Rob Gillen's WebLog

I’ve recently recieved clearance to discuss a project I’ve been working on for quite awhile – a new SDK for the Microsoft Provisioning System. This is something that has been a goal of mine for a number of years, and if you have done any significant development for/with MPS you will be glad to hear that the developer toolset is finally going to be shipping (no, don’t ask me when – but it shouldn’t be too long).

So I need to begin this post by admitting that I’m relatively new to the XSD world… particuarly as it applies to C#. While I’ve done a signficant amount of Xml programming and manipulation in C#, my recent forrays into this technology cause me to reconsider my belief that I’m an experienced Xml programmer…

The last session I attended today was called a "Birds of a feather" session... this is much less formal and is sort of a community-style meeting. This session was great as I had many questions and the opportunity to sit and listen to the authors of DNN discuss their thoughts and directions for the product, as well as to see that they are truly interested in the feedback from the community was simply great.

The last “main” session I attended today was on extending the Visual Studio .NET IDE.  This session was of particular interest to me as I’ve dabbled with the VSIP for quite some time now and never been able to get anything truly of interest working.  I listened intently as they described the improvements in the VSIP (now the VS.NET SDK) in the latest versions.  Key things are that they now support fully-managed packages… meaning I shouldn’t have to look at C++ (yeah!).  The wizards for add-ins are a little bit better now, and the registration process is greatly improved.  They took us through two demos and answered a good number of questions.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.

Because the keynote went long today, they rescheduled the lunch sessions so my second session of the day was called Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo"): A Lap around the Windows Communications Foundation. Unfortunately, I felt the session was nearly a complete waste of time.  Besides the fact that the speaker seemed less than prepared (truely seemed surprized by some of his demo results), the demo and content did not “gell” well.  There wasn’t that cohesion that makes for a good presentation.  Furthermore, while I came out of the presentation knowing how to do some WCF programming, I am still missing the *why* I would want to.  Seeing that this was the introductory session of the conference on Indigo, I assumed more time would have been spent on getting us excited about why we would want to use this new technology, and the amazing business problems it could solve for us… unfortunately, none of that was given.  Thankfully, this was the only “downer” session I attended today.

The keynote for PDC05 today was great.  It started out with Bill Gates (this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person).  He was followed by Jim Alchin.  Between the two of them, we saw some great demos and heard some really encouraging things.  The following is a list of key points that I came away with from the session:

Well, not actually, but I’m close.  I’m certain that there will be a ton of people posting about PDC05, and those who attended the pre-sessions probably already are.  I arrived this afternoon in time to go down and get registered so I can skip that in the morning… I’ve been spending this evening working through the schedule and trying to determine which sessions to go to (there are so many!).  As always, some blocks of sessions seem pretty boring, while others have 4–5 sessions that I really want to attend (thank goodness for the conference DVD’s).