Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) and BizTalk 2006 (Pathfinder)...oh, and Gary and Bub too!

Today was the last day of TechReady, and while it’s been an amazing five days, I’m looking forward to heading home on Sunday.

This morning I got along to a BizTalk 2006 Adapter lab, and learned about the new adapters that will be supported as part of BTS 2006. The most exciting ones were the new WSS (SharePoint) adapter and the POP3 adapter (receive emails through BTS). There is also better support for BTS development through VS 2005 (including zoom support in the orch designer), and the administration tools have been rebuilt; take it from me, they rock! Being able to configure send and receive ports and locations outside of Visual Studio BTExplorer is a gift, and now you can package up your BTS applications using an MSI file, and use the admin application to deploy them, again, without the VS dependency.

The release of BizTalk Server 2006 and the .NET InfoPath Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005 has prompted Chris and myself to change the format of our TechEd session, and do our devmo using all the new kit. Now, it’s going to be a little more risky, as these products aren’t code complete, but eh, it certainly will be more fun!

I also attended a great deep dive on Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as “Avalon”. It was an end to end devmo and covered off some of the innovations that make developing a compelling UX (User Experience) easier for developers. I have been inspired by this new technology, and will be putting together a session for the lunchtime event, look out for the event link. By the way, if you’re going to be doing any WPF dev using Visual Studio 2005, make sure you get the Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1.

OK, so now, my next installment in the Register For Tech.Ed ‘05 Australia comic series…enjoy ;)