So, it’s Wednesday. My fourth day at the PDC.. Time is going fast….

This morning the key note is done by Rick Rashid; Mr. Channel 9 dude is also there to… hmm to do what? Ah well, he looks funny and if you’re lucky you get a petit small Channel 9 dude.

Mr Rashid told us about Microsoft Research. What does the organization look like, what do they do and where do they do it.

Two to most interesting things from his talk to me were the CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 and DryadLINQ.
Trevor Taylor gives a nice summary of what this toolkit is, and you can get more information on the toolkit’s homepage.

The other interesting subject was DryadLINQ, which is a programming infrastructure designed to supports large scale computations over clusters. A technical report with sample programs can be found here.

At the end of the key note, we were shown “SecondLight”.. no, not Second Life, but Second Light.
It’s a multi touch display (you know, Surface), but is capable of displaying more information on a second display. It’s a bit hard to explain, so see it for yourself! I was stunned by the demo; really, really cool stuff!