I attended the keynote, plus three sessions today. Here's a quick summary of points I found interesting:
Steve Ballmer Keynote
I blogged about this already, but you can watch the webcast yourself.
Live Communication Server 2005
This is basically an enterprise IM server, with ability to interoperate with other company's IM servers, and public IM (MSN, Yahoo, AIM). If you want to have IM in your company, but don't want employees using public IM (and therefore possibly sharing sensitive info on public networks), then this is a possible solution. Their IM solution is well integrated with Office and other MS products. No mention of an API in this presentation, but it was a rather high-level talk.
Building Smart Client Applications with .NET: The Future of Software Development
Tim Huckaby, a consultant (non-MS employee) gave this talk on Smart Clients. In short: The definition of Smart Client is flexible; but it is something between a client/server app and a thin-client web page. It offers more in the way of a rich experience, with a better UI than the web. Unlike standard client/server, or 'normal' windows apps, it is able to work in connected and disconnected mode, taking advantage of the internet. The speaker says that things are “going the way of Smart Clients. This is not a prediction, this is a fact--large companies are developing and rolling out applications that use this architecture.”
He showed some demos of various smart clients. It looks like the programming model of Word, Excel, and Outlook has become much more accessible in Office 2003--for example, you can drop aand run .NET controls into Word's taskpane with very few lines of code. Having tried to write add-ins in COM for earlier versions of Office products, I am hopeful that this new stuff is much better. So far it looks that way.
Programming with System.net v2.0: API's You Need to Quickly Build Robust Network Applications
This speaker demo'd some great new functionality in the System.Net namespace. He showed how to do some things that we've had to implement ourselves in .NET 1.1. The new framework offers:
- Network Awareness: GetIsNetworkAvailable(), speed, interface, change notification, IPStatistics
- Caching policy: Http caching is built into the core classes--using caching on HTTP requests is very simple.
- Enhanced Protocol support: New class, FtpWebRequest, lets you use FTP servers just like HttpRequest. SMTP, and many other protocols have been implemented.
- Security: There is a new NetworkStream that supports SSL connections. Making a secure, SSL-enabled connection on a socket means you just have to use this new class. Works on remoting, TcpChannel, and other network connections. He gave a demo of writing a secure chat client/server in under 100 LOC.
Smart Client Architecture
Bill Hollis and Rocky Lhotka (yeah, the guy that wrote that Wrox book) gave an overview of possible architectures that assist in developing apps in the Smart Client model. I'd need diagrams to do it justice. In general, though--with one of our recent applications we are ~90% of the way towards their recommended architecture (yay Breckin!). I think you can watch the webcast here. I recommend it. The code can be downloaded on Rocky's site.
That was the last session of the day, ending at 6:15...