Ok, I haven’t been dully reporting as I promised, but probably because
I didn’t think my days were going to be that busy. I’m now wrapping up
some comments about the last two days and hopefully I will be able to
elaborate more about each session after the end of the PDC, so, stay
tuned.
Yesterday I have attended to a quick tour on Indigo and Avalon, none of
them interesting enough. I have also attended to a session about the
P2P functionality built into Indigo and that was cracking. Microsoft
has implemented some very good features there for P2P applications.
Today, though, I had all sorts of problems early in the morning, so I
couldn’t get here to the keynote. I got here later and went to a
session about IIS 7.0 extensibility. Very interesting topic, but the
poor presenter couldn’t get his IIS to work, so none of the demos were
working. The guy was really embarrassed and I can really understand
why. What he did manage to demonstrate, though, left me with a bit of a
bitter feeling:
Microsoft has had the great idea of moving all the pieces of IIS to
modules. Now everything like authentication modules, processing
pipelines and etc. live on their own DLLs and can be easily replaced by
custom code. It sounds really great, however, the API for that is all
unmanaged. You have to write native code for it. It means that it must
be really a life saving functionality to make a company decide to build
custom C++ modules for IIS when they’re developing web applications
with ASP .NET or even worse ASP 3.0… This will be the sort of feature
that has great potential but will rarely be used.
I went to a session about the Windows Workflow Foundation… Hum… Tasty.
Microsoft has incorporated into the WinFX platform (the core of Windows
Vista that will also be available for Windows XP and Windows Server
2003) a complete workflow management system that can easily be reused
inside .NET applications! How great is that??? It is awesome. It was
being kept secret by Microsoft until now and finally we got a
demonstration of the thing and even a book about it. Really cool.
I saw also a presentation of the transaction and queuing capabilities
of Indigo. It is cool how by only annotating methods with attributes
and configuring some stuff in the config files you can get really great
functionality. Indigo looks better every day and it is really exciting.
Microsoft managed to get 1000 i-Mate JasJar’s PPC Phone Editions and
sell them here at $150. It was announced on the second part of the
opening keynotes, but guess what? I had left by then. When I discovered
about that, it was already sold out. I’m waiting for this device for
months now and when I have the opportunity to buy one for no-price
guess what? I loose it… :-S
Well, that’s it for today, folks.