Well the biggest week in the calendar of the Microsoft Developer is over, so much stuff to now digest. I had to laugh last night, I’d just spent a couple of hours watching some of the sessions online and then I got an email from Apple telling me that I could purchase some sessions from WWDC08.
The online coverage is fantastic it’s almost better than being there, almost. Ignoring the cloud computing announcements which won’t really impact us for the next 12 months or so (PDC09 has already been announced) and the windows 7 client stuff (again, we’ll wait for a public beta) the really cool stuff is the developer related material.
I watched Jeff King’s session on Visual Studio 2010 web developer features last night, the key highlights:
- HTML SnipIts – The ability to have the snipit functionality inside the HTML editor, MS have focused on the HTML authoring experience and adding this functionality certainly aides in this. My brief description doesn’t do this feature justice, take a look at Jeff’s demo.
- Triple click to delete content – just fits with the better authoring experience mentioned above.
- Javascript Intellisense – Better intellisense performance, the whole engine is more resilient
- Deployment – Jeff introduced the MSDeploy tool, it has the ability to change config files (and do other tasks) specific to the environment that you are targeting, this whole process looks interesting, although I’m sure the VSTS guys have some ideas that will probably apply to me more so.
I also watched the Olso demo with Don Box (he’s always a must watch, even if he was doing a cooking show, you’d still have to watch)
- The M language looks interesting, Don points out that Oslo is three components, the language, a tool and a repository. Don also mentions that developers have an unhealthy love for text editors and they changed the product from a Visio type tool to a text based one, I agree that he made the right choice.
I had to watch Scott Hanselman’s presentation on Baby Smash, one of those compulsory viewing things:
- Charts – Native chart support coming in .NET version 4
- Touch (aka surface), Silverlight and WPF are starting to really converge, your skillset is easily transfered across all of these technologies.
- The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is something to keep an eye on, visual studio 2010 is going to be making use of it. It’s a framework for adding extensibility to your applications.
- The whole .NET is crazy cool, it’s all there and is super easy to use.
Web Futures wasn’t as interesting, mostly cause I have my head in this space anyway, the things that did interest me were:
- The ability to have custom ID’s in webforms (might make webforms a little less icky)
- Fixing up of viewstate, so you can turn it off at a page level, but turn on specific controls (plus they are fixing up some controls that don’t work properly with viewstate off)
- Cache provider model, will be able to plugin tools like Velocity.
Entity Framework, I watched Tim Mallalieu talk on this. If you’ve been following the Entity Framework you might have seen the vote of no confidence that was put out by the Alt.NET community. Anyway it was good to see the team take this feedback onboard.
- POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) can now be wired up to entities, you need to watch the demo to get the point of this.
- An interesting point that Tim made was that the next version of SQL Server was going to make use of the Entity Framework for Reporting Services, this is really cool.
So much cool stuff going on. There is so much content to watch, I was watching this in comfort on my lounge via my Media Center PC, the SilverLight experience is awesome, better than any Saturday night movie.