Volta: What is Microsoft Volta Video

Channel 9 has two videos about Volta.
From the site:

"Erik Meijer and a small team of very sharp developers (including Brian Beckman) have cooked up an intriguing toolset for building multi-tier distributed applications: Volta.

When the Volta CTP release announcement hit the wire last week, the press declared Volta as a Java killer, etc. In reality, Volta is primarily, and most importantly, a tier splitting system where the details of the tiers aren't of primary importance.

So, the most obvious case is Silverlight 2.0 as the client tier and a web server as the server tier... This is a great scenario since Volta can split IL to IL without having to resort to IL translation to, say, JavaScript (which has gotten too much attention). Further, execution contexts such as XNA, WinForms, DHTML, SVG, VML, even SQL are realistic client targets (tiers) for Volta. Then there's the notion of a local "distributed" system (think of applications running on a single client as the tiers) where Volta also makes sense as a means of easily composing the system.

Too much has been made of the IL to Javascript translation capabilities, so much so that people are apparently not seeing the forest for the trees. Well, have no fear. Over the coming days you are going to learn more about Volta than you can imagine and the people who'll you learn from also happen to be the people who thought up and implemented Volta.

The most important thing here, technically, is that Volta provides an intuitive and elegant toolset for composing concurrent distributed muti-tiered applications.

Think of Volta as a technology that facilitates communication between distributed execution contexts (a tier is just an execution context in this model). Using Volta in an client-web server scenario is only one approach. Volta could be used in many more interesting contexts (XNA, WinForms, WPF, even Singularity – use your imagination…).

In this episode (or part 1, if you will) we meet the team and learn the basics. Since it's a room full of devs there is whiteboarding and lots of techincal talk, just the way we like it here on C9.

You will be seeing much more of this great team over the coming days and Volta will make more sense with each epsiode, culminating in an Expert to Expert Going Deep where we a great deal of how Volta's tier splitting capabilities are implemented and get a clear picture of what a tier actually can be.

It's all about tier splitting and a tier is simply an execution context. Volta is much more than a web technology..."


Part1
Listen to the podcast(MP3)
Listen to the podcast(WMA)
Download the Video
Watch the Video

Part2
Listen to the podcast(MP3)
Listen to the podcast(WMA)
Download the Video
Watch the Video