Architect or Cobbler?: PDC Day 1

I'm hard pressed to say whether I'm excited or not about day 1. There appears to have been a lot of announcements of stuff that has been announced before. Sure the Avalon GUI framework has been neatened up, and is much sexier, but I still didn't see a GUI design tool. Vista has added some new cool stuff, but it felt a little like looking at Sun's Looking Glass project. I think there were some key themes I took from the keynote. First, it's not just Longhorn that get's a rebranding. Welcome to the world of Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) and Windows Presentation Foundation(Avalon on Vista ) and even WPF/E (Avalon on anything else, I forget what the E stood for) Another key thing that really astood out is something that Dave and I were discussing the night before conference. I was saying that there was no compelling reason to move to Indigo, in fact there may well be compelling reasons not to. The SOAP stack can be complex, the standards still aren't nailed down and the Indigo toolkits, with the best will in the world, are unhelpful (I know there's a year to release and the toolkit will probably get much better, I do think Microsoft make a fairly decent job with tools). The world out there may be passing SOAP services by, and RESTful web services are certainly getting a look in. So what do we see announced today (and demonstrated), support in Indigo for standard XML over an HTTP Channel. Unfortunately, it has the rather poorly named POXChannel (I figure the POX is for "Plain Old XML", but never asked) Also, the Atlas project is now firmly out in the open, so Microsoft are taking on board the threat of AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML), and are creating their own framework. Just what I need, another web development framework. LINQ was previewed as well, which seems to be the replacement in many ways to ObjectSpaces. It was more than an ORM however, in that it tried to provide a uniform query language across objects, XML and databases. This also looked fairly interesting, and certainly something I'll be playing with. IE7 was also previewed here, and it looks decent enough, tabbed browsing, RSS integration, a print preview and print page function that finally works (this got the biggest applause of the keynote, nearly) Just as I was getting jaded however, Office 12 was demonstrated. there are some interesting new features in Office 12 which look to me to be a strong case for migration when it ships with Vista, but by the time we got to this I'd stopped taking notes, so you'll ahev to look at someone else's blog to see all the cool new Office features. What did strike me was the strong integartion with Sharepoint, and for our organisation, I was really excited by the integration between Powerpoint and Sharepoint, including some form of team working on presentations, which is a boon to a training company. The sessions I've atended though, have been high quality, I've picked up some useful coding tips, and I've got a glimpse into the future. So in hindsight, about a 7/10.

# posted by James @ 1:12 AM 0 comments Comments: Post a Comment

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PDC Day 1

Wednesday, September 14, 2005


Architect or Cobbler? Good code starts with good design
about me Name: James Winters Home: Swindon links Solid Quality Mentors The Server Side - .NET edition The Server Side - J2EE edition The .NET Architecture Centre Java BluePrints Blogs I follow Darren Burford - Darren's Journal Julie Lerman - Don't be Iffy Danny Simmons - system.data.objects. dev guy recent posts Countdown to PDC Factory Methods The One and Only Tomorrow never comes Contracts in Indigo Playing with Indigo Getting Started archives May 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 May 2006 June 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 November 2007 March 2008 feeds	PDC Day 1 Wednesday, September 14, 2005 I'm hard pressed to say whether I'm excited or not about day 1. There appears to have been a lot of announcements of stuff that has been announced before. Sure the Avalon GUI framework has been neatened up, and is much sexier, but I still didn't see a GUI design tool. Vista has added some new cool stuff, but it felt a little like looking at Sun's Looking Glass project. I think there were some key themes I took from the keynote. First, it's not just Longhorn that get's a rebranding. Welcome to the world of Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) and Windows Presentation Foundation(Avalon on Vista ) and even WPF/E (Avalon on anything else, I forget what the E stood for) Another key thing that really astood out is something that Dave and I were discussing the night before conference. I was saying that there was no compelling reason to move to Indigo, in fact there may well be compelling reasons not to. The SOAP stack can be complex, the standards still aren't nailed down and the Indigo toolkits, with the best will in the world, are unhelpful (I know there's a year to release and the toolkit will probably get much better, I do think Microsoft make a fairly decent job with tools). The world out there may be passing SOAP services by, and RESTful web services are certainly getting a look in. So what do we see announced today (and demonstrated), support in Indigo for standard XML over an HTTP Channel. Unfortunately, it has the rather poorly named POXChannel (I figure the POX is for "Plain Old XML", but never asked) Also, the Atlas project is now firmly out in the open, so Microsoft are taking on board the threat of AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML), and are creating their own framework. Just what I need, another web development framework. LINQ was previewed as well, which seems to be the replacement in many ways to ObjectSpaces. It was more than an ORM however, in that it tried to provide a uniform query language across objects, XML and databases. This also looked fairly interesting, and certainly something I'll be playing with. IE7 was also previewed here, and it looks decent enough, tabbed browsing, RSS integration, a print preview and print page function that finally works (this got the biggest applause of the keynote, nearly) Just as I was getting jaded however, Office 12 was demonstrated. there are some interesting new features in Office 12 which look to me to be a strong case for migration when it ships with Vista, but by the time we got to this I'd stopped taking notes, so you'll ahev to look at someone else's blog to see all the cool new Office features. What did strike me was the strong integartion with Sharepoint, and for our organisation, I was really excited by the integration between Powerpoint and Sharepoint, including some form of team working on presentations, which is a boon to a training company. The sessions I've atended though, have been high quality, I've picked up some useful coding tips, and I've got a glimpse into the future. So in hindsight, about a 7/10. # posted by James @ 1:12 AM 0 comments Comments: Post a Comment << Main blog page