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Keepin' it real..

2008 bejegyzései

I'm delighted to see that the first CTP of Parallel Extensions (a.k.a Parallel FX) is out. Check Joe Duffy's post for the details, I have been waiting for this for some time now! Also in the news is that Silverlight 1.1 (which will be named Silverlight 2.0, what a surprise) Tools Alpha has been refreshed for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Scott Guthrie has the details (well, he always does). Certain proof of that is he also announced ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which will be release next week. This will mark the first public release of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

Now only if we could get that ADO.NET Entity Framework refreshed for VS2008 RTM.. Pablo? :)

Unless you were living under a rock, you are happy to know that Visual Studio 2008 RTMed. You can read what our beloved prominent bloggers have to say about this release:

• Soma: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 shipped!
• Scott Guthrie: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released
• Brad Abrams: VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 RTM

Brad's another post is worth mentioning: The ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit has been refreshed for Visual Studio 2008. Check it out here.

As for myself, I am extremely excited about this release. I have been working with the public Beta2 drop since its release and recently used RC drops for one of our projects. VS2008 being RTM means that:

• LINQ to X and LINQ to SQL in particular RTM'ed. It's there for all projects.
• I have an RTM C# 3.0 compiler that I can work with.
• I can soon press F11 and trace into .NET Framework code as well as examine the call stack with source and MSFT comments. (this is HUGE)
• and much much more...

Probably these three are what excite me the most and will undoubtedly change the way I (and my peers) will work on upcoming projects. I am expecting a rapid adoption of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 for a multitude of reasons:

• The CLR is still the same 2.0 CLR that is under .NET FW 2.0 and 3.0.
• Visual Studio 2008 can multitarget .NET FW 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5
• C# 3.0 features one-by-one and LINQ to X are typical examples of 'how could I live without these before?'.

There are two things that I think should be also included in this post when I think of the next few years of the MSFT .NET platform offerings:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework (LINQ to Entities)
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (One of those few products the Scott builds for Microsoft)

I think both technologies are particularly powerful when it fits the type of project you want to apply it to. The Entity FW will be the standard for any mid-sized or bigger project where having a conceptual model is useful and/or you want Astoria services (ADO.NET Data Services is the official name, I think) running on top of it. For smaller projects, the one-to-one mapping of LINQ to SQL will be sufficient. Let's not also forget that LINQ to SQL is RTM today and we still have to wait for the Entity FW a couple of months.

The MVC Framework is particularly interesting whenever you were drooling over Ruby on Rails and hoped .NET would have something similar. I love the extensibility and pluggability of the platform. Let's not also forget that the loosely coupled architecture and contract-driven design allows for great test-first and controller-first scenarios and the separation of concerns is something that should be included in the United States Consistution or at least the Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately being a little a late, I totally missed the SQL Server 2008 part but at least I'm here to hear the summary of the session. Not exactly new information but I definitely hoped I'd see geospatial information in action ;) I was able to ask my million dollar question at the end of the demo of ADO.NET Entity Framework (not sure how that ended up in this session): What is the difference between LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET Entity Framework and what are the main differences that can help me make informed decision when picking the technology. LINQ to SQL woud be the 'get you started quickly', 'one-to-one mapping to the database', etc. whereas the Entity Framework would be able to do table splitting, more complex mappings. The more interesting point the presenter made was around lazy loading. LINQ to SQL uses a more implicit approach (just get the data somehow) whereas the Entity FW is more explicit and tries to reduce the number of roundtrips to your database.

UPDATE: In the mean time, the presenter started talking about Location Intelligence and GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data type. Perfect! DEMO TIME!!!!! (There's also going to be a whole session on spatial features in SQL Server 2008 tomorrow 9am)

The demo queries all the coffee shops along the highways that Microsofties use to get to the campus. Fairly simple query that returns just that. Do that without geospatial features, smarty pants! :) A mashup is shown pinning the coffee shops on top of a Virtual Earth map of Greater Seattle. Cool stuff.

Hi there! I am sitting in CCIB's auditorium, waiting for TechEd 2007 to kick off with Soma's keynote. We got seated in the third row, extremely close to the stage and almost in the middle. Turns out, the Super Early Bird seats are worse, so I don't exactly see the point. We were Super Late Birds and have great seats!

Live coverage:

1:39PM: Two graffiti artists are going at it, a DJ is mixing trance, definitely enjoyable. There's also a VJ somewhere. I am getting dizzy from the smell of sprayed paint.

1:48PM: Graffiti artists finishing up, looks great. DJ mixing Alanis Morissette - Uninvited (City of Angels OST), gotta love it.

1:56PM Graffiti pulled up, nobody's on the stage now except for the DJ.

2:00PM Soma is on stage, LOTS of people in the auditorium. Thanks the developers who have given feedback to make VS2008 a better product.

2:03PM Soma is promoting a restaurant in Barcelona.. (Moo Restaurant) That's some marketing ;) Draws an analogy between his experience and that developers and designers should work great products hand-in-hand.

2:06PM Visual Studio 2005: Over 1 million professional developers, Visual Studio Express: Over 17 million downloads (25% of developers using Visual Studio team System)

2:15PM Soma talks about different the types of developers and how the tools bridge all audiences. .NET as the consistent programming model.

2:18PM Platform advances, .NET Framework Data Support (LINQ, MS Sync Framework), .NET Framework (new WPF controls, WCF: REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON (cool!), Silverlight). Soma just used Anders Hejlsberg's favorite expression: first-class citizen ;)

2:23PM Visual Studio Tools for Office is now part of Visual Studio 2008 Profesional. Built-in support for AJAX, other web development improvements. Soma just said first-class citizen again.

2:30PM Microsoft Sync Framework CTP is announced, helps improve offline experience and to build p2p-based solutions. Software + Service Blueprints also announced. Ready to use building blocks and add-in for Visual Studio.

2 :39PM Visual Studio 2008 new features demoed on-stage. Split view for ASP.NET pages, CSS support. LINQ to SQL, O/R Designer shown and bound to controls.

3:04PM Demo is over, funny video about Visual Studio 2008 development. Soma is back with inspiring words. Although he didn't say first-class citizen for at least half an hour now.

3:06PM VS Ecosystem is now the subject. This might be our time. 200+ partners, 2000+ products. VS Premier Partners now get access to the Visual Studio IDE source code (this would come handy).

3:46PM. Damn. My battery died on me during the keynote so I couldn't blog live that Dan Fernandez walked up to the stage and demoed AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft which we developed. Our bottom line was two laughs and a heartwarming applause at the end of the demo. Felt good ;)

I've taken a good deal of photos during the keynote which I'll be uploading to Flickr soon. I might also share the better ones here.

There is a break now from 3:30pm to 4:00pm and afterwards the first session starts. As you know, I'll be attending a session around Distributed Applications and what the future (and the future of .NET) holds us in that domain. Until then, it's snack and refreshing soft drinks time!