Yesterday, I ventured down to Google's campus for the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the launching of Google Code. It was a relatively eye-opening experience, as they pointed out a lot of things about their hosting system that I hadn't known previously. For example, while the site launched with four projects and two APIs, it's now hosting over 905 projects and 60 APIs. And that's just Google's stuff. End users have uploaded over 300,000 of their own projects to the site, and 26,000 of those were updated in the last month. 

Java is the most popular language used in Google Code projects, with PHP and Python both close behind. What is interesting here is that C++ and C# are dead even at 4% of the overall  projects. There are over 4000 Android applications in Google Code, and over 1000 Eclipse projects. The band, Radiohead, used the service to host its music so that fans could remix their songs, and the source code to the Apollo 11 guidance computer is hosted there as well.

But those are just numbers. What was really interesting to me was the way the Google folks took credit for simplifying online project hosting. And you know what, they're right: they did push open source hosting sites to simplify by offering a streamlined alternative.

How did Google streamline Google Code? For one thing, issue tracking was refined to the same simple interface you'd get when posting a comment to a Web site. Rather than ask bug submitters to post up huge amounts of information and click tons of radio buttons, as is the case in Bugzilla, the Google Code issue tracker submission window is nothing more than a title bar, and a big blank text box in which to describe the issue. 

Elsewhere, Google made it easy to host your project on their site, and took approval and compliance processes out of the system entirely. Sourceforge notably required a lot of hoop jumping back in 2005, and Google decided to ditch these requirements and just allow anyone to host projects there.

Google also took the controversial tactic of restricting license usage on Google Code. They whittled the choices down to the bare minimum, and as a result, over half of the code hosted there is either GPLv2 or GPLv3. A quarter of the projects are under the Apache License, and the rest are a mix of Eclipse, MIT, and a handful of others. As Google engineer, Ben Collins-Sussman put it, if you can't get what you want out of the licenses they chose, you're doing it wrong. He also said that many developers think of legal documents like code: if they compile, you're good to go. This is super wrong, and can get you in trouble. So Google has used Google Code to halt open source license proliferation and dilution.

For the fifth anniversary, Google implemented a Paxos algorithm in the backend of Google Code, so now updates will be instant and reliably replicated. 

Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Exam credit will be added to your transcript if you pass one of the tests - no retaking is required. You may register here.

Today's MIX 2010 keynote focused on Internet Explorer 9.0, which is now available as a platform preview. IE9 adds native video playback (H.264) through HTML 5, hardware accelerated graphics using DirectX, has support for scalable vector graphics, and a new JavaScript Engine. The JS engine matches Firefox 3.7 alpha in performance - a marked improvement upon IE8. JavaScript performance does matter to Microsoft afterall.

Inspired by his kids and wanting to start something he would be really proud of, serial entrepreneur and four times CEO Gene Wang began his fifth start up. Launching People Power in January 2009, Wang entered the “hot new space of green technology,” he said.

His answer to more efficient and cost-effective technology: this week’s announcement of the availability of the SuRF (Sensor Ultra Radio Frequency) Developer’s Kit for OSHAN (Open Source Home Area Network). This release can help developers build smart and environmentally friendly appliances for household electronics and devices by using longer range at the lowest cost and ultra-low power consumption technology, Wang said.

He did however agree that this release is more for people developing devices, but reminded about the gigantic new market of green technology by citing what Gary Locke, secretary of commerce said to him, “Whichever country leads in energy will lead the world economy.”

The open source software and hardware kit is for wireless sensor networking with an open source operating system and network stack based on TinyOS, the release said. This provides developers access to the long-range, low-power SuRF board, a PCBoard built around Texas Instrument’s CC430 System-on-Chip.  With this system embedded onto one chip, Wang said, there is a much lower building of materials cost. And of the system’s power consumption, he added, “I think we’ve defined a new high watermark of power efficiency.”

With electricity costs on the rise, coupled with climate change, one can see how this kit is a step in the right direction. SuRF can be preordered now and costs US$149.95 a kit that includes two SuRF boards. People Power is also having a competition for any developer who builds the coolest SuRF device by Sept. 15, 2010. The winner will receive 5,000 shares of People Power stock, $5,000 and a free SuRF board.

Interesting, but alarming facts:

- The United States' TV vampire power consumption (how much power is used when the TVs are off) is equivalent to a coal fired power plant.

- 98% of power used by a DVD player is when it's not playing a DVD.

- U.S. electricity utility emissions: 7,830 thousand metric tons of Sulfur Dioxide, 3,330 thousand metric tons of Nitrogen Dioxides and 2,477,213 thousand metric tons of Carbon Dioxide.

Unlike it major competitors, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will not support HTML 5. Instead, the browser will be based upon Internet Explorer 7.0, said Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Windows mobile. Microsoft is making its initial bet on Silverlight and XNA applications. Without HTML 5 support, alternatives for developing Web applications are more limited.

