opportunities, ample freedom to pursue what one believes in, a clear path for growth & excellent rewards. The journey has just begun and I have a lot to achieve…

2. Principal Engineer @ Microsoft: This was also the year I made it to the “Principal” level – a pretty distinguished level here at Microsoft more so in the Test discipline. This too came about in August. I was extremely happy and equally thankful to God for getting here in the time I did. I realize that several don’t make it thus far as the stakes are high, expectations immense and the challenges huge. Honestly I did not work towards this as the goal. I always believed in doing my best work and giving it my all in everything I do. Additionally I always look for feedback in how I can improve and what I can do better – what I call continuous learning and self-improvement. I have been fortunate to be in a team that rewarded this year over year and this continued to serve as an accelerant towards my growth here at Microsoft. If there is one individual who deserves a lot of credit for my growth, it would be Mark Hanson my manager for the last 5 years. His strengths were my weaknesses. He taught me how to negotiate, reward people, connect with them socially and most important of all how to network. He made me reach out to people and get out of my comfort zone. Mark gave me fantastic opportunities, boatloads of freedom, unfettering support and a great role to do my best work and pursue whatever I believed in. He provided the perfect platform.

3. Sanjaay & family: On the personal front, this was a year wherein I found someone else to share my life with – Sanjaay. I was very close to my 1st son Rahul so I initially found Sanjaay as more of a distraction and someone who took time away from Rahul. But as weeks and months progressed and as  he grew up, I started discovering the  great kid he was. He is amazing and a lot of fun to be with – sometimes I think he may be more fun that Rahul. I still don’t think I spend enough time with him. Many times I find myself in a quandary over whom to spend my limited time with esp. when I come home so late at night. Sanjaay is more mischievous than Rahul. He takes a lot more risks and does the opposite of what you tell him most times. I have had to adapt myself for him as I found him testing my patience. A good example is when I had to give in and move all my artificial plants into a closet as I could not teach Sanjaay to stop tearing the leaves and making a mess everyday for me to cleanup. I also had to move my new DVD rack into a closet as I could not get Sanjaay from not pulling out all the DVDs every few minutes.

Rahul on the other hand has slowly started to become less cute as he keeps getting into fights and sometimes does not listen to what I or Sweethaa say. When other kids or parents complain about him, I get more annoyed at Rahul. I guess it is I who needs to change to accept him as a regular kid and not this perfect angel who is always going to be perfect in everything he does. Some work cut out for me here… I also need to find better ways to discipline him – I am getting tired of all the ‘timeouts’ and even occasional spankings – don’t fear they don’t hurt – I love him too much. I find that spanking only creates fear and I don’t want him to fear me. How do other parents instill discipline with just love? What makes it hard for me is that I and several of my siblings/cousins, when we were growing up, were all disciplined mostly through spanking. So I have a lot to learn here. It’s unchartered territory…

This was also the year that my cousin Vishal got married. I am glad I could attend his marriage. Boy, time flies. I still remember when he was as old as Rahul running around the house. It just seems like yesterday and now he was all grown up, finished college and ready for marriage. When we visited India in March, they just started looking for a bride for him and in less than 2 months his marriage had been finalized. It was all too fast but again it was inevitable. I am very close to my uncle Babu. Everyone adores him. So there was no way I was going to miss his son’s marriage – even if it happened right in the middle of the re-org. He also deserves partial credit  for my success at work – as it was the trip to India to attend his son’s marriage that made me start early and work harder in finding my next challenge during the re-org before I left for my trip to India. It was a extremely short trip for me – 5 days that I extended to 8 days. But it was necessary that I be there to ensure I had no regrets. Next in line was Dharani & Keerthana’s marriage. Both their marriages were finalized this year after several years of groom hunting. While I won’t make it to their marriages in person, my best wishes are always with them.

This was also the year that Neha (my brother’s 1st kid) was born and turned Sankar (my brother) into a responsible adult. My brother bought his 1st house – that too a brand new one — just this past month and will be moving in sometime in Jan. Usha (my sister) also became pregnant and is expecting her 3rd kid — hopefully it is a boy that she much desires. All the more reasons to celebrate 2009.

As a family we also spent a lot of great time together this past year  — our 2 trips to India – one long & one extremely short, a trip to Cancun, another to Orlando & another to Cannon Beach. Sanjaay & Rahul had a blast in India. This was also the year that Sweethaa lost boatloads of weight to get back to prime form. She worked out like crazy to get into shape in time for Vishal’s marriage in Aug – and boy she did! I’d have married her again had I seen her for the 1st time at the marriage She was (and still is) gorgeous….

4. Suren/Sirisha and friends: This was also the year that we found  a new friend in Suren & Sirisha. They are amazing and we are fortunate to have found them as friends. I should thank Sweethaa here as if it was not for her I would not have come to socialize with them and found a really good friend. Surprisingly (or maybe not so considering how reserved I usually am) the last time I made friends was almost a decade ago when I was in school (if we exclude Sunil from work – another amazing guy and good friend). What makes it special is not just how much I enjoy spending time with Suren and Sirisha, it is how much Sweethaa, the kids & they enjoy it as well. It is like as if everyone loves the company of each other — Sweethaa loves spending time with Sirisha. Rahul loves playing with Shreya, Sneha seems to enjoy playing with Sanjaay and Suren seems to like spending time with both Sweethaa & me. Suren & Sweethaa are pulling each other’s leg all the time. We have gotten closer and more comfortable with each other these past few months over several nights of playing “twenty eight” & “zero” (a type of spades) card games & through trips to Cannon Beach, Cancun & Orlando. What I love the most about Suren is how willing he is to help others. He is always the 1st person when it comes to helping others. He never cares about money or keeping tabs when he spends (something I associate with). He is always the 1st to arrive & the last to leave – helping out in any & every way. He is good father (he loves his kids but is also always disciplining his kids… sometimes a tad too much), a great cook and an amazing friend. He takes the same care of other kids (not just Rahul/Sanjaay) as he does of his own kids. He is a lot of fun to be around. As for Sirisha she has several of the same characteristics when it comes to helping others. She is more reserved though, has a little carefree attitude (in that I don’t care what you think of me) and does not seem to take things too personally. She equally goes out of the way to help others – not just Sweethaa or me. What makes them both special is that they are great human beings not just good friends. They are truly made for each other.

