PDC05: Tuesday and Wednesday - my brain is too small!

Tuesday was the start of the full conference - and the start of brain ache for me :-) Over two days and two very long keynotes we covered a very large amount of technology - with pretty much no coverage of VS 2005 or SQL 2005 (well - lets face it - we have nearly shipped those :-)).

The breadth of technology we have under development is staggering. Avalon and Indigo were joined by Workflow technologies for human and system workflows, huge changes to Office desktop applications (both in terms of making it easier for the user and easier for the developer), a shiny new version of Sharepoint Services at the heart of Office 12, Infopath enhancements including Web delivery of forms requiring no Infopath on the client,  Visual Studio Tools for Office v3, three new designer tools including Interactive Designer for Avalon work, Atlas "framework" for AJAX based ASP.NET 2.0 development and a new set of extensions enabling developers to query object, relational and XML data directly from within C# and Visual Basic. There is definitely a good buzz here - even oldies like myself with dogs, gerbils and mortgages can't help but be excited by the amount of technology we have coming over the next 18months or so.

I need to absorb this stufff a little more - and have spent most of Wed and Thursday in the excellent Hands On Labs playing with some of this technology. (NB: The event organisers and product teams have done a great job with teh Hands On Lab and the track lounges - fantastic stuff. There have been so many Microsoft folks in the track lounges you couldn't fail to get answers to questions about the new stuff.)

And lets finish with my recommendation for a quick read. Take a look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/  and more specifically take a look at this introduction.