I have been following Microsoft's adventure on HTML5/Javascript based desktop UIs for a while – actually, did participate on the journey while working for Microsoft back in 2003 on a Microsoft POC project codenamed IceFace which was doing something akin of websockets (using a proprietary ActiveX and doing low level TCP from it) and something akin of an HTA application. In the recent years, I was watching when they announced WinRT and one of the programming models being HTML5/Javascript; also watched with awe as they failed to penetrate the world with WinJS Tutorial ; than when UWP enabled using HTML5/Javascript as one of the technologies to use. So when I heard last year they tackle this area again, I didn't have high hopes.

I was wrong. They actually listened to the people – yes, they misinterpreted what they want the first few (?) times, and lost their expected leadership in the desktop app segment (which were quickly eaten into by the HTML5 hybrid applications), but at last they stopped fighting the inevitable.

Why do I say this? Next to the bridges Microsoft announced and later opensourced (centennial for desktop app, the later cancelled bridge for Android applications, the bridges for hosted web applications, for iOS applications and for Silverlight applications) Microsoft sneaked in an announcement: Electron applications for the Windows Store . Using Centennial technologies (so no registry or file system is used, and the application is running on full speed, but still running in a sandbox) you are able to 'compile' your Electron application to a Windows Store AppX (either for the external application store or the internal one). Moreover – using NodeRT (which can be downloaded through npm, and does some crazy magic of generating node.js native addon's C++ code using C# reflection over WinMD manifest files) you are able to access the same WinRT/UWP APIs like any other native application would do – see Showing Native Windows Notifications from Electron Using NodeRT for details.

This easily enabled applications do interaction with the native Windows experience, like setting the lockscreen image from JavaScript (TypeScript):

const {KnownFolders} = require('windows.storage')

const {LockScreen} = require('windows.system.userprofile')

myFolder.getFileAsync('image.jpg', (err, file) => {

  LockScreen.setImageFileAsync(file, (err) => { })

})

Or popping up a toast using https://github.com/felixrieseberg/electron-windows-notifications :

const appId = 'electron-windows-notifications'

const {ToastNotification} = require('electron-windows-notifications')

let notification = new ToastNotification({

    appId: appId,

    template: `<toast><visual><binding template="ToastText01"><text id="1">%s</text></binding></visual></toast>`,

    strings: ['Hi!']

})

notification.on('dismissed', () => console.log('Dismissed!'))

notification.show()

So yes, Windows 10 migration for some of the applications and firms might be far ahead, but I think we would be prepared. We are still to see how they will tackle the issues regards Electron security sandbox, but I feel like this time Microsoft might be just naturally doing what was expected from them for a long time, and we can see others stepping into the same direction with getting on the Electron bandwagon.

New year, new petprojects. One of them is moving existing documentation in an easier to manage, easier to use format. I looked around what is being used right now internally, and seen many tools from doxygen to sandcastle. One of the tools that caught my attention was sphinx. Being a Python tool, it enables to run on both on Windows and Linux, and looking little more around I found support for VSCode editing – I'm in.

So, what is sphinx? Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license. It was originally created for the Python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects in a range of languages.

So I gave it a try and I ended up setting up something similar to github pages – I send a PR to a particular internal repo, and when it gets merged, it kicks off a build which automatically uploads it as the new content.

Locally I did set up the following in my tasks.json:

{

    "version": "0.1.0",

    "command": "python",

    "isShellCommand": true,

    "args": [ "sphinx-build", "-b", "html", "-d", "build/doctrees", ".\\src\\sphinx\\source", ".\\doc"],

    "showOutput": "always"

}

Next thing was to set up my conf.py, I picked a few plugins I was thinking I'd use:

extensions = [

    'sphinx.ext.autodoc',

    'sphinx.ext.intersphinx',

    'sphinx.ext.viewcode',

#    'sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel', — this depends on a newer sphinx that I have

# http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.5.1/ext/autosectionlabel.html

    'sphinx.ext.autosummary',

# http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.5.1/ext/autosummary.html

    'sphinx.ext.todo'

# http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.5.1/ext/todo.html

]

I started playing than around with the RST syntax, and very quickly figured out that there is good support for python (not a surprise) in code coloring, but even if I did set .. code:: csharp it wasn't recognizing it.

So time to write my first sphinx plugin, in _ext/csharplexer.py:

def setup(app):

    import pygments

    from pygments.lexers import CSharpLexer

    app.add_lexer('csharp', CSharpLexer())

than I can add 'csharplexer' as an extension.