This was also the year that I found more good friends (again Thanks to Sweethaa & her nudging me to get up and go play with the RR junta… even though I did not want to due to my reserved nature) in Naru, Suraj, Sai, Swamy, Anand, Leela, Lakshmi, Sudha & Priya. I even made it to Lakshmi’s top 10 friend list She is pretty cool and fun to be around. So are the rest esp. Naru & Leela — both can be the life of any party. I got to spend more time with them all, this year than ever before. There were several memorable parties (with a lot of karaoke & a lot of dancing)  starting with the 2009 new year. There were also a few memorable trips like the one to Cannon Beach. They made up for all the family I left behind in India. It was as if we found a new family here in US. They collectively became our extended family here in the US and made our lives here a lot more colorful.

And as always Roops (my best buddy from college days) was always there. Somehow he manages to stay connected and still be the same person he was a decade ago. I am very thankful to have him for a friend as he has changed very little in all these years. Bugs (Bharath) has become a little distant as we have found it hard to keep in touch with. He did visit us once this year and it was a fun short trip. I do occasionally miss the Bharath we knew when we were in the Bay Area – back in 2001/2002.

5. Music, movies, games & more: This was also the year that my favorite music composer A.R.Rahman won an Oscar for his work. Truly deserving… but debatable if it should have been for Slumdog as he has definitely delivered much superior work in his other regional Indian films – Bombay & Roja to name just 2. We had some great music albums (see my earlier blog post on this) in 2009. We also had some really good movies in the form of Ayan, Unnaipol Oruvan, Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu, Naadodigal & Eeram in Tamil;  3 Idiots & Love Aaj Kal in Hindi & Star Trek, Avatar in English. TV was fun again with a great season of “Lost”, “ Grey’s Anatomy” and the new series “Fringe” that I love. This was also the year that Xbox 360 widened its lead over PS3 with exclusive features (even if briefly) like Netflix that were implemented so seamlessly.

If I had any regrets in 2009, it would be about not being able to be with Mom & Dad and share more of my good times with them. It pains me to think they are alone back in India. It hurts most when one of them falls sick.  I wish 2010 brings them the best of health and keeps them in high spirits, surrounded by good friends and loving family.

I look forward to 2010 and the new decade with a lot of hope and some trepidation. By the end of this decade I’d have hopefully moved back to India to spend some quality time with my parents… my 2 sons would have both grown into teenagers… my wife and I’d be 4o! Oops… not looking forward to that one. That said I am planning to make the most of every day and live life to the fullest… how I do that & what new year resolutions I’d need to embark upon to achieve that is a topic for another blog post..

Considering the amount of time I spend listening to music, I thought it would be a nice idea to pen my thoughts on what I personally considered as the best albums (Tamil/Hindi alone) of 2009. So without further ado…

5. Ninaithale Innikum: This was a surprise album. I was immediately impressed with the songs as early as I saw the 1st previews on SunTV. The movie was so so but the songs were a super hit. Vijay Anthony had done it again. The songs “Sexy lady” and “Banaras pattu ketti” were catchy and extremely popular. It also had equally hummable melodies in “Azhagai Pookuthu” & “ Nanbanai Paartha”.

Soundtrack by Vijay Anthony

4. Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani: A really good album from Pritam in a feel good movie.

Soundtrack by Pritam

3. Love Aaj Kal: This was a really slick album – modern yet classy. It had a mixture of melody and racy tracks. While “Twist” & “ Aahun Aahun” got the most attention, I personally loved Yeh Dooriyan. The movie was also pretty cool. Saif was rocking and carried it completely on his shoulders. He has really matured as an actor over the years.

Soundtrack by Pritam

2. Ayan: It is as if Harris reserves his best work for Surya or Gautham Menon. In this case it was Surya. This album was a smash hit. The songs were rocking and so was the cinematography & choreography of the songs. To add to it all the movie was also a big hit. “Oyyayiye”, “Pala pala” & “Nenje nenje” were what rocked the air waves. My personal favorite was “ Vizhi moodi”..

Soundtrack by Harris Jeyaraj

1. Tum Mile: This was an amazing album. Pritam rocked. The lyrics were great and the tunes hummable & melodious. It could make you cheerful, romantic, nostalgic or even sad. Every song rocked. I can listen to this album a dozen times back to back and still find it enjoyable. The movie was slow and forgettable.

Soundtrack by Pritam

In summary, the year 2009 belonged to Pritam. He was the most versatile and produced the best music.

