Archives
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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.
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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.
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PDC05: Choosing the Right Presentation Technology
Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.
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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.
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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:
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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).
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Writing MPF Schemas is easier now using VS 2005
I know many people do not take the time to include schemas in their MPF named procedures, but I am a big fan. Here at eQuest, we use these in-line schemas for all sorts of things ranging from auto-generating CHM files to auto-generating strongly-typed C# and XML Web Service wrappers. The problem is, these are a *pain* to write. I hate writing them, and even worse, they are hard to get accurate. It is very easy to miss a step, or mis-state a requirement, etc. It is very easy to duplicate a node, or forget to include a node, etc.
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Web Service Studio
Those of you who interact with and develop XML web services on a regular basis are probably very familiar with this tool or have other tools that you have purchased/developed to provide similar functionality, but I came across the Web Service Studio (http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=65a1d4ea-0f7a-41bd-8494-e916ebc4159c) last night while working on a little web service project and I think it is great… It is straight-forward in its operation, and doesn’t have alot of “jazz” to the UI, but it does what it is designed to do… which is providing you with a means of interacting with Xml web services in an adhoc fashion. I used it primarily as a testing tool, to validate that the web services I was creating worked as they should. There are many other tools that one could use for performing such a validation… the built-in test page (only works on the local machine), building a custom client such as a winform app (this works, but requires a custom build for each web service which is hardly efficient), using a tool such as InfoPath to quickly build a test form (again, very effective, but requires a new form for each web service). Web Service Studio allows me to simply point to a url after which it will read the WSDL, enumerate the methods available to me, generate the proxy, and let me test/probe each request right there… better yet, it allows me to see the raw XML request being sent back and forth for each “post” so I can see what the request/response needs to look like for non-webservice-friendly (i.e. you have to hand-craft the XML) SOAP clients. Anyway, if you are working with Xml Web Services on a regular basis and need a simple (and free) testing tool, this tool is definitely worth looking at.
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VisualStudio.Net.2005.Beta2(firstExperience) == Really.Good;
Wow… early this morning was the first time that I was really able to spend some time with the new Visual Studio 2005 beta… and let me join the majority of the blogsphere in saying that I’m quite impressed. My task today was a simple one… that of converting a primarily content-focused website that I had build using Dreamweaver MX to ASP.NET 2.0. The following are some general impressions…
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So... InfoPath IS useful....
One of the unfortunate realities of being a busy consultant and developer is that your exposure to technologies and tools are often limited to what you have to have to use to get your job done, or what your client needs and/or is interested in. Obviously, you work hard to keep yourself exposed to as much and varied technology as possible, however somethings invaribly slip through the cracks.