Kathy Kam has the best summary I’ve found. Changes in five areas: UI Framework, controls, networking, base services including threading and web services, Deep Zoom enhancements.
Daily Archives: June 4, 2008
End of an era: Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki departs Tecmo
He’s not happy either; he’s suing his former company:
I have filed this lawsuit with a strong intent to question the social responsibility of Tecmo Co., Ltd. and its President Yoshimi Yasuda, as well as condemning them for their unjust acts. Today, in addition to announcing the reasons for this lawsuit, I make clear my reasons for resigning.
Itagaki is an outspoken individualist so I guess this kind of drama is in character. The move is worth noting though, simply because of the exceptional quality of the Ninja Gaiden game (I’ve not yet seen Ninja Gaiden II). There were several releases of Ninja Gaiden for Xbox: the original; two major downloadable called the Hurricane Pack I and II; and Ninja Gaiden Black which added a new Mission Mode with as much play value as the game itself. The point here is that Itagaki is a perfectionist; he took a game which was already excellent and honed it over several iterations, seemingly putting the pursuit of quality ahead of commercial considerations. The Hurricane Packs were free, and Itagaki is said to have opposed ports to other platforms despite the lack of acceptance for Xbox in Japan.
To understand the game itself you have to look beyond the reviews, to things like this fan-written advanced combat guide. Known to be a challenging game, it is loved by hard core gamers for its sophisticated, nuanced combat system with huge numbers of different moves and many surprises. I know nothing like it for intense combat and replayability, though spoilt by unnecessary gore.
Ninja Gaiden II is just about to be released; it’s a shame that Itagaki won’t be around to further develop it as it did for its predecessor. Unless he makes up with Tecmo, that is.
Silverlight vs Windows Presentation Foundation
One other thing I forgot to mention in my post on Bill Gates Tech Ed keynote: Silverlight vs WPF. Someone asked Gates whether desktop applications were merging with web applications; Gates actually misunderstood the question, which he heard as whether Silverlight and WPF were being merged together. He said:
With WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment … Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.
In reality, it would not surprise me if Silverlight thoroughly outshines WFP. I realise that they share a lot of technology, in particular XAML and the .NET Framework. But in many ways Silverlight is .NET done right, from a client perspective; it delivers just what is necessary for a rich client. It also runs cross-platform, a huge asset bearing in mind the increasing market share of the Mac and signs of life in desktop Linux. I’d also suggest that Silverlight will not always be restricted to the browser – look at Times Reader for proof.
In answer to the question actually asked: undoubtedly.
Missing from Bill Gates Tech Ed keynote: Live Mesh
I watched the video of Bill Gates keynote at Tech Ed yesterday. You can also read the transcript.
I enjoyed the second half more than the first. Gates can rarely resist giving a potted history of computing in his keynotes – maybe because of his own role in that history – but I find it a snooze. It also tends to reinforce the impression that Microsoft is yesterday’s company.
Gates shaped his keynote, which was on the subject of application development, around four themes: Presentation, Business Logic, Data Access and Web Services. In presentation we got a plug for WPF and Silverlight – more the latter, with a nice demo by Soma Somasegar but nothing we haven’t seen before from Mix08 and the like.
On the business logic theme, we got a demo of a new tool called the Architecture Explorer, said by Brian Harry to be part of the Oslo wave. Microsoft will be pushing Oslo strongly at PDC later this year. Separately, I noticed that the Microsoft’s software factories guy, Jack Greenfield, has recently posted about how his team has moved from Visual Studio Team Architect to Developer and Platform Evangelism. Now I may be wrong here; but my guess is that Microsoft had a huge internal debate about whether to bet on software factories or modelling as the next step in enterprise application development, and that software factories is being sidelined in favour of Oslo. Hence statements like this:
Visual Studio Team Architect team remains actively committed to supporting Software Factories, as do the rest of Visual Studio Team System, the Visual Studio Ecosystem team and patterns & practices.
Phrases like “actively committed” usually mean the opposite of what they say. We’ll see; but note that we got Oslo in the Gates keynote, not factories.
Then we got data access, with Dave Campbell on SQL Server Data Services and the Sync framework. I think this is cool stuff; but having seen it at Mix (where I talked to Campbell and liked what he had to say) it was not new to me.
Finally, web services. This is where Gates talks about Live Mesh, right? Wrong. Gates gave a nod to cloud computing as the future:
I can run Exchange on premise, or I can connect up to it as a service. But even at the BizTalk level, we’ll have BizTalk Services. For SQL, we’ll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically.
but that was it, it was on to fun robotics. I found this a surprising omission. As I see it, Mesh + Silverlight (plus of course things like SSDS) forms Microsoft’s cloud computing development platform. However, I imagine that like modelling vs software factories this is a matter of debate within the company as well as outside; perhaps we are seeing the Gates view vs the Ozzie view here.
By the way, I got my official Mesh sign-up invite this morning and I have the impression anyone can sign up now; why not try it?
Technorati tags: microsoft, bill gates, live mesh, oslo, software factories, sql server, dave campbell, soma somasegar, ray ozze, cloud computing, teched 2008