Note: all song info courtesy Wikipedia

It’s that time where I am deciding on what to get as my next phone. I have narrowed down my choices to the HTC Fuze and the iPhone 2G. Yeah 2G as I am on the T-Mobile network and the iPhone 3G is not compatible with the T-Mobile 3G network — hence not worth the price premium and battery life compromise. I am considering the AT&T Fuze as I still have not given up on Windows Mobile (waiting on 6.5 and 7 to redeem some lost ground) and have heard some really good reviews on this phone. I would have preferred the HTC Touch HD but it is not yet available in the US. As you know my current phone is a T-Mobile Shadow, which I have had for over a year now. I am quite satisfied with it – just lacks touch. So I just bought both an iPhone 2G and the HTC Fuze today. I plan to try out both for a few weeks before I make a decision. I will be taking them along with me on my India trip. I am really looking forward to my trip after 2 years. I can’t wait to see my 2 kids and my wife. I really miss them.

Reviews for the HTC Fuze:

• WMExperts
• MobileTechReview
• PCWorld.com
• CrunchGear
• Laptop
• infoSyncWorld.com

Reviews for the iPhone 2G

• MobileTechReview
• PCWorld.com
• Laptop
• infoSyncWorld.com

So now I am going to spend the next few days waiting for the phones to arrive. Stay tuned as you will be hearing more from me on my experience with the 2 phones.

In the meantime if you love music, why don’t you check out “Vizhi moodi” song from the latest Tamil movie Ayan, sung by Karthik to the lyrics of Na Muthukumar and music of Harris Jeyaraj. I am loving it. I can see this to be the “Munbe Vaa of 2009”. Harris cannot top that but he has definitely followed up Vaaranam Aayiram with a good album.

I attended the following sessions today:

1. Windows 7: Extending Battery Life with Energy Efficient Applications (by Pat Stemen) 

Pat introduced the notion of ‘all day’ mobile PC battery life that all notebook manufacturers were working on. He asked developers to focus on idle more than anything else. The need for energy efficient software applications is 2 fold – in the case of notebooks it was about extending battery life and in the case of Desktop/Servers it was about reducing energy consumption. Some of the suggestions he made to application developers to help with energy efficiency were

• Race to sleep: get to sleep state as fast as you can and stay there as long as you can. Even if this implies that you need to use higher power for a shorter duration, this was better that using lesser power every so often.
• Lower resource consumption: use what is necessary. don’t go crazy in trying to use more than you need
• Lower CPU utilization
• Use Timer resolution optimization & Timer Coalescence APIs: this would help with scheduling activity around the CPU interrupts
• Optimize/reduce disk drive & registry activity
• Reduce/avoid animations when not needed (e.g. network activity icon changes in Vista)
• Make application aware of power environment (do less in low power state)
• Intelligent background activity. e.g. in Win7 we have trigger start of services
• Make application aware of Sleep and Resume transitions
• Availability Requests – use the new APIs in Win7 for this

Pat demoed the new utility in Win7 “powercfg /energy” that actually provides a report of potential issues that maybe impacting power consumption on the machine. It calls out the apps that were utilizing the most CPU during that idle time. I found it to be pretty cool. I’d encourage folks to play with it. It also provides an idea of how much charge the battery is holding – providing an idea as to whether it is time to replace the notebook battery. He did mention that in the future they were looking at surfacing a similar report for the end user. Another tool he pointed developers to was xperf that ships as part of the Windows Performance Tool Kit. I do plan to play with these tools myself when I get back to Microsoft. Performance is an area that I’d really like every Microsoft employee to take seriously and help improve. I plan to encourage folks within my team at the minimum to lead by example in this regard.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC02/

2. Live Services: The future of Device Mesh (by Jeremy Mazner)

Jeremy was a good presenter. He had the audience engaged throughout his session and built the necessary momentum around this technology. He was showing the power of Device Mesh and what it had to offer. He explained the basic architecture around how devices talk to Live Mesh, the authorization model used and how all devices are not created equal. He highlighted the need for some devices to not be first class Mesh Devices but instead be treated as Applications in Live Mesh e.g. Photo Frame. For his live demo he took a picture using a Digital Camera with eye-fi card (SD card with wifi built-in) & then showed the picture within 5 seconds being

• synced to his PC over live mesh and showing up in Photo Gallery/MCE;
• an hard copy printed using his portable wireless HP printer;
• displayed on his digital frame &
• backed up to his network attached storage (NAS)

All of the above happening within a few seconds of capturing the photo on his digital camera as a result of these devices/apps being configured in Live Mesh to be synced. This clearly showed the power of Live Mesh device synchronization

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB35/

3. Parallel Symposium: Future of Parallel Computing

This was a panel presentation with different folks picking it up from where the earlier speaker left. The content was too heavy and really required knowledge of parallel computing in order to comprehend. I guess it was bad choice on my part. So I ended up leaving after trying to listen for 15 mins.

Video & Slides of talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/SYMP03/

With that I was done at PDC. Before I leave, I tried to see if I can get my hands on the goodies but found out that Microsoft employees were not qualified for it. I was extremely disappointed considering I (my team) paid full price for my attendance at PDC. This was bad form and made me leave on a bad note.

The video & slides of all the sessions (incld all keynotes) at the PDC can be found at: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008

Check them out at your leisure. Some really good sessions here. I plan to catch up on some of the sessions I missed later in the week.

