Day 2 Sessions and Universal Studios Party
Wednesday, 14th September, 2005
What a difference 24 hours makes! You can criticise Microsoft for many things, but failing to react to a groundswell of complaints isn't one of them.
In yesterday's blog I complained about the out-of-date and incomplete 'The goods' software pack attendees were given, and in particular the lack of Office 12 Beta 1. The official story yesterday (at least from the Microsoft Office rep I spoke to) was that any PDC attendees wanting to get on the Office 12 beta would have to apply for the beta and hope for the best, just like everybody else. Understandably people weren't happy!
This morning that all changed, with the announcement at the keynote that all PDC attendees would be sent the Beta 1 DVD in a few weeks when it will be ready. There are also blog reports that the hopelessly out-of-date copies of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 included in the software package are going to be replaced later today with Release Candidate 1 of Visual Studio Team System and the September CTP of SQL Server 2005, both of which (finally!) work together. This goes a long way to addressing my criticisms of 'hype vs reality' yesterday. But there was even better news at this morning's keynote. All PDC attendees will receive a voucher for the RTM version of SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition with a 'production' license. That's a very generous move on Microsoft's part, and yes, I'm a LOT happier with the situation than I was yesterday!
Things dramatically improved on the session front too, although that may be down as much to my choice of sessions (friends tell me an IIS 7 presentation I'd intended going to until a session change caused a conflict, was an unmitigated disaster with every single demo crashing). The keynote was very marketing-oriented, but was short, snappy and informative. Most of the hoopla was around the 'Expression' product suite which comprises 'Acrylic' (vector and raster graphics editing program), 'Sparkle' (interactive designer) and 'Quartz' (web designer). I wasn't as excited about these announcements as the vast majority of those attending seemed to be, as I see them as a 'poor man's Photoshop/Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver' respectively.
Integration of these products with Visual Studio is obviously a lot better, but given the push that these products are for designers, rather than developers, I don't see the need or demand. No designer I know who's been using the industry standard products for many years is going to switch to what they see as a 'poor man's copy', least of all in its early release 1.0 state. Huge applause greeted a demonstration of the 'Microsoft Research technology that is unique to the product' and which was claimed to enable the 'smart lassoo' feature, but the reality is that this did not work as well as the Photoshop 'magnetic lassoo' we've had for a couple of years now. Admittedly MSDN subscribers, who presumably will get the products for free, and who can't afford the 'industry standard' designer tools will love this stuff, but according to the sales pitch they are not the intended audience!
My first session, postponed from Tuesday after the keynote seriously over-ran, was 'A Lap around the WinFX SDK and Win32 SDK'. This attracted very small numbers, which is a pity as it was an excellent talk from Brent Rector covering a whole bunch of tools xsd.ex, Fusion profiler, the new DOS 'smart' command prompt MSH (Monad) and a whole bunch of other stuff. Most interesting was the news that the platform and .NET SDKs are being absorbed into the new WinFX SDK. Reading between the lines it's clear that Vista is going to be fully .NET enabled. Most interesting of all are the oft-repeated rumours that the next release of Visual Studio (Orcas) will be released in the Vista timeframe and will be a 'point release', with WinFX being the new moniker that will gradually replace the common parlance of .NET. When the 'Orcas released with Vista' rumours appeared on blogs before the PDC most, including me, poo-pooed this as being unrealistic given the timescales, but now many, including me, seem in agreement that this is what will happen. It's very clear from the C# 3.0/LINQ demo's that the software is already pretty robust and releasing them with Vista at the end of 2006 makes sense.
Anders Hejlsberg gave a beautifully paced and pitched presentation on LINQ (pronounced 'Ling') - the new Language Integrated Query Framework that ships with C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. This is a major announcement and although there are some questions around the whole 'Dlinq' (ADO.NET 3.0 codename) piece it's far more than a data/object mapper as may first appear to be the case. I'm looking forward to playing with this powerful new technology as soon as I get some breathing space. Other speakers could learn a lot from Anders' presentation style - the right balance of PowerPoint slides and demo's, with lots of code samples that are simple enough to follow. This was a definite highlight of the whole PDC event for me.
Ramash Nagarajan gave a somewhat less successful talk on "WinFS Future Directions: Building Data Centric Applications Using WPF (Avalon) and Windows Forms". I felt this suffered from too much complex code for this format which makes following code examples hard to follow. There were some impressive demo's in the talk, and the technology again has exciting possibilities, but the talk failed to deliver on its promise of including Avalon, with the only Avalon content being a demo (no demonstrable code) of an Infragistics data-bound control that did some clever rotating Rolodex views of photo's of people (I have a horrid feeling that in a few years time we're all going to be really sick of these rotating effects!)
The final session of the day, on ATLAS, was my personal favourite. Some may criticise Shanku Niyogi's over-enthusiastic appeals for applause but the fact is his demonstrations WERE cool, and he recovered from any minor coding mistakes very quickly. ATLAS has turned out to be much more than I'd expected, offering a lot more than AJAX, in the sense that it carries the whole object-oriented .Net server control paradigm over to the client. A decent framework for the browser client at last! It's elegant, it's powerful, involves little to no hacky spaghetti JavaScript and DHTML writing on the part of the developer, AND it works across all browsers too. Excellent stuff, and the future for 'fat client-like' applications on the web is suddenly looking very bright.
The day ended with the party at Universal Studios. I didn't stay too late, but got a chance to experience the one new attraction since my last visit, 'Shrek in 4D' (which was excellent), and got to talk to a whole bunch of interesting folks, from a Microsoft employee from Redmond to a group of fellow ASP.NET developers struggling with much the same issues I struggle with in my day-to-day programming. I ended the day MUCH happier than yesterday, and encouraged that attending PDC was now looking like having been the right decision after all. Tomorrow will hopefully prove this out.
Apologies for late publication of this blog. IIS is unusable (it just hangs) and just locks up on any attempt to reinstall it after removing it using Control Panel, which is making blog HTML proofing and testing difficult. This IIS hang, together with intermittent hangs when trying to access Network Configuration happened just after I tried to install the 'Max' Avalon-based demo (which fails with a message saying 'something outside my control has caused an error'!) It may be coincidence but if you're thinking of giving this showcase application a go, decide if you want to do what I'll have to do when I get back to the UK - completely reinstalling XP and all my software just a few days after it was completely installed cleanly!
