"Whidbey" Publishers Summit

  • Article

I talked about the XML support in VS.NET "Whidbey" at a publishers summit hosted here
in Redmond yesterday, which prompted some good feedback. Now that I have been caught
up in the machinery of publishing it amazes me how much effort it takes to generate
a book through authoring, editing and marketing. There are supposedly around
4000+ books on .NET with about 280 of those on VB.NET alone. Dare, Joshua, Arpan and me
hosted an XML round table to talk with some authors on their projects. In
an attempt to make their titles standout more I talked to one author who was relating
his book to Route 66. Personnally I would have chosen "Samurai Jack cuts VB.NET
code". Certainly a title like "The guru's guide to VB.NET" is now considered a non-starter.

I notice that the full abstracts for
the PDC talks have now been posted here. If you are totally confused by all these
code names this is a brief biased description of each one;

- "WinFS"- The digital aid meets meta data. Store all your "stuff" and find it seemlessly with hundreds of rules.

"Indigo" - SOAP 1.2 + WS-\*. The future of distributed computing
  • "Avalon" - Cool UI graphics, no Windows message pump and a declarative programming
    model.
  • "Yukon" - SQL Server next with the beauty of an XML data type to store all those XML
    documents.
  • "Whidbey" - VS.NET next with some great innovations in the XML
    programming model    .