Finally to answer the question, is it worth attending PDC as a Microsoft attendee (not a speaker, not a booth keeper) i.e. sending someone to PDC just to attend sessions — my answer would be a NO. All the keynote & sessions are recorded and is available online. So considering you spend 90%+ of your time attending the sessions, it could have been done right from within Microsoft. There is very little opportunity for customer interaction – ‘Ask the experts’ was one of the few. The real deal killer is the full registration fee (approx $2500) that you need to pay — even if you are a Microsoft employee! This is in addition to travel & lodging. The only good thing with attending in person is that I was able to take the time to watch the sessions as I might not have had more than a few hrs to watch more than a couple of sessions if I had not come here physically. With everything that happens in Redmond and with all the work & meetings, I would have personally not be able to watch more than a session or two. I know this because I have not gotten a chance to watch the talks from Blue Hat ’07 & Blue Hat ’08. I’ve been wanting to do this for months/years now.

I am off to the airport now to catch my evening flight back to Seattle to see my kids & family. So I bid adieu for now. Chao!

In the field of Software Engineering, he spoke about

• SLAM which is a static driver verifier rule development kit and does software model checking
• TERMINATOR which is a research project focused on general liveness properties and automatic methods for proving program termination
• Dryad LINQ used to simplify distributed computing on large computer clusters using SQL like query language

In the field of Environment, he highlighted

• SensorMap & SenseWeb – this was cool. I’d ask you to check out the website and learn more. This basically involved a sensory device that was very small that they had developed that could be placed anywhere and it would gather key environmental data and send it back to be able to map/plot it to better understand the environment and make environmentally friendly decisions. Foe example he showed us the heap map for the convention center keynote hall for the last 2 days using around 100 sensors placed within this one hall and monitoring it every minute to see how the rooms temperature was maintained and where the inefficiencies were. It was a pretty cool demo to watch as he showed over time where the various hot & cool spots were & which part of the room was not air conditioned properly. This was an example of sensing in the box. They also spoke about sending in the cloud and sensing in the wild (the Swiss experiment project). Some really neat stuff

In the field of Health, he highlighted

• Personalized medicine research &
• Applying machine learning to understanding HIV/AIDs – this I felt was really cool to see how today’s computer science concepts like ‘how spam worked’ were applied to understand & cure diseases like HIV/AIDs. Mind blowing.

In the field of Education, they highlighted

• Conference XP
• Tablet based computing advances
• Robotics
• World Wide Telescopes (WWT) – this is a rich virtual telescope that is a collaboration between MSR and various academic & government agencies. It is available as a free resource to help guide explorations of the universe. They mentioned having 1.5 million active users and also announced the release of the next version Equinox today.
• BOKU – talk about saving the coolest for the last. This demo really rocked! The idea here is how to inspire kids on programming and make programming not a skill that you learn only if you need it but something that every individual possesses or learns as they grow up. What better way to do that than make it a game. BOKU is just that – it introduces the programming paradigm and thinking in kids without having them to even see/write any code. They do all the programming in virtual visible constructs as objects and actions they take on those based on some constructs. You’ve got to check out the demo to understand how it works. I promise you that you will be blown away. Where was this when I was growing up? The entire audience in the hall was clapping/applauding as they all loved it. Rick did later mentioned (I read online) that the code name ‘BOKU’ was going to change before they released this as a google search brought up all sorts of kid-unfriendly sites/articles. Funny.
• Second Light – this was another cool demo that was well received. Here they took the surface computer and extended it to add another layer on top of the surface without much additional hardware. You can take a trace paper or any such object and project a different image only on the trace paper (different from that on the surface). So let’s say you are looking at a map on the surface computer. Now if you were to hold the trace paper on top of a certain location or region on the map, it can provide more details about that location – some text maybe, historical info, etc (whatever you want to show) — on the trace w/o changing the original map on the surface computer. So you are basically seeing 2 images – all through some intelligent science of fooling your eyes using the same equipment to project 2 images – the 2nd image on the trace paper is projected by the same surface computer without altering the image on the surface computer through some fast switching of images that are not visible to the eye. Pretty cool.

All in all the later part of the keynote with the demos was more exciting than the beginning and made it worthwhile attending.

Now for the sessions that I attended today

1. Windows 7: Sensor & Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications (by Dan Polivy)

This was a session focused at a pretty narrow audience – developers who were targeting sensors, GPS & other location based devices. The speaker spoke about the various API’s they were providing in Win7 for application developers to leverage these hardware in a standardized way without having to program separately for each individual device. It was not too relevant/exciting for me.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC25/

2. Windows 7: Design Principles for Windows 7 (by Samuel Moreau)

I am not sure the speaker achieved the goal he had for this session. Based on the title, I believe the goal was to share the design principles and maybe explain them. But I found that Samuel spent too much time in the introductions and later rushed through some of the design principles and even then seemed to share just a few incomplete set of design principles. The talk felt incomplete. It would have been nice if he had shared more stories & used more examples like the one he did about how the original idea for accessing the jump list (using a drop up list next to the taskbar icon – essential making the taskbar icon a split icon) was dropped since it was good for feature discoverability but bad after user understood the concept. It would be in your way & annoying and accidently accessing the jump list was seen as common in usability studies. As someone who has worked on every build of Windows, I always wondered why they changed it and now I know. Personally I felt the ‘Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop’ session on  the 1st day was better than this one and shared more design principles than what Samuel managed to convey.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC22/ 

