Dev Blog - Johan Danforth

Or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) as it is now called, and it is very, very powerful. I sat down in the lab area where they have everything you need installed, complete with lab instructions, and tried out a few web services and such. Support for contract first coding is better now, where you first create the "contract" as an interface and you then go on and implement this contract with code. You can do the same sort of things on the client. I like that.

I also had a quick look at the LINQ stuff, and it's pretty cool coding. LINQ style coding will probably replace the ADO.NET code you do in your Data Access Layer if you use such an architecture. It is powerful and intuitive and there is no longer a need for a mapper design pattern where you map a strongly typed data set (or similar datatable object) into a DTO (Data Transfer Object), because you can create the DTOs directly with LINQ. In ADO.NET 2.0 you can continue using the same kind of code and patterns you used in .NET 1.1, but I would suggest everyone to look at the ObjectDataSource stuff and

Something I would like to look at in more detail is the workflow foundation, but that will have to wait until I get home.

Lol, maybe they had as much free coke, coffee, juice and ice cream at the top meeting Mr Bush was attending as we have here at the PDC'05 convention, but if that was the case I understand him. If not, it's another great quote in the never endling list of quotes the most powerful guy in the world has produced, this one in writing... :)

Anyway, it feels encouraging that he actually can write and that he has normal human needs... there is hope for the world after all. ;)

Yesterday was the best day so far at the PDC. Most impressive things was first what will probably become 'ADO.NET 3.0' or something similar - LinkQ or DLinkQ, which is dynamic language integration (or something like that). Eric blogged about that. Next thing which was really, really cool and got lots of applause from the session attendees was the new integrated workflow foundation, which is basically a powerful workflow engine. The Windows Worflow Foundation is a part of the WinFX subsystem and will let you host workflows in lots of different containers, like IIS, a windows forms app, sharepoint, SQL server or even in a console app! It's also dead simple to use. It's as if you ripped out the basic workflow engine from Biz Talk and created a powerful set of APIs to use against it. It will be used ALOT in the future. The graphical workflow designer in Visual Studio was impressive.

Last night was Universal Studio Theme Park night and it was just great! Me and my friends rushed off to the Jurassic Park and The Mummy rides as fast as we could to get a head of all the other 8000 or so people there. Really cool rides I must say :) If you ever go to Los Angeles, don't miss it. We tried most of the rides in the park, but I think Jurassic and Back to the Future was the best :)

Off to the next general session now.... *running*

Atm I'm standing in the Windows Vista Internet Alley, where they have set up hundreds of machines running Windows Vista (build 5219). The user experience is just great, lots of animations and stuff. In the future when coding for the WinFX platform I think you have to be a bit careful to not just add all of these moving and zooming stuff just because it is easy to do it. But it is cool, I must admit. Everything got a kind of soft touch to it. I wonder what kind of graphics hardware you need to run Vista graphics in optimal speed. No wonder ATI is platinum sponsor of the PDC event :D

One of the things that drew the longest run of applause was probably when Jim Allchin (I think it was) jacked a standard USB memory into the Vista box and it got recognized as internal memory! Time to dig out all my stray USB memory sticks and get them to use, my laptop will look like a christmas tree, USB mems sticking out in every socket ;)

Off to the next general session now with Eric Rudder and Steven Sinofsky.

One thing I just noticed what that the rich text editor in .Text doesn't load up in IE 7

Shorty we're off to meet with some of the other 100 or so Swedes that are here at the PDC. Microsoft SE has arranged for a get-togeather at a hotel close by. Will be fun to meet a few old friends that I know should be there tonight.

Tomorrow I'll attend sessions about "Avalon" (now called the Windows Presentation Foundation), another (hopefully better) session about "Indigo" and 2 sessions about CRM solutions and "Atlas". Atlas is functionality for more easily doing AJAX-style programming in ASP.NET 2.0 and later. Looking forward to tomorrow.

The concept of pluggable providers in .NET is really interesting and something I want to have a deeper look at when I get back home. The last session I was at today was about providers and how you could (quite easily) replace someting like the default membership and roles provider with your own.

Stefan Schackow did a very good presentation about providers, which sort of saved the afternoon. I attended the COM202 session about "A lap around the Windows Communications Foundation" and it wasn't very good at all. The speaker jumped right into all the nitty gritty details you could play with in WCF and I bet 80% of the guys in there listening didn't follow him at all.

The keynote with Bill G and all the others was looooong, and they ran 25 minutes over time so we had to run to grab lunch and in 10 minutes I have to be at the "Indigo" session.

The keynotes were pretty good, Bill showed a funny video and they demoed a bunch of stuff - some more interesting and impressive than others. Highlight was when 4 of the top MS architects were at the stage at the same time, doing a combined coding demo - Don, Chris An, Anders and Steve Guthrie. That was neat. When I get back to work I'll try to demo a few of the cool things with Windows Vista and the built in RSS-capabilities you there and within Office 12.

Time to run to the next session!

So, originally I had planned to attend the SOA pre-conf session today, but I had a look at the material and realized I've been through most of that already and much of it was pretty basic. So I decided to change to the session about building reusable libraries with Brad Abrams. But again, that session was also pretty basic, and I've been doing coding guidelines for quite some time at work, so it wasn't that much new stuff to me. So again (right after the power failure) I decided to change session - so at the moment I'm sitting at the ASP.NET 2.0 session, where they are talking about new features in ASP.NET.

So far so good. They've been covering Master pages, Themes and some of the controls like the menues and those. Right now it's about the Gridview and different datasources. It's cool, but I still get chills by all this declarative coding... ;)