Next, I started looking making the rendering little nicer – I'll likely have longer listings as part of the code, and I wanted to have a syntax for toggles working. So time for the next extension – toggle. Taking the following source:

.. container:: toggle

    .. container:: header

        **Example to show how to add unitycontainer**

    .. code-block:: csharp

        :linenos:

        Assert(true);  // OK

        var i = 1;

        Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

I could just add _static/custom.css:

.toggle .header {

    display: block;

    clear: both;

    cursor: pointer;

}

.toggle .header:after {

    content: " ▼";

}

.toggle .header.open:after {

    content: " ▲";

}

and _templates/page.html:

{% extends "!page.html" %}

{% set css_files = css_files + ["_static/custom.css"] %}

{% block footer %}

<script type="text/javascript">

    $(document).ready(function() {

        $(".toggle > *").hide();

        $(".toggle .header").show();

        $(".toggle .header").click(function() {

            $(this).parent().children().not(".header").toggle(400);

            $(this).parent().children(".header").toggleClass("open");

        })

    });

</script>

{% endblock %}

Which resulted in something I liked 🙂

Will be continued – next time I'll try to get viewcode working.

I did post previously about 32 bit vs 64 bit through the magnifying glass of .NET – good news is, that it’s now high time to scrap all those results, and revisit the question. The reason behind is one of the changes between .NET 4.5.2 and 4.6 (and therefore 4.6.1) is the introduction of a new JITter (ryujit) which should result each of us carefully revisiting this question.

But, let’s not go that quick; what the problem is we are trying to solve.

32 bit vs 64 bit

“I’m in .NET, why should I be interested in 32 bit vs 64 bit? Isn’t .NET bit agnostic?”

Yes, .NET itself is agnostic; however some of the libraries and technologies you might use might be not. Think about technologies like: P/Invoke, COM Interop, Unsafe Code, Marshaling, Serialization, Managed CPP, … So, yes, if you happen to have 100% type safe managed code, you can just copy your application from a 32 bit system to a 64 bit system, and it would “just run” successfully under the 64 bit CLR. However, likely you are using some of the technologies just mentioned, so you should do your homework to investigate whether your code is depending on the bit length. Be aware, that unlike C++, .NET only changes size of the pointers (IntPtr) and not the builtin value types (e.g. int is going to stay the same). So moving between 32 and 64 bit world either result in no changes or a set of changes related to pointers, changes related to 3^rd party libraries, marshaling, serialization, and more; and you can use System.IntPtr.Size and System.Reflection.Module.GetPEKind to determine the current bitlength and/or querying a deployment assembly for platform affinity.

Why 64 bit? Actually, why 32 bit?

What does 64 bit allows you to? Addressing (not necessary accessing) a bigger chunk of memory. 32 bit applications inherently (because of the pointers they use) are limited into a 2Gb section of the memory, 64 bit applications don’t have this limitation.

So, that means I should just specify I want to have 64 bit, and that’s it? I’d have more memory and would be faster? Actually, not necessarily. 64 bit pointers do occupy more memory. Cache lines in the processor gets evicted more likely. Stack becomes bigger. Your application will likely (mileage might vary) occupy more memory, and there is a chance (mileage will vary) it will perform worse – despite the fact that running on 32 bit results involved in the WOW64 subsystem that has its own performance hit.

So should I not update to 64 bit? You should measure; although because what explained above it might be not trivial, you might not want to put effort into it right now.

Why this is a topic now?

With .NET 4.6 a new JITter got introduced that is a significant rewrite of the existing JITter (and caused some uproar when just after .NET 4.6 release a problem in a tail call optimization caused issues). It’s actually optimized to bring 64 bit nirvana for the masses by incorporating more usecases to use SIMD and SSE for. Yes, I’m going to talk about synthetic microbenchmarks here. Synthetic microbenchmarking is evil and you shouldn’t trust any of the results below, rather test your code – mileage will vary.

There are many usecases, like: matrix multiplication, simple floating point arithmetic and more where there is a significant speedup – we speak 4-5x (due to better usage of registers, opcodes, due to better coalescing of arithmetic instructions and use of noeffect code reorder). However, there are many other usecases – just calling a static method, or calling a virtual method might slow down by the same 4-5x factors.