3. Optimizing Applications for Remote File Access over WAN (by Mathew George)

Mathew is a good friend of mine (we went to school together – UIUC) and I knew he was presenting. But the problem was I did not know when. The reason I found out later (the hard way) was that his session was not in the PDC session pamphlet they had handed out to all attendees on day1 as part of their PDC badges. So at 3pm, I was trying to find Mathew’s session and could not find any title that closely resembled what he was working on. I went to a session on Offline access and found out that was a talk by Pablo (not Mathew). Note: At any point in time there are 10 or more sessions happening at the same time. Mathew’s name was not listed on any of those sessions. So I gave up trying to find his talk and was loitering around the convention center floor checking out the booths. I accidently passed by the Information Center in the middle and picked up a sheet of paper which said ‘Updates to PDC sessions’ and in that sheet was listed 2 new sessions that had added to the PDC session list along with several others which were dropped or whose time had changed – one of them was Mathew’ s session. Talk about discoverability! Very few people (if any) would even know about the session to attend it. And I was right. When I walked in there were just 8 or 10 people attending the session. Among the sessions I attended, this was the session with the lowest attendance I saw at PDC – and this was no fault of Mathew. I felt really sad for him. He had put a lot of effort and time into preparing his talk and his content was just right. It was a really good talk. His talk focused on do’s & don’ts for application developers on how to use RDR APIs for SMB shares and other remote file access. He was talking about which APIs to avoid using to avoid the extra roundtrip and how it was better to use the Handle based APIs and not path based APIs. It was a pretty darn good core OS level talk. It was good to see a talk that was not about just API’s or just about UX or just about the cloud/services but how to better program against Windows to make it more performant. As I was listening, I really felt that we in the Windows Security Team (team that I work in) could have had more such sessions targeting the same/similar audience that Mathew was targeting. Hats off to Mathew for trying. The fact that the few who attended, wanted to know more and had a lot of Q&A itself speaks to the content. They infact chased Mathew all the way to the Microsoft pavillion after the talk. A plea to organizers next time around is to ensure all sessions are added to the list in time and if we don’t, we should not bother adding them later – esp. with discoverability being close to impossible. They could have solved the discoverability by handing out to everyone (who walked into the keynote room on day1), the sheet with the updated PDC sessions.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES23/

I spent some time during the day playing with a one of the several  Surface Computers & Win7 Touch interface on the HP Touchsmart computers. Boy oh boy! If you wanted to see/play with the surface computer or TouchPC – this was the place to be. There were so many that many were just sitting there. I work at Microsoft and I have never seen one other than the one they showed in the Company meeting on stage. So it felt good to touch and play with it. I felt that the Win7 touch interface still had a lot of rough edges and needed refinement prior to shipping. It was not responsive enough and I had to do certain things twice/thrice for it to recognize my finger input. I could never get it to go back in IE. Forward worked. It was something that I was doing – but even so it needs to be intuitive. If I (a software engineer) cannot get to use it, my mom definitely cannot.

1. personalized experience where user is in control.
2. find and organize the information on your PC
3. bring together the functionality of the devices

Steven first had Julie Larson-Green demo the new Win7 taskbar which she explained was designed to consolidate the numerous ways of launching an app in Windows prior to Windows 7 – Start Menu, Desktop shortcuts, Quick Launch, Notification tray, etc. The first thing you’d notice is the clean desktop and the richer icons on the taskbar – looks clean & less noisy. She showed the richer preview windows that allowed user to peek at the application by hovering over it without switching to the application.

Image: http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244375.html?seq=36 

She then demo’ed Jump Lists – I really love this feature. If you right click the application icon on the task bar, you will get a list that is application specific. In the case of explorer, this is the list of the most frequently visited folder locations. In the case of Word, this list is the Most Recently opened documents. In the case of IE, this list has both the recent history and most recent Favorites site visited. The jump lists is also available from the Start Menu. In the case of Live Messenger, you get to set the Status when signing in as well as act of other Messenger specific actions. Neat!

Image (taskbar jump lists): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244373.html?seq=34 

Image (Start Menu jump lists) : http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244345.html?seq=6 

Julie then demo’ed the Window management features. Dragging the window to the left side of the monitor allows you to dock it to the left side. Similarly dragging to the right edge of the monitor, docks it to the right side. Better still, dragging it to near the top maximizes the window. Again I love the Window management features in Windows 7. She then showed how to easily pin applications to the taskbar (eliminating need for quick launch) and also how to rearrange the icons on the taskbar (long overdue but Thank You!). Julie then showed the explorer libraries (2nd attempt at what was tried in Windows Vista) – which allows for multiple folders to be shown as one virtual folder. I really like the implementation for access to the content but I am worried the user maybe confused when he is trying to save content to the library – where would it get saved? Can the user make that cognitive leap?

Image (picture library arranged by Tags): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244352.html?seq=13 

Image (document library arranged by Folders): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244366.html?seq=27

Julie then demo’ed the improvements to search and the new windows home networking features. Homegroups are cool but I found the brain-dead easy way to join a wireless network from the notification tray icon very simple and intuitive. Julie next showed a feature called Device Stage which is kind of a central location to find out more (including access the product manuals) and interact with the devices connected to your Windows 7 PC. Neat idea but I’d like to see how well this adopted by the eco system.

Image (search): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244347.html?seq=8

Image (wireless network): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244356.html?seq=17 

Image (device stage): http://content.zdnet.com/2347-12554_22-244339-244346.html?seq=7

Julie next demonstrated the new ability to apply/create themes for Windows 7 personalization, the new notification tray and customization of it & the new action center wherein all the notifications/pop-ups we see in previous Windows are collapsed under.  Julie ended by showing the Windows 7 touch capabilities and the touch-aware apps. I personally found the reception to the features Julie demoed to not be very high as the developer audience was not clapping/applauding much.

