[PDC'05] Did some coding with "indigo"

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.