MIX Day 1

I won $50 tonight after an hour and a half at the blackjack table!

I was really impressed with my sessions today.  The highlights for me were the demos in Visual Studio Orcas (Beta 1 is now available for download). There are some amazing features in Orcas. If you’ve read our Javascript article in the May issue of MSDN Magazine, you know that Javascript is a complex and powerful language, but coding and debugging it can be a nightmare. It is for me, anyway. What I love about Orcas is the enhanced Javascript support. You get full Intellisense on Javascript functions and types. Here’s an example:

The IDE keeps track of variable types and will show you the right Intellisense for whatever the variable’s current type is:

I was also really impressed with LINQ in C# 3.0. When I first started at Microsoft, Joshua Trupin wrote about LINQ in his Editor's Note in the May 2006 issue, but I was too knew and overwhelmed to think that much about it. Before coming to MIX I spent about three weeks updating our internal scorecard for web traffic. This involved reading and writing data to and from three different sources in a variety of different storage engines and format (ODBC, SQL Server, XML, etc.). I think It would have taken less than a week with LINQ. You wouldn’t believe how popular LINQ was today. You would think with all the sexy Silverlight stuff, new ways to query data wouldn’t be a popular topic. But Anders Hejlsberg’s session “Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications” was packed. I mean no wall space left un-leaned upon, no floor un-sat upon. MIX must have underestimated the demand for LINQ because the room was really small (if I find a picture, I’ll post it).

Stay tuned for MIX day 2.

-Mike Richter