My second day of the conference was a mixture of different topics, from distributed application architecture, over database features to the new C# features.
DAT202 - The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview of SQL Server 2008, Francois Ajenstat
There have been serveral new features presented in this session:
- new data types : filestream, datetime2
- support für spatial applications (geometry/geography support) with a cool demo using virtual earth
- ado.net entity framework (object/relational mapping on top of the ADO.NET Provider model)
- Demo of Project "Astoria" - ADO.NET Data Services for the Silverlight Apps.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/default.mspx
WIN202 - Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – Synchronization Framework for Enabling Roaming, Offline, and Collaboration Across Devices, Services & Apps , Philip Vaughn
The goal for the syncing framework is to allow the sync work without the need to define the own protocol. It is a provider based framework, with some already provided storage providers (file system, database). which can be easily extended and the strategies to resume conflicts. The definitely cool thing is the Sync Toy, which is an GUI built on top of the sync framework.
[2] Microsoft Sync Framework
ARC210 - Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion , Pat Helland
The funniest session of the day was the one by Pat Helland about the life beyond distributed transactions (don't use it ;-) Here is the link about the early version of the presentation and the coresponding whitepaper:
[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/16/link-to-life-beyond-distributed-transactions-an-apostate-s-opinion.aspx
TLA312 - Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0 , Luke Hoban
I liked this session very much, which came without almost any power point at all. The presentation was about the new features of the C#3.0 on a LINQ to object scenario, which showed in a very good way the usage of new constructs and syntactic sugar in C# 3.0. And i felt like 10 years younger, seeing lamda expressions in the programming langugage again, for the first time since scheme and lisp ;-)