Rob Gillen's WebLog

PDC05: DotNetNuke - The Migration to ASP.NET 2.0

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 primary objective was to discuss the migration of/support for .NET 2.0 in DNN. The discussion was of particular interest to me as there were many assumptions that I had made about which features of the framework they "had" to update to - however, after listening to them talk, I've pretty much changed my positions... the problem is... they are not just doing things earlier than .NET and therefore should be replaced with the "native" versions of such... rather they have a significant amount of "extra" functionality that they consider "core". to simply hack and replace with the .NET equivalents would be to throw away valuable features. This applies in particular to webparts as well as the skinning/themeing components... The team was truly thinking creatively about ways that they can grab the "best of both worlds" which is very encouraging.  It will be interesting to see how the final version looks on .NET 2.0 and what parts of the framework they were able to leverage and which ones they left with the default implementation.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.

PDC05: Extending Visual Studio with Add-ins and Packages

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.

After the session, I took some time and worked through one of the hands-on-labs avaialble on this very topic and was able to successfully get a dockable tool window sample working… maybe there is hope…

Of most interest is that after the sessions, many of the MSFT people are simply “around” for you to talk to… I was able to spend a fair amount of time discussing some questions around multiple-tool-window interactions with the very same guys that normally work on this stuff… it was a great opportunity and I’m appreciative of the time they spent with me.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.

PDC05: Choosing the Right Presentation Technology

The second break-out session I attended today was called “Choosing the Right Presentation Technology: Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"), Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE, and More”.  The speaker was great and really seemed to know his stuff.  There wasn’t alot of raw knowledge gained during this session, however I still felt it was valuable… it might have been much more valuable if I spent more time building winform apps, or designing the graphics aspects of said applications.  Nonetheless, it was great to see another demo of WPF and WPF/E (running on OS/X).  He had a good discussion of Atlas, XAML, WPF, etc. and the history of UIs in general and how we got to where we are now… very exciting to see what a good designer working in concert with a good developer can accomplish.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.

PDC05: Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo")

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.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.

PDC05: Day 1 Keynote

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:

• Bill G gave a “state of the industry” type talk explaining that he felt this is the most exciting time to be in the software industry, and that software is the most significant change agent around today.
• Demo’d Windows Vista… very impressive UI – not just the graphics… little things like alt-tab improvements, previewing docs, previewing task bar items, side bar items, integrated RSS, etc.
• Office 12 is going to rock.  I am disappointed that they didn’t give us a pre-release version on “The Goods” kit.  Most notably is the new menuing/toolbar structure with the goal of making the programs and their features more discover-able to the general populous.
• Excel 12 has some great new features allowing for tremendous data visualization without really knowing what you are doing… very nice improvements
• Powerpoint 12 has some great enhancements, such as automatically taking text bullets/flow items and converting them into a diagram for you with a few clicks of a wizard.
• Powerpoint and Sharepoint have some great improvements with respect to “slide galleries.”  Picture if you will, a company assembles a great deck for sales teams to use.  obviously, many presentations may not need all of the slides.  The content developer could post them to a slide gallery, where each slide would be individually available for inclusion in a given sales person’s deck.  Further, the salesperson would be notified each time he/she opened the deck if any changes had been made to the master copy and would be able to update the local copy with just a few clicks.
• Outlook 12 has some great improvements with respect to handling tasks and RSS… incidentally, I’m now convinced that NewsGator for Outlook has a short life span (at least how I use it)
• switching topics a bit now… “Workflow” is moving high on the priority and will be “baked in” to the OS… it will be interesting to learn more about what this means.
• LUA will be the default running mode for Windows Vista
• USB Memory Sticks can sometimes be used to instantly add additional memory to a machine… they can be made availalbe to the virtual memory runtime
• You have the ability to sandbox certain processes to isolate potential security risks
• Atlas is going to be cool
• WPF (Avalon) is really cool
• WPF/E (WPF Everywhere) is amazing… ability to run Avalon on any device… including things such as mobile devices, Linux, Mac OS/X, etc.
• Infocard is a federated identity system but is open this time… more to come on this
• There was a great demo of the various key development components… of most interest to me was the integrated query framework that allowed for the object exposure of db tables, and then the dynamic joining of data from said db tables with data pulled on the fly from in-memory repositories using SQL-like syntax… very cool

Oh yeah… and I scored an i-mate JASJAR… I’m so pumped… more on the other sessions I attended in a few minutes

I'm at PDC!

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).

I hope to have some interesting technical things tomorrow… tonight’s post is merely informational… however, it was neat to get a few minutes to play on some Windows Vista-based machines… They have setup what they call “Internet Alley” which is essentially 300+ machines that are available for people to come up and just use… (all running Windows Vista of course).  The UI is pretty jazzy… windows and menus fade in sort of in an Mac OSX-like fashion… very smooth and sharp… it’ll be interesting to uncover the other features… I did also play with the Windows Explorer which had a number of additional tweaks…

It should be a week that will not dissapoint…