VS 2005 RC Bits Update

After fussing in line at the beginning of PDC to get NO RC BITS, all is well after every attendees (including me) received the VS 2005 RC bits on Thursday. BTW, for customers that are considering standing up a VSTF, the beta 3 bits are ONLY DAYS AWAY. This is a critical release as it will include the GO-LIVE license and the guaranteed in-place upgrade to the final RTM, gold bits early next year.

BEST OF SHOW PDC 2005 - Vista Transactional File System

I'll have to go with the Vista transactional file system as best in show and here's why. Many lifetimes ago, I sat in a meeting with a pile of so-called programmers, and the discussion centered on a transaction against an ACCESS MDB FILE on a remote file share, and a marker file on the local disk. Of course, the marker file was the flag that indicated to the application that the tx had taken place against the ACCESS MDB FILE. Well, needless to say, it was education time. After explaining 2PC (or two-phase commit) to the programmers, and also highlighting the importance of a TP monitor to referee the protocol, all I received in return was crickets chirping.

Well that was then, and I can tell you that I have waited a mule's age to have this theoretically basic functionality from the platform. Who'd a thunk I'd have to wait this long? Anyway this is a true breakthrough.

HONORABLE MENTIONS PDC 2005

LINQ, DLINQ, XLINQ

The dreaded "impedance mismatch: between relational and object worlds collide (or intersect) with Language Integrated Query built into C# 3.0. Also available to VB.NET devs.

WPF, WCF, WWF

Dub-dub-X family of renamed infrastructure for WinFX. more of these later.

GaDay for now,

-Ken