PDC [ It went so fast

Stefan Barrett — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:27:23 GMT

Back home after a conference which flew by.

The main bits I'm going to be playing with, will be the .NET 4.0 - I wonder how long it will be before we can get our hands on it.

One of the main selling points for me, was the new dynamic keyword, which a number of presenters got a laugh from describing as "... statically declaring as dynamic". This will make talking to office (from C#) a lot easier but the potential for abuse is quite high. Basically it allows you to write something like:

dynamic something = someObject.someChildObject;
something.Func();

Where the someChildObject property on someObject actually returns a object. At run time, and not compile time, Func gets resolved.

This would allow somebody to write something like:

dynamic func(dynamic a, dynamic b)
{
return a.Func(b);
}

You can pass anything into this function, as long as 'a' has a function which takes 'b' and returns something.

PDC08 - Day 3

Stefan Barrett — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:40:02 GMT

PDC seems to be all about

.NET 4.0 and beyond
How to make use of all the cores in our machines
How to make use of the cloud
Windows 7
Touch screens

The added features in .NET 4.0 I could use now - so it's sort of useful that they've given us a VPC with VS2010 on it. That's enough to play with, but personally I would have prefered to get a image so I could install it on a existing system.

Recycling seems to be much more important this year - which is good. Bit of warning regarding the bag would have been nice.