Steven then came onboard to talk about the Windows Live Essentials suite which would be released alongside Windows 7 to enrich the Windows experience and serve as a conduit to the Windows Live Services in the cloud. This would be an example of the ‘Software+Services’ approach Microsoft is taking. He went on to speak about what Microsoft was doing different with Windows 7 and how. He then spoke about the work in Windows 7 around fundamentals – improved performance, improved reliability * compatibility. Following this, he set out to demo some other features in Windows 7. I found it nice to see Steven do the demo himself without bringing out anyone else. He showed the following feature demos

1. USB Bit locker encryption,
2. ability to create/mount VHDs natively,  
3. new magnifier,
4. ability to natively flip monitor orientation,
5. easy projection using Win-P button combination 
6. support for multimon in TS, 
7. ability to customize Shutdown button,
8. ability to easily disable certain notifications
9. UAC slider

The most well received features (developer audience were applauding for) were 2, 5 & 6.

Steven finished by talking about the path to RTM (Beta early next year, followed by RC) and a ‘Call to Action’ slide for developers.

Steven was followed by Scott Guthrie who spoke about .NET 3.5 SP1 and also announced .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. He called out support for WPF in VS 2010 IDE. The head of IT for Tesco.com showed a cool demo of a web retail grocery store experience using WPF and .NET APIs. It was pretty cool and slick. His pronouncement of the ability of Silverlight apps to run both online & offline was applauded. He called out support for Silverlight designer in VS 2010.

Scott then brought on stage David Treadwell to talk about Live Services. David announced Live Framework to access Live Services. He compared the Live Framework to the CLR of .NET framework. Ori Amiga showed a demo of how to enable an app to leverage the live services using the live framework. He demonstrated the synchronization abilities across devices possible using live framework with a few lines of code. The demo was well received. Following Ori, head of online media at BBC, demonstrated the BBC iPlayer application leveraging Windows Live Services to share/tag/rate media watched by Windows Live Messenger buddies and present it in a visually compelling way. He forecasted such meshified applications are going to be more common place.

Finally Takeshi Numoto came out to demo Office 14 Web applications. The demo was short and slick but he did it in a matter of fact way. I personally felt that he could have pitched it better and engaged the audience more. This announcement IMHO was huge and could have been the ‘and finally one more thing…” that Apple usually reserves for the end. The Office 14 web app that Microsoft demonstrated today is way superior to anything that is out there – Google apps would take ages to catch up to this. The key is how it is priced/packaged. But we’ve finally brought Office to the cloud and how!

The keynote was well over 2.5 hrs. Compared to yesterday, today’s keynote was huge as it had several announcements. It’s going to take the audience several months to digest all the information that was unveiled today.

Transcript & Video of the Keynote: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ozzie/10-27PDC08daytwo.mspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/

Immediately following the keynote, was another Keynote by Don Box & Chris Anderson. This was an interesting keynote as it involved Don & Chris coding for the entire 1 hr – programming against Azure using Oslo, live in front of the audience. They were coding against live websites that the audience could by visiting the website hit the breakpoints in the code they wrote — cool! What was impressive was the way they did. They had fun doing it and kept talking the other person on what to code next. They added levity to their keynote by asking developers to drink a pint of whiskey whenever they used function x (or) drink a pint of beer whenever they used function y and so on. I was blown away by how they managed to make their keynote so engaging without any slides or demos but just code. Hats off to them!

Following the keynote, I had just 15 mins to grab a quick lunch and head off to the first of the 4 sessions for the afternoon. The sessions I attended were

1. Windows 7: Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop (by Chaitanya Sareen)

This was quite a lively talk. Chaitanya was a good presenter. He walked through the various Win7 desktop changes and also provided a brief background on why they made those changes along with backing SQM data. He covered most of the new Win7 features around personalized desktop, less clutter and user in control.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC24/ 

2. Windows 7: Best Practices for Developing for Windows Standard User (by Crispin Cowan)

Crispin is a PM on my team. This was one of the only talks that was being presented by the Windows Security Team. We had been preparing for this for days and even had a demo written by Ming on my team to show how not to program for standard user. Ming had written two apps – one well written & the other not and an accompanying exploit that shows the vulnerability in the poorly written app. Unfortunately just 5 mins before the session started Crispin called me and told me the demo was not working. The exploit app was crashing when launched. We had no time to debug or fix it as we were going to live in 2 mins. So we had to skip the demo. Crisipin did extremely well with the content and was able to get the message across clearly as we planned. This was one of the sessions that was popular i.e. the room filled up in less than 15 mins and folks had be redirected to an overflow room. Crispin also set aside adequate time for questions and spent more than 15 mins just on answering questions – the most among all the sessions that I attended at PDC. Even after the formal open mic Q&A, Crispin & I joined together in answering some more questions from folks who walked over to us.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC51/

3. Windows 7: Using instrumentation and Diagnostics to Develop High Quality Software (by Kevin Woley & Ricky Buch)

This was one of the most informative talks I went to. I found it very interesting and personally had a lot of takeaways from this talk for my team. Kevin focused on Windows Instrumentation and how to leverage it. He called out when to use Performance Counters and when to use Events. He demo’ed instrumentation he had added & gathered for an app using Power shell. He showed the 3 types of event gathering tools – WPP, ETW and Event Log and how ETW & Event Log had merged into a common API set and development model for Windows 7. He later spoke about the improvements to ETW/Event Log in Windows 7 and Performance Counter 2.0. I did not stay for the 2nd half of the talk by Ricky wherein he spoke about the new Windows Diagnostic tools & custom troubleshooting packs.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC50/ 

