What did I bring away from PDC2005?
Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005), aka VSTS is well on its way to release on November 7th, 2005. However, TFS (which will not be released in November) released a B3 this week on MSDN Downloads. We've all heard about .NET 2.0 (at PDC2003). Generics, Partial Classes, and in the past year we've learned about Team System (Architect, Developer & Tester) and Team Foundation Server.
Orcas (Visual Studio 2006/7) will be the XAML enabled IDE for Vista and will include a design surface that is fully CSS-aware. This design surface, Quartz, was unveiled as part of the Expression suite. Odd that they used the term Quartz, since Apple uses the term to refer to its desktop rendering modules (Quartz2D and Quartz Extreme).
ATLAS is still evolving and according to Shunta, ultimately the AJAX (XmlHttpRequest's) technology might be built into the ASP.NET 3.0 controls. For now, it's just a technology preview... with an official release within a few months after Whidbey. I still believe the Atlas control declarations on the ASPX page (and even in the JS) are still way too verbose - but then again so was XAML at PDC2003. Shunta even made a comparison to XAML in how they reduced it's verbosity (eg. atlas:control.subtype) as a possibility for future ATLAS releases. All I can say here is that Atlas is going to lift up ASP.NET programming to be more powerful that WinForms or SmartClient apps. A new class of app will evolve from this, and not even XAML apps (hosted in a future version of IE) will be as cool.
SQL Server 2005 now comes with the SQLCLR. Enterprise Studio will replace both Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer - but I knew all that before going to the PDC. It's Project LINQ where the real DB magic comes into play. This ADO.NET 2.0 capability is what Anders' was trying to sell us at PDC2003 - a unified method for querying any type of data from within .NET. You don't have to use a static non-OOP aware language like T-SQL to query data. This can be a great thing... but shouldn't be overused.
Office 12 gains a new task-based UI, but they are still going to be client apps - not a web app like many have thought they were moving too (probably because they will finally have a Unix-like XDisplay capability built into Vista, called RAID). Hotmail, thankfully, will finally see an overhaul with an AJAX-type OWA look-alike to compete with GMail and the upcoming Y!Mail.
Longhorn Server will be released in 2007 and will include IIS7 and RAID (Remote Applications Integration Layer). IIS7 is going to take the market by storm. I believe the granularity of administrative control, ease of management (XML config's and changes don't require a restart of IIS), and pluggable modules is going to setup IIS7 to totally dominate the market. Considering that IIS has had ZERO critical vulnerabilities since the 6.0 release in 2003, how will Apache even be able to compete?
Tags: [PDC05]
posted @ Saturday, September 24, 2005 4:41 PM