Conclusion

Don’t believe any of the results above – please do measure yourself, and feel free to leave in the comments below whether you did see any performance improvements using .NET 4.6.1 and 64 bit over your 32 bit application. Also, going over 2Gb of memory usage – is it possible your application should be restructured not to hold all the data on the client side? Probably revisit a different pattern for client-server interaction is timely?

And I was thinking that last years’ keynote was a hard act to summarize. I’ll try to avoid dumping bunch of links here – many other people done that. Let me still try to summarize how Connect was – it all started on the Tuesday for me when I have had the opportunity to sit down with Jay Schmelzer, Director of Program Management and Sam Guckenheimer, Product owner of Visual Studio Strategy to speak about the upcoming announcements without actually speaking about the upcoming announcements; and would like to thank Eric Maloney from Microsoft for making that possible. For the big day itself, I’ll try to follow the ‘any’ trifecta – Any Platform, Any Application, Any Developer here the same way as this triplet became the official mantra of the day. The trifecta actually came live as a physical token as well. But let’s not jump too much forward.

Any Developers’ (and DevOps’, security architect’s, etc) life was made easier by ditching the static KB security article page and moving to a shiny new https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security-guidance portal. And of course the new Flow Partner Program with 6 new services. Any Platform has seen a significant change by Samsung releasing support for .NET for Tizen (TVs, watches got shown), by Google (and Nancy and xUnit) joining the .NET foundation (and as it turns out they have been a contributor for .NET for a while, and now ASP.NET became a first class citizen on Google Cloud), and of course, nothing smaller than (wait, I need to check whether hell is feeling well in the freezer) the end of one and a half decade of cancer – Microsoft <3 Linux Foundation (actually Microsoft been a significant contributor for the Linux kernel for a while now). Btw, did you know that the first 25.000 dev essentials users get 3 month of Linux Academy free with ‘MCSA: Linux on Azure’ course preloaded? Also I suggest starting to browse http://docs.microsoft.com – new documentation on Azure, SQL Server for Linux, Visual Studio 2017 RC (btw, ever considering moving away from ReSharper in favor of native, I suggest https://aka.ms/vs2017productivityguide, also, I’m looking forward what NCrunch’s next step would be as test as you type is now part of the IDE), C++, EntityFramework and more, and all being editable through github PRs. So go ahead, and do extend missing documentation instead of just leaving comments on it.

Through the color of shirts, we saw that the love for Any Developer (red shirts) and Any Platforms (black ‘devops’ shirts) were undivided, still one of the best burns of the keynote was when Scott Guthrie got the question from Beth Massi: “New shirt?”. Any Developer (probably just ‘Anyone’) could see how the Visual Studio family got extended with two new members – next to Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Team Services and Visual Studio (for Windows? Original? Vintage version? – Miguel de Icaza), now we do have Visual Studio for Mac (based on Xamarin Studio / Monodevelop, however many pieces has been replaced with actual Visual Studio code) and Visual Studio Mobile Center (your one stop mission center for your app, the integration of all Mobile related ALM and Azure functionality). We have seen demonstration for the Any Platform part by Chris Dias with a demo covering MongoDB, a Mac, docker, azure, nodejs, .NET – actually Linux Foundation membership started to make sense as this might have been a OSS conference just I missed the title somewhere? 🙂 Chris not only showed lightweight interaction – one of the more heavyweight pieces when injecting the MongoDB connection string into environment variable for the NodeJS application to pick up from Azure Portal UI (of course it would work using just the rest API and / or DSC application deployment templates).

If you would think no other surprise guests on the stage, ‘ohmyyyy’, we are so wrong – Any Platform. Github founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath showed up briefly and demonstrated the unprecedented love of Microsoft towards anything opensource. You cannot be a CEO without numbers, so he brought some along around commits, committers, projects and so. Not only did we speak about the Linux Foundation membership, but also proved by a person no other than Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the foundation.

Next section was about Mobile, and when it’s about Mobile and Microsoft it’s about Xamarin – distinguished engineer Miguel de Icaza and Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman gave strong demonstration of the first hand experience with the new Mobile development capabilities around Visual Studio, around the new Mobile Center and it’s integration into Azure, and much more. Xamarin getting lot of love from Developers, and we hear about the trust it gets from the enterprise. Comes as a little surprise that Visual Studio 2017 RC (release notes) is being announced by Nat – actually a good example for even more ‘mobile first’ 🙂 James Montemagno started to raise the heat in the room showing off the iPhone emulator, the realtime forms preview, live edit, Xamarin inspector for Android and many more – so more that he ends up announcing Visual Studio for Mac (see above), with ASP.NET Core support in it. It gets included in each and every Visual Studio subscription – even the community edition. Nat and James gets the privilege to demo Visual Studio Mobile Center – seldom you do see kicking off builds, CI, pipelines, etc on a conference stage (although I still remember last year when we were dissecting the new experience of Visual Studio Installer – who would think watching an installer is gonna be interesting?).

