Live from PDC last day and closing notes

REST with WCF

REST is gaining popularity and in WCF 3.5 we added REST support through WebGet and WebInvoke attributes and the UriTemplate. Now we just made available the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) REST Starter Kit CTP 1 that you can find it here www.msdn.com/wcf/rest

The WCF REST Starter Kit is a set of features, Visual Studio templates, samples and guidance that enable users to create REST style services using WCF.

The CodePlex Preview 1 release provides new features that enable or simplify various aspects of using the http capabilities in WCF, such as caching, security, error handling, help page support, conditional PUT, push style streaming, type based dispatch and semi-structured XML support. The WCF REST Starter Kit also provides Visual Studio templates for creating REST style services such as an Atom feed service, a REST-RPC hybrid service, Resource singleton and collection services and an Atom Publishing Protocol service.

A couple of nice feature are:

- The possibility to auto generate some human readable metadata that describes the service endpoints and the JSON payload.

- Support of tunneling PUT/DELETE verbs over a POST a feature absolutely needed to support Silverlight Clients. Due to browser limitations SL can only du GET and POST.

Entity Framework vs. LINQ to SQL

This is always a debate but let put it like this: Entity Framework is the future and is the recommended solution for DAL when you want an O/R mapping and LINQ functionality.
There is a whole ecosystem that is being created around EF with ADO.NET Data Services, business application framework, etc..
V2 will carry over staff from LINQ to SQL like better POCO support and Lazy loading so making EF a real super set of LINQ to SQL

So now is a good time to start learning it.

 Closing notes:

PDC is always a very good conference and is a great way to understand what will come in the next 1 to 2 years. Of course it would be cool that all this stuff would be RTM but PDC is all about the future so we need to live with thatJ.

The big trends that seems to surface out of PDC are:

- Cloud Computing and Services

- REST & AtumPub, most of the Azure Services talks REST & AtomPub and WCF will have more and more support for it too.

- Multi-Touch computing. Windows 7 will have support for it and WPF 4.0 will enable creating great “touch applications”

- Rich User Interface for the Desktop and the Browser. XAML rules.

- Parallel programming

Below a summary of the technologies that I have seem with a rating for importance, coolness, potential impact and timeframe for mainstream adaption.

To note that the ratings are purely personal opinion and from a guy that the main focus isLOB in the Enterprise and Top Web sites solutions.

Ratings from + to +++++ with the last (5) being the maximum rating

So if you are not yet using the following technologies, is now time to start learning and use them, they are here to stay:

- XAML based UI (WPF & Silverlight)

- WCF

- Entity Framework

- ASP.NET AJAX

If you are a Web site, a ISV or a Startup (and not a MacJ) you should start to get familiar with these stuff:

- Cloud computing in general

- Azure Servies

- REST programming

See you next year PDC and cheers from 30C Los Angeles, no snow here!

Ronnie Saurenmann