Notes on .NET 3.0 (WinFX) Tour Video

MSDN Showtime has a show related to .NET 3.0, the show is called  .NET 3.0 (WinFX) Tour and was recorded in Rotterdam (Netherlands). The show covers Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), InfoCard and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). There are two shows with a total of almost 2 hours of info.

The first show (50 min), presented by Ami Vora, starts with an introduction to .NET 3.0 followed by a small demo of InfoCard. I must admit that this was the first time I really took time to listen/read about what InfoCard is all about, and I was a bit surprised... My impression from this show was that it looks like an advanced version of Passport. The main part of the show (25 min) is about WCF and the most of the time is spent on creating a small demo application by live coding.

The second show (1 hour) is about WF and WPF. Clemens Vaster is the presenter for WF and I think he makes a good case for WF. However, I think the demo coding (30 min) was not as structured as I would have liked it to be, I was having problems understanding exactly what he was doing and why. The WF stuff gets hidden in all the coding and talking. In the end there is 10 min on WPF presented by Paul Tallet, which to me felt as too short!

One thing I did learn during Clemens demo was that there is a static method on System.String called IsNullOrEmpty. Using this method eliminate the errors you can do when writing if(str == null || str.Length == 0).

As I'm someone who focuses on distributed applications and BizTalk I found the WCF and WF information most interesting, even though I had heard most of it before. If you like to learn more about .NET 3.0 (WinFx) I think this is a good introduction, specifically I think the first part is very good.