From the devops world, not only have we seen ‘overnight’ (I’m not sold on that one yet) migration from onprem to cloud, but also we have seen Mr. Demo himself – big applause for Donovan Brown 🙂

Did you know you can love that warm, fuzzy feeling when you do deploy to docker from Visual Studio? And you only need to sing ‘Just riiiiiight click’ while you are doing that. Actually, I’d need to have Donovan’s right clicked shipped in my production code, can I do that? Even Scott Guthrie needs Donovan’s right click, on stage. I have to admit, that Donovan not just being awesome presenter, but again had a few ‘this is where you clap’ moments by showing off cross docker boundary work by rubbing some devops on it. Continuous delivery rulez! And before you would think the world is only about right click, we welcome the selfies as well: Beth Massi shows of taking a selfie and taking a live video feed, demoing cognitive services and Azure functions in an elegant and entertaining way.

Than we had one of the surprise announcements for the day (at least for me) by closing the gap with SQL Server SP1 delivering most if not all of the SQL Server Enterprise features for all versions – yes, even for the free express version. OLTP and data warehouse, operational analytics, compression and partitioning, polybase, encryption, row level security and masking – are all there. I really liked the deepdive into SQL Server (me being a server side guy originally) with Lara Rubbelke, and installing SQL Server for Linux into Docker literally in seconds blown my mind.

Not only basic functionality got reproduced for Linux like querying, data load, sharding, partitions (actually not that basic), but also all the special indexes that makes SQL Server blazingly fast. (did you know there is a USQL extension for VSCode? of course next to the mssql extension) Related to performance – in case you were living under a rock, stackoverflow.com is a Microsoft shop – they actually do run the whole site on a hot-warm setup, e.g. 1 SQL Server bearing with the load.

From SQL Server to bots – we have seen the bot framework before, now it has new support for Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams (surprised?) next to skype, and with the possibility to debug into the bots, have them access internal and external services and more.

I shouldn’t miss the set of basic announcements from here: Entity Framework Core 1.1, ASP.NET Core 1.1, and .NET Core 1.1 itself (did you know that over 60% of contributions to Core are coming from the community? I’m also to thank the community to making it so great and fast!). However this wasn’t the part of Scott’s presentation which left me speechless (rare occasion), and not the fact that he prefers zsh when running the shell inside VSCode – it was the demo using Selenium to automated, coded UI test applications written not just in UWP, but also in VB6. Kasey Uhlenhuth also showed up to ‘filter out those suckers right out’ by demoing the new navigation and intellisense capabilities of the IDE – ReSharper, your turn 🙂 .

So we all heard about the demise of the project.json which we started to love (who wants GUIDs in the project file?), so I wasn’t happy when it was announced a few months back that .NET Core 1.1 would prefer .csproj files again. Through the demo of Maria Naggaga I learned this is not actually the case! Yes, project.json got removed in favor of .csproj – but this is not my grandfather’s csproj! No GUIDs, clean structure, ability to use wildcards – actually it feels and seems like using grunt, gulp or similar. While Maria showed up amazing performance numbers on a 20 way server, the newest round 13 TechEmpower data came in – not only ASP.NET delivered 859x speed advance, but delivers unbelievable low latency numbers and ended up in the top 10 with ASP.NET for Linux!

With these words I finish the keynote blog post, watch this space for the next rounds of posts covering the afternoon sessions and the special #FINTech sessions that were delivered the day after.

Let's do some Azure this time. Did you know that they are bigger than Google and Amazon combined? Let's hear more from the Red Shirt ™ ! This post is more picture heavy than usual, so many things to show not just write about!

What are the main reasons people choose them? These are Choice and Flexibility (management, applications, application frameworks, databases, middleware, infrastructure), the Openedness (choice of device, framework, OS), their Enterprise readiness (certifications, compliance, ability to choose between service provider datacenter, azure datacenter, your own datacenter – same tools, APIs, UIs to manage), and Productivity (focus on developers – did you know 40% of Azure clients are startups and ISVs). There are the various Azure app services you can create – providing web, mobile, logic, api as building blocks.

