Back on track.

It's been a long summer. My day job has kept me away from blogging.

I got a chance to go to PDC this year. There was so much to absorb. I'm still letting everything percolate. Here's the things that impressed me:

VS.NET Whidbey

• Intellisense is greatly improved.
• Extensible debugger displays was VERY cool.
• Code visualization (C#). Say goodbye to Visio. I think I might actually be able to use the code diagram now.
• Of course the C# language improvements are great (Generics, Iterators anonymous functions etc.)

Longhorn

• Avalon - I love the direction that the presentation layer is going. XAML was REALLY cool. I really like the idea of applying the declarative nature of XML to UI layout and design.
• WinFS - I need to study this more. I'm not totally sold on it yet.

Indigo

• I liked what I saw of Indigo. This is def the right direction to bring web services and SOA into the mainstream.