OMG!! WTF!? Dude, I totally feel like an ignorant moron! (Sorry for the childish and cheesy intro but I have the worst brain overload since PDC05!)
Fortunately I’ve had a few days to think about it and now I feel I am slowly landing on my feet again. Here is my summation of PDC 2008!
Future looks promising with the cloud and all that surrounds it! I’ve got to say that I can’t wait to build my first live service in the cloud. I already have a service in mind as a demo. However I will have to wait a few weeks since I am working hard toward our own conference event; Øredev which is upcoming in a few weeks where I will be presenting Dynamic Code.
Speaking of Dynamic Code; the upcoming news in C# 4.0 and 5.0 are in no small way addressing the concerns of calling code and talking with and about types that are not .NET types. The keyword dynamic will be very helpful and to be able to use the compiler as a service will be so beneficial to code generation scenarios – even though C# 5.0 where this last feature is expected is still a long way off. Here is my more detailed blog post on that topic: The Future of C# 4.0 and then 5.0
On the OS side I’ve already tried to install Windows 7 on a virtual PC. It went OK but not good. This is a pre-release preview that we got at PDC (which is yet another way of saying Beta by the way). Virtual PC addons did not install nicely in my guest OS yet and since I cannot toast my work PC just yet I’ll hold off for a while. That does not mean there aren’t some pretty nifty new features coming! Personally I like the improvements in networking the best; it took until Windows 7 before a PC could understand that in different networks there are different default printers. That alone is a reason for me to upgrade real soon. I understand there are many more cool new features coming on the home networking front including the capability to play media from one device and output on another. This will be very useful for home media centers. Any device is now a remote for your media!
“Oslo” to me is very promising! The guys behind it Don Box and Chris Anderson are not know to disappoint. I have the book The “Oslo” Modeling Langauge (“Oslo” is named “M” btw) and have looked at it a bit. Really powerful and cool. Since I am interested in software architecture this fits me like a glove! I’ll come back with more comments on “Oslo” once I’ve had time to digest and test.
I was very glad to see that Entity Framework is “fixed” which means they’ve accommodated the critics from V1. Now in V2 you can generate db from model and you can run EF pure POCO with complete persistence ignorance. Very good!
Another great thing to gain insight into is Microsoft Research do great stuff and cool: Surface and programming for children with Boku. I love Boku! Actually I want this. Forget about my kids! They can play with Boku when daddy’s done!
The key note also showed a very strong Office Live demo that takes entire office (finally) completely online. All functions seemed to work and it looks as though they are very far ahead of Google Docs. I didn’t attend any office sessions but I want to start evaluating soon.
Azure and Azure services are of course the big announcement at PDC. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here and how the public will adopt (or not) this grand initiative! I saw their sessions on how this whole thing scales and the infrastructure behind it. The main idea here is that you yourself will have to do 0 heavy lifting. Synchronization, authentication, authorization, storage, application servers. It is all there! You will have to do none of that! Incredibly useful!
One of my favorite sessions was Microsoft Identity Roadmap for Software + Services by the Great Kim Cameron and Vittorio Bertocci! (Vittorio will be at Øredev in three weeks.) All of the products needed to eject identification concerns from your code are here! And Live ID users are now able to use OpenID as a means of identification – 400 milj live Live ID can do this! How most excellent!
PDC vNext:
With all this announced and introduced at this years PDC it is still clear that there was something that didn’t make it. Something important. Because already announced is PDC 09! This will be in November which can be around the time of the real release of Windows 7 (perhaps). But the release of an OS version is not sufficient reason to give a full PDC. Maybe Microsoft just wants to beat the drum for all the stuff just rolled out once more when most if it is final? But I think there has to be more for a PDC not to be a “beige” show. It will be very interesting to know what this will be!
I loved going and I am really optimistic about the future as a .NET developer! There is no darkness in the clouds ahead for us who choose to work with Microsoft and the competitors will have to run to keep up! Here is Gartner’s initial analysis on this: PDC shows Microsoft at a Critical Inflection Point
Cheers,
M.
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posted @ Monday, November 03, 2008 10:35 AM