And here comes Xamarin – it's FREE. FREE as in really FREE and OpenSource. You do get it for the community free edition as well. And if this wouldn't be enough – you don't need a Mac anymore. And the windows emulator have multitouch. And with android emulator. Using Xamarin Android Inspector, with markdown support. With Roslyn providing code completion. With live editing for Android. Xamarin Studio on the Mac – free!

With Visual Studio Team Services getting the Xamarin Test Cloud added, you have a complete mobile devops life cycle now. "I'll just rub a little devops on it and it will make it better". With not only picture playback, but also video playback with realtime memory, CPU and log correlation.

"The first time I installed Linux was after I joined Microsoft."

No devices to buy, no VMs to manage. All comes hand-in-hand.

And we switching gears ™ to IoT.Starting with Open Mobility Cloud for cars (BMW this time, not Volvo ). Noone is going to ask you to deliver IoT. People ask you to make them access data easier and better. Check outhttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/mydriving/ if you interested.

Announcement time again: introducing Azure Functions (with an opensourced platform), enabling to host snippets in the cloud with only paying for the actual resources you use. With automatic alerting, cloud connectivity and more. And another announcement: Azure IoT Updates with Start Kits, Hub Device Management, Gateway SDK, and more.

And now over to one of my favorite topics: Microservices.

267 million messages per second with 50.000 concurrent user in the same battle. Age of Ascent MMO game round now, anyone?  Age of Ascent developers helped adding 2300% increase in speed to Kestrel – thanks to them going opensource. Who does not love opensource?

And our favorite one lesser Scott is there showing an opengl game, Visual Studio.NET and Service Fabric Explorer at the same time. Object Oriented design moved to the cloud. You already know this if you know how to code .NET. Little learning curve for IReliableDictionary and Queue – not your usual collections.

Can I submit a PR for fixing the typo? 

"When I test my code I test it in production." "F*ck, awkward" "This is the classic off-by-one error in a MMO game"

Actually next to learn about weather we see another game, using DocumentDB:

And now a new area (is it just me feeling we have been rushing through more areas than ever?): PowerBI (free till May 1st), with PowerBI SDK for creating ability in your application to add PowerBI capabilities and connectivity to your own application.

Next topic is productivity. Reinventing productivity. Developer productivity. Transition to the cloud. Delivering new productivity experiences on the mobile. Building a modern productivity ecosystem. The platform opportunities are already open today. You can build intelligent applications by connecting to Office services. You can make your solution part of the office applications. And you can engage the users through conversations – conversations as a platform. You need a productivity platform and working ecosystem for this. The four pillars around this are mobility of experiences, collaborative productivity, intelligence everywhere and being trusted all times.

You can use Microsoft Graph to reach the data – similarly how you did it using Microsoft Hailstorm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_My_Services , anyone remembers it?). The demo is using DocuSign to show how the new beta graph API enables you to use the data and intelligence from the Microsoft Graph. The office addin capabilities (announced today) now making it easy – using web technologies (html5, css, javascript; and technologies like OAuth). This enabled announcing Office addins for Office 2016 for Mac and Office 2016 for iPad/iPhone/Android. Also, having a common, modern distribution using enterprise or normal application store enables you to easily reach people.

Simple web technologies and a config file enables you to write, package and deliver your addins easier:

We speak of a Seattle company – Starbucks connectivity in your email available now 

Office 365 Group connectors – another productivity announcement, from now on you can add custom connect, already 60 providers having their information actively added to the threads:

Also enabling trusted, secure video and audio conversations by using a the common communication platform, embedded into the applications:

And probably the last gear change:

Having the Muzik platform iOS/android/windows phone addins – devices, IoT, next generation productivity. Showing demo for Highspot and machine learning – they are an AWS shop, but running PowerBI there. And – running azure website inside powerpoint as an addin, and use Vorlon.js to debug the application realtime. Also adding possibility to add the bot framework and platform using node.js and restify.

And introduced http://projectmurphy.net and the Skype bot you can use there for playing with 

We learned a lot about ongoing projects – open source projects Microsoft is involved in, user groups Microsoft is involved in, Enterprise customers and ISVs Microsoft is involved with, the involvement with students and universities, etc. Lastly – we learned about a new show called http://www.decodedshow.com/ as part of the closing words.

I think I have to repeat myself from yesterday: Empowering developers!

