Aarthi Ramamurthy

So I'm here at Mumbai doing a talk at TechMela along with my team folks and we are having a lot of fun. There are lot of people attending TechMela (trust me, getting my plate filled at lunch is *tough*) and a lot of talks and lab sessions. I know this is a little late, but if you are at TechMela, do come by and say Hi. You'll find me with the other folks in the Visual Studio for Devices team. And this also means that I'll have pictures of Mumbai (for the first time in this blog) next week.

Labels: Microsoft, Mumbai

A full week away from Hyderabad and away from Internet access (mostly) left me craving for computer time. I took a hell of a lot of photos and have to filter and upload them and then post them here. That should take a couple of days. Maybe more.

Sooooo, the big thing that happened last week was the announcement of Microsoft Popfly - this has been under wraps for a while now and it's amazing how well it turned out to be. People call it a whole bunch of things - a mashup creator, a tool for developers, a social networking website and so on. To me, Popfly is just fun. Pure, unadultered fun.

Popfly is still an early release and there's a scarcity of invites, which probably means that a lot of folks wouldn't have been able to create mashups or poke around. I got a chance to play with it and here are screenshots.

This is a small mashup I created..




And this is how it turns out to be right after two mouse clicks ..



And this is a game of Whack-a-Mole mashed up using Pink (I searched for Pink at Yahoo! Photos and mashed it up with Whack-a-Mole game) pictures..



Popfly is probably the best Silverlight application I have seen so far. I really like the look and feel of the site and totally adore the About Us page.

And oh, I have an invite with me which I want to give out. If you want to play around with Popfly, send me a mail, and I'll send you the sole invite I have.

Labels: Microsoft, Microsoft Popfly

Ever seen a Corporate VP's "official" bio picture like this? Read more about it here. And this is one of the reasons why I'm a HUGE fan of J Allard (known simply as 'J' to a lot of us internally) - great attitude!

Labels: J Allard, Microsoft

So this is it! After watching the streaming keynote video for more than 2.5 hours now, I can finally talk about what's been cooking inside a lot of Microsoft buildings.

Silverlight was announced a few days ago. In addition to that, in Mix '07 conference that starts today, we announced the RTM (or the final release) of Expression Studio. Trust me, the demos of Expression Studio will blow your mind away! Silverlight will now ship with a cross-platform CLR (a small one at that) which lets people write and run apps on browsers on both Mac and Windows.

My favorite announcement for the day is the DLR or the Dynamic Language Runtime along with IronPython and IronRuby (yes, it's called IronRuby) which allows people to go implement their favorite dynamic language which gets compiled to .NET bytecode. Waaaay cool!

So what are you waiting for? Silverlight 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha lies here.
The blog posts are just rolling in and there is so much buzz all over Internet. You can probably catch the entire webcast here (with the terrific demos and Ray Ozzie + Scott Guthrie's interview with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame) in a while.

Whew! So there, I've just blogged it. Exciting times are ahead. Wildly exciting times.

Labels: Microsoft, Mix, Silverlight

If you already know about Thinkweek papers (submitted by Microsoft employees) read by Bill Gates - you should probably know that Sriram and I had submitted a couple of papers this time around. Now, that's not a big deal - quite a few employees submit these papers.

The big deal is that Bill Gates left a comment on one of our papers, so when Sriram woke me up this morning to tell me this, I fumbled around and got to my laptop and started grinning like an idiot. This is just uber cool! And for once, I don't even need my morning coffee to wake up :)

If you are an MSFT employee, the internal link is here.

Labels: Microsoft