Incidentally, IE7 failed the Acid2 test, (which is now 5 years old) but Lieberman said that it would be comparable with other mobile browser experiences. iPhone Safari, Android Chrome fair much better. The Internet Explorer 8 browser does pass Acid2. When asked why Microsoft opted to use a dated browser, Lieberman explained that Microsoft has focused its resources on breaking with the past to provide a better user experience through Silverlight.

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC Framework 2.0. The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern will promote the creation of higher-quality software through greater componentization and testability in .NET Web apps. According to Microsoft new features in ASP.NET MVC 2 include:

• Client side validation: Automatic support for JavaScript validation in the Web browser. Developers can also extend it to use a client validation framework of their choice by simply writing an adapter which reads in the JSON metadata and calls into the client validation library.
• Enhanced model validation: Developers can use the DataAnnotation validation support built-into the Microsoft .NET Framework to declaratively define and add validation rules to business objects and properties.   
• Asynchronous controller: Support for asynchronous action methods that can be used to improve performance when dealing with long running operations.
• Support for areas including tooling:  Ability to organize ASP.NET MVC applications into multiple areas, each with its own models, views and controllers. Visual Studio tooling support is available to easily add new areas to applications.
• Auto-scaffold UI helpers with customizable templates: Helps to refactor common UI elements into reusable templates.

Microsoft is going to announce an analytics framework from the Silverlight runtime on Monday at its MIX conference in Las Vegas, according to a blog post by Microsoft evangelist Michael Scherotter. Here are some of the details that he let out of the bag:

• Support out-of-browser scenarios
• Support offline scenarios
• Support multiple analytics services simultaneously without impacting performance
• Support designers in Microsoft Expression Blend to instrument applications without coding
• Support A/B Testing
• Support SketchFlow Prototypes
• Support logging of video experiences with the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework

Let's take a look at the important bits. Silverlight has worked out of the browser and offline ever since version 3.0. That would probably require an endpoint (for data) to be installed inside of the firewall. Microsoft ships code instrumentation tools from PreEmptive Software in Visual studio 2010. There is an opportunity for Microsoft partners such as PreEmptive to provide a multipurpose solution for Web analytics as well as developer analytics. Merging the two data sets together could prove interesting for developers: think code coverage, method level performance, etc.

If Microsoft wants customers to run multiple analytics services it must have developed a common data model. That is something that is lacking in analytics today. Microsoft has the opportunity to solve an industry problem should it decide to make its data model a CodePlex project.

As an Alex, I was most enthusiastically floored by this conversation between two Alexes. Or is that Alexii? Either way, their conversation was spurred by this excerpt from Steve Souders' "Even Faster Websites." Essentially, the gist of these sites is that CSS items are evaluated as a giant list, every time you put in a sub-div element. It's quite a realization, if you''re building sites with 1000's of CSS elements, like Facebook. Potentially, every <p> tag could be causing your viewers' browsers to check every one of those 1000's of elements. And it clutters up your DOM! Yikes! Go read up, because you may be dealing with CSS improperly. Or at least, from improper assumptions.

Microsoft is publicizing some data from Geeknet that reveals a slight but steady increase in open source software that runs on Windows. "Windows is the only operating system that runs all of the top 10 all-time most downloaded projects on SourceForge: eMule, Azureus/Vuze, Ares Gallery, 7-Zip, Filezilla, GTK+ and Gimp Installer for Windows, Audacity, PortableApps.com: Portable Software/USB, DC++, and BitTorent," according to a spokesperson. "Also, of the top 25 all-time most-downloaded projects on SourceForge, 23 run on Windows, and 14 of them only run on Windows."

The data is being released ahead of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco later this month, which the company will be attending. I expect that it will make a few minor announcements there.

Boy, we were a tough crowd. The Windows Phone 7 leadership, marketing, project management folks plied us with food and beverage, but as a room full of tech journalists, were were naturally skeptical. Windows Phone 7, eh? Not Windows Mobile 7? The questions will remain until MIX in Las Vegas, 2 weeks from now, but here's what the Windows Phone 7 folks told us tonight...

• Windows Phone 7 development will be focused on Silverlight, but all of the .NET languages will work.
• XNA will be the games development platform, plus Games for Windows Live, or Xbox Live, or whatever you want to call it.
• There will be an App store
• The interface has been designed from the ground up for usability, rather than for consistency with the Windows brand.
• Devices will be coming from most manufacturers and all the carriers.
• The SDK will enable "cheap" development. They did not say free, though Charlie Kindel, who's heading up the whole project, said that his team understood that the other leading platforms offered free SDKs.
• Kindel and his team were molded in the image of the Xbox team: that is, a team beyond reproach, small, and given free reign within Microsoft.
• From my visual experience with the prototype/not-for-production device, the interface is super simplified, and well imagined.
• Realization? Well... Kindel had trouble getting his flashlight application to work... Only took 6 lines of code to write, though!