Techie Blog: Geek Factor 7/10

Another full day at the PDC in LA and here is a summary of what I heard about.

New suite of tools named the Windows Workgroup foundation, I'll let you you guess what it does, there a clue in the name. It contains a Visual Studio designer for the various activities and of course you can extend these by inheriting and then providing you own finctionality for the execute method. Of course you can add your own properties and then you can use your own custom activities within the designer. We have a preview of this on disk 4 of our DVD pack, and I thought it was a Lord of the Rings box set.

Microsoft is taking on the graphics application market now with a suite of tools called the Expression suite, very arty name. It contins the following:

1. Acrylic - Graphics design tool using technology from the Research labs to have intelligent capture and other cool features.

2. Sparkle - Interative design tool that used the same file formats as Visual Studio so can therefore be shared. What they didn't say was if it had any sort of Team System integration. Thats on my radar of things to find out.

3. Quartz - Quartz is the CSS/XHTL Web design tool targetted at Web developers

They announced VSTA. We had VSTO Visual Studio tools for Office and now we have Visual Studio tools for Applications. This will be the VBA replacement and is intended to find it's way into third party applications such as Auto Cad to allow .Net Dev in these apps.

I'm not sure where this leaves VSTO in the future and I also need to find out if this VSTA will be behind Office 12, I guess not but this is number 2 on my list of points to find clarification.

Saw some sharepoint enhancements with some nice Active Active Directory integration to provide presonal information pages. There are search improvements using spell checking and linguistic technologies.

Outlook 12 can now use Infopath forms to send in a message. This could