4. Developing Connected Home Applications and Services for Windows Home Server (by CJ Saretto & Fabian Uhse)

This talk was unique in that it was given mostly by Fabian who is an intern at Microsoft. So that was cool! Fabian demo’ed a home server application that controlled the room temperature (fan, fireplace & window blinds) based on awareness of the time of day and user actions. He controlled the service both from a MCE TV as well as from a Mobile Device. I found the session short on content or very little I learnt from. The session was more of a reminder to developers on the existence of Windows Home Server and a Call to Action for them to write apps/services targeting Windows Home Server

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES11/ 

Following the sessions, tonight was the party night. They had a party for PDC attendees exclusively at Universal Studios from 7:30pm to 11:00pm. I went back to the hotel, took a short breather (I was exhausted) before leaving for Universal Studios. I was not too excited about going alone. I knew my friend Mathew George was attending PDC and giving a talk tomorrow, so I convinced him to join me at Universal Studios for at least sometime. He was initially considering skipping it and preparing for his talk. As I stood in line to take the shuttle bus to Universal Studios, and looked around, I was pleasantly surprised to see Liam Price (ex-team mate who had moved to the Live Services team in June this year after working with me for almost 5 years). I was glad to have company and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with him and his 4 other team members (hope they didn’t mind). Liam was here at PDC to apparently help with the demos for his team and also to man the booth they had at the pavilion. It was great catching up on what’s new in our respective worlds. Mathew also joined us for an hour but took off early. There was plenty of food & booze all night in addition to all the attractions (tonight was also Halloween theme night). We kept to just the food. I don’t drink & strangely neither did Liam nor Mathew today.  I’ve been to universal studios twice before but never at night. The Halloween them made it unique. The haunted mansions and strange houses with spooky ghosts, vampires & blood were very well done and could have be really scary/frightening for someone traversing alone. I personally had a really good time thanks to Liam & Mathew.

There was a first for Microsoft PDC too — one where Bill Gates was not giving the opening KeyNote. I personally thought Ray did extremely well. Ray spoke about why it was still essential for developers to build for Windows. He called out 2 reasons. Firstly Windows, he called out was the most broadly deployed platform that provides application developers the needed extensive customer base to market their products. Secondly the fact that Microsoft built 1st class apps that lighted up the platform made the platform all the more compelling for end users. Ray went on to talk about how cloud computing today was not a new concept but it was very different from the early incarnations of it. He mentioned that Microsoft has a rich experience in broad scale distributed services through their investments in Xbox Live, Windows Update, MSDN, etc. It was all about taking this experience and packaging it together. He mentioned the launch of the formal cloud computing effort began a couple of years ago when Amitabh Srivastava and Dave Cutler were brought together to build the OS for the cloud – codenamed: RedDog. Ray did acknowledge Amazon for leading the way with their product EC2 in the market today. Following that Ray announced “Windows Azure” – serviced based OS platform for the cloud — available today as an Alpha release. It was not fully evident what we wil charge or how we will make money out of it. But Ray did mention that the pricing would be based on 1. apps resource consumption & 2. service levels they’ve agree upon. Industry folks & bloggers speculate that Microsoft may provide a couple of pricing options — one ad funded and free & the other by charging the service hosts. Ray summarized Windows Azure’s core benefits to be: 1. Scalable Hosting environment; 2. Automated Service Management; 3. High Availability & 4. Rich Developer Experience

Ray mentioned the biggest benefit of Azure would be familiarity for developers with the existing Windows APIs and development tools– Visual Studio. The learning curve would thus be quite flat. They showed off a “Hello Cloud” app and also showed off a partner BlueHoo.com who was leveraging Windows Azure for their mobile application.

Ray was followed by Bob Muglia who called Windows Azure the 5th generation of Windows computing. He also announced the modeling language ‘M’ and Oslo. Bob compared today’s announcement to the announcement of Windows NT in 1992. Bob was full of energy and he was jumpy on stage. He was clearly excited and kept walking the stage. He pretty much woke up everyone. One of the bloggers covering the event, mentioned “hey.. can I have whatever he had before he came on stage”. I found the comment pretty funny but really good at summarizing how Bob was. I liked his energy.

Bob was followed by Dave Thompson who announced Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Aside from Live Services & Office Online, the Azure Services Platform would constitute .Net Services, SQL Services, Live Services, Sharepoint Online Services & Dynamics CRM Online Services.

The initial set of products that would be built on top of Azure Services Platform would be Windows Live, Office Live, Exchange Online (will be migrated to Azure), Sharepoint Online & Dynamics CRM Online. You can find out more information about Windows Azure here: www.azure.com

In summary, I felt the keynote as a whole (done together by Ray, Bob & Amitabh) lacked punch – no cool demos or the wow factor. I do understand that this is indeed a significant announcement and maybe the turning point for Microsoft. The new Azure logo does look cool. Seems like they also redesigned the .NET logo too.

If you want to watch the keynote for yourself you can find the video & transcripts here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ozzie/10-27PDC08dayone.mspx

Now for the rest of the day, I attended the following sessions:

1. Lap Around Cloud Services – Part I (by Manuvir Das)

I didn’t get much out of this talk. The speaker seemed knowledge and had good presentation skills but there was not much meat to his talk. It seemed too much of talk at the very high level w/o enough details. Maybe it was by design. But I personally felt the content inadequate.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES16/

2. Microsoft Advetising Platform: a day in the life of a click (by Robert Devine)

This was a good session and a pretty interesting one too. I am glad I attended as I learnt a few new concepts. I learnt what CPC, CPM & CPA stand for and what the differences between them are. They stand for Cost per Click, Cost per mil (aka 1000), Cost per action (aka purchase). You can read more here. I also learnt a detailed system workflow of the 3 types of ads:

• Keyword ads – based on search engine results AND relies on user clicking them. Google relies on this for 99% of their revenue.
• Display ads – shown on websites like msn.com, news.com, etc AND relies on just # of impressions i.e. # of users who visited the site. There is no way to know if the user saw them or not. Yahoo relies on these more than other ad forms
• Contextual ads – ads placed in blogs, applications, etc based on the context/content of the page.

