Well the PDC has ended and so I guess its time to reflect on
stuff that
has been going on this week. I guess the big news for me that I can
talk about is that I'm co-authoring DevelopMentor's
Guerrilla WinFX course with Jon
Flanders, Dominick
Baier, Pierre
Nallet and Brock
Allen. The first run will be on Microsoft's campus on the 7th
November.
The big announcement for me was the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).
This is an integral part of WinFX and means you'll never have to write
a state machine again and can write declarative flows through
processing that are managed by the workflow engine. Jon has co-authored
a book
on WWF.
The other technology that has caused big waves in the C#
community in particular is Language
Integrated Query (LINQ). This has required a bunch of
extensions to the C# language which will debut in version
3.0. LINQ as a framework works over in memory structures that implement
IEnumerable<T> however its also extensible
and Microsoft have provided two extensions XLinq for XML querying and
DLinq for consuming database data. I love the basic Linq infrastructure
and XLinq looks pretty neat. However, DLinq concerns me, automated
creation of SQL has a habit of producing less than optimal SQL. Also
its too easy to end up with alot of data being ripped off the database
and joined on the client (this is what happens with hetrogenous joins).
Other than that, Office 12 looks pretty awesome as does the
Aero Glass shell in Vista. IIS7 has made some very impressive advances
in terms of allowing non-admins to administer a web site and hish
modularization of previously monolithic functionality (the neat thing
is you can drop features you're not using from memory for a
website so reducing the attack surface of that site.