Besides the integration of a Silverlight designer into the IDE, there were a couple of announcements that sneaked into the Keynote. First support for configuration files for multiple environments (dev, stage, uat, production). Second, Visual Studio's UI will be rebuilt using WPF. Scott Guthrie demoed a custom WPF extension for VS2010, that not only rendered the comments from methods in a very user friendly way, but also added extra functionality to retrieve WorkItem information from TFS.
On day 2 of PDC2008, the Silverlight toolkit was announced. This release features a series of controls that were only available on WPF and adds charting controls (both static and dynamic). These charts are part of Microsoft's open source program, so the source code will be shipped with the controls as well.
Another announcement was the tighter integration between Silverlight and Visual Studio. VS2010 will ship with a fully integrated Silverlight designer and WYSIWYG editor.
I attended to the "Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features" session on Day 1. Two of them really caught my attention:
- Improvements on Builds: One of the "cool new features" is the new workflow based builds. It comes with a rich editor to customize all the actions of a build and, because it is built on top of WF, you can create your own activities.
- Branching tools: branching, merging and tracking changes is one of the crucial tasks of the everyday developer life. With TFS 2010 you will be able to visualize changes and the mergers in branches. For example, if a change is lost after several merging several branches and you find out months after this happened, you can visualize in which branch this got lost and what merging order was followed.
This session fell into the "too much information too little time" category, which seemed to be the common denominator among the sessions at PDC. There are lots of things coming on the ASP.NET world and MVC, which has recently been released as Beta, is only one of them.
MVC has been very well received by the community and definitively shows promise. Microsoft has made it very clear that one of the main objectives with MVC is to appeal to the Ruby crowd.
The other main aspects that will be the focus of ASP.NET 4.0 will be Dynamic Data (which will feature improvement to what has already been shipped in SP1), Core, AJAX and Forms.
In this last area, the main features are around more control over what it is rendered, cleaner HTML and improved JQuery integration (you can get a glimpse of the integration here)
There were 2 other interesting things mentioned: The new buzz word is "hybrid applications", where a web app does not have to be 100% MVC, Web Forms or Dynamic data but a mix of them using the right technology when appropiate. The second one was a brief mention of "Silverlight server controls". I wonder if more info about this will be available of day 2's keynote
Earlier today Ray Ozzie, announced Microsoft's initiative on cloud computing: Windows Azure. In a nutshell, Azure is an OS for the cloud. Yes very buzz wordy, but it is technically true. Azure will take care of all the management task associated with publishing, managing, upgrading applications and resource consumption in the cloud.
So far 5 different families of services have been announced:
- Live Services
- .Net Services (which is an evolution of the previously announced BizTalk .NET)
- SQL Services
- SharePoint Servces
- Dynamic CRM Services
During the CTP period, which starts today, the first three will be available in one form or another. In the upcoming months more features will be activated. Microsoft is planning a rapid evolution of the services, with several incremental releases instead of one major upgrade to Beta or RTM.
For more information go to Azure.com and MSDN
I've just landed in LA, and after a quick walk around Belverly Hills I decided to go back to my PDC agenda and try to finalize what sessions I'm going to attend to.
There are 3 of them I'm really looking forward:
- Microsoft Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications: Can we deliver enterprise level applications on Silverlight? What's Microsoft's stance on this? These are some of the answers that I hope will be answered on this session
- Architecture without Big Design Up Front: up to 70% revolves around designing applications and writing specifications. I'm really curious about what features will be introduced by "Rosario" that can help me with my job.
- ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap: What can I say? We are really excited about MVC and we need to understand Microsoft's direction with ASP.NET if we want to stay ahead of the game.
I guess I'll have to wait and see how the sessions turn out during the week :)