The speaker seemed very knowledge and did extremely well to be able to explain the complex workflow involved in each of these 3 ads — in terms of when the publisher submits the request to billing at the end. There are several steps in between and it was just amazing on how much computer science is involved in this.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB49/

3. The future of C# (by Anders Hejlsberg)

This was a fantastic session and would be hard for someone to outclass this one.  It was clearly evident that Anders was a great teacher. He had the ability to explain difficult programming concepts in a way that even a layman would get it. He also introduced the right level of levity to his talk. If you get a chance, you should definitely check out this talk. Highly Recommended.

Anders spoke about how the lines between Object Oriented programming language, declarative language, etc were all blurring. He called out how Static Languages (like C, C++) and Dynamic Languages (like IronPython, IronRuby) — each have their own distinct advantage. Anders professed the need for languages that can leverage the power of multiple processors and multiple cores and how it would require developers to write programs to leverage the concurrency. His quote “there is no slash parallel compiler switch that we can use but instead the program has to be written that way” brought a lot of laughs.  Anders kept the audience engaged not just with his content, his teaching style, his tone & his levity but also got their attention via some pictures he had in his deck. He had a slide with a picture of 6 blind men & an elephant to draw the comparison to how he felt folks were trying to use programming languages. His next slide had 2 kids with their hands on each others sholder to highlight what he called out as need for co-evolution among programming languages instead of competition. By co-evolution he meant programming languages borrowing from each other and in the process growing together. Anders announced C#4 and its key features

• Support for Dynamic programming: The ‘how’ got a lot of laughs as well. In order to make a variable dynamic in C#4, the variable is statically typed to ‘dynamic’
• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments: This was cool and got the most applause from the developers. You no longer need to supply all the parameters needed for function as ‘missing’ parameter in C#. Instead the parameters can be assigned default values during the function definition. Additionally you can skip some arguments to a function and specify others by supplying named arguments & you can even pass them out of order as they are named. He closed by saying “I apologize as it took us 10 years to get back to where we were”. 
• Improved COM interoperability
• Co & Contra variance

Anders ended his talk by giving a preview of what we may see in C#5 — Compiler as a Service. This got a rousing reception from the audience.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/  — MUST WATCH

4. Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features (by Brian Harry)

This was another interesting talk especially since I was completed blown away by the feature set of TFS. I did not even know it did so much. I realized after this talk that what we use at Microsoft within the Windows team is less than 1% of what TFS has to offer. The visual tree views of code flows across branches, RI’s & FI’s and the ease of resolving merge conflicts was the most cool. We’d be saving several thousand man hours of time we spend today within Windows if this tool can be leveraged within Windows and does everything that Brian demonstrated. The ability to link test cases, bugs, work items & features along with the various pivoting that you can do was also impressive. I can’t wait for the day we’d be leveraging it.

Video & Slides of Talk: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL52/

The convention center itself is pretty huge. Between sessions I checked out the Big Pavillion where Microsoft product teams and Microsoft partners had several booths. There were thousands of computers all over the convention center for folks to check email. The best was the 20 or more Surface Computers that were present all over the convention center for folks to play with. They even had a scavenger hunt game that required placing a card (they handed out to everyone) on the Surface computer and collecting specific pictures that were scattered across each of the surface computers. So you had to go each one, place your card (looked just like a business card) and it would show what pictures that were there in your card and you’d need to identifying similar puzzle pieces that were lying on the Surface computer and drag & drop them into your card. Goal is to find all the missing pieces. Pretty cool idea! It got everyone to play with the Surface. There was a lot of food — lot of healthy snacks (granola bars, muffins, etc) and a lot of fruits including coffee & soda all day.

In the evening I went to visit a friend/roommate of mine from UIUC – Navin Narayanan and his wife Purnima who are settled here in Los Angeles working in the advertising field. I am meeting them after almost 3 years. They are a great couple and fun to be with. I did leave their home until midnight. It’s almost 1am and I need to catch a few hours of sleep to be ready for the big day tomorrow when we will unveil Windows 7 to the world.

I landed here in LA around 6:30 in the evening. My flight was uneventful. Earlier in the afternoon, it was a little hard to bid good bye to my sons (one 3 years & the other 5 weeks old). I’ve never left them behind. Another 1st. I am staying at the Westin Bonaventure – a few blocks from the Convention Center. I had dinner at BK and then decided to catch a movie before I retired for the day. I was looking for a good movie theater and my search led to me the theater at Pacific Grove. It was a really beautiful and contemporary mall — very rich with a lot of decor and water fountains. The movie was pretty decent. I am really excited and looking forward to PDC tomorrow.

So here without further ado, introducing Sanjaay Rajkumar
http://cid-0bf1c11fa8d010ad.skydrive-beta.live.com/play.aspx/2008-08-Sanjaay-Birth?ref=1
http://picasaweb.google.com/rajkumarmohanram/200808SanjaayBirth#

So with that one, we’ve completed our procreation responsobilities.  Stay tuned for more updates

Cheers!
Raj/Sweethaa/Rahul/Sanjaay