In case someone is interested, here is my planned schedule for //Build'16: 

Seeing the recent set of announcements – starting from Office for iPad through buying up Accompli, Sunrise, Xamarin, etc., also announcing Microsoft SQL Server for Linux – it came less of a surprise that Microsoft is bringing Ubuntu on Windows – however comparing it to the Microsoft of the past (Steve Ballmer once considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source itself as a cancer) it still comes as a big surprise. We still lack some of the details there, but we are seeing various Linux subsystems integrated into Windows (does it mean that Bash would be coming for Windows? I think yes). So we are not talking about a Windows-Ubuntu hybrid OS. Neither we talk about a virtual machine. However, as a result of this, Ubuntu would be able to run on native Windows libraries, using the subsystems, and gives access to Ubuntu from within Windows without the overhead of a VM/dual-boot setup.

What else I expect? Some excitement around Ubuntu LXD and using together with containers and Windows would be nice.

Ionic just announced (http://blog.ionic.io/announcing-windows-support-in-ionic-2/) – as part of the other huge sets of Microsoft Build announcements – that their API and toolkit, along with a total UI looknfeel and component set is coming for UWP. Why is this important?

If we glance at the sessions of //Build'16 you can see they focus on two major target right now: game development for UWP and web development (or better to say, using web technologies) for UWP. You could ask, where is the desktop development? Next to having a session focusing on moving desktop apps to UWP (using project centennial, which enables bringing win32, .net, etc apps to become part of the UWP ecosystem and windows 10), there is no speak of desktop development at all. What does this mean? A move of focus? I have been watching the whole UWP story for a while, and by now I'm positive (even if not sure) that the web technologies is the way how desktop applications would be built. So, I'm more than thrilled to wait for the //Build'16 keynote and the breakout sessions where this would be hopefully dived into.

The next session on the FSI DevCon was focusing mostly on Machine Learning – how can you use many of the achievements recently came out of Microsoft (most of them open sourced!) to target creating a new kind of AI. We’ve seen some amazing demos of Project Oxford's (Microsoft's in-cloud solution for evaluating queries like 'Twins or not?' and much more serious questions as well) scalability, up to 150 billion evaluations per second. As I have been a Windows Hello user as well, obvious was the question – does the face recognition being the same in Windows Hello and Project Oxford? Turned out to be they do share some of the codebase, but Hello does depend on 3D camera points and much more to make it more robust.

·         Microsoft expands availability of Project Oxford intelligent services: http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2015/10/26/microsoft-expands-availability-of-project-oxford-intelligent-services.aspx

·         Microsoft open sources Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit for more efficient big data research: http://blogs.technet.com/b/inside_microsoft_research/archive/2015/11/12/microsoft-open-sources-distributed-machine-learning-toolkit-efficient-big-data-research.aspx

·         The Language-Integrated Quantum Operations (LIQUi|>) simulator: https://github.com/msr-quarc/liquid

 One of the best quotes of the days I think should be paired up with the next discussion topic: Universal Windows Apps and Platform, which was: "Windows RT OS? No we are not discussing that now." There is not much I'm allowed to share on the rest of the discussion.

The last big topic we dived into was bitcoin and block chain – to help figuring out what my/our strategy is supposed to be on it. If you still struggle separating the two: if block chain is Manhattan, bitcoin is just one building in it. Same way: if block chain is the iPod, Ethereum (more on that later) is iTunes. We discussed the basic on block chain and bitcoin – What are tokens and addresses. How it works as a P2P network. How it forms consensus. What is a block chain VM and how it works. Why resolving the truth is going to help you next to just storing the information. What are smart contracts and why they are smart – how you are incubating disruption here. We looked into what ÐApps are, how they are distributed applications built with the smart contract platform Ethereum. How the smart contracts enforce themselves as they live on the block chain, how they react to events, multiparty actions, how they can help you transfer assets. How you can create composite contracts. What clause chains are? And most importantly: how you end up with a giant worldwide distributed virtual machine. We looked more deeply how ÐApps work – how it's a combination of a contract and a JavaScript GUI to work with Ethereum and eth. And then popped up the reason why we were there – to learn about 'Azure Block chain as a Service'! We looked at how Ethereum block chain as a service serves a vision with service fabric and microservices, and I think I agreed on that block chain is can be a bigger thing than FIX if needed. The ability to fire up my own ubuntu/go based solution for playing with block chain in the cloud is appealing, and the support in VSCode is giving me a good development IDE to write the sols and configuration files for it.

As the last of this series, I'm saying this here the last time: It's a different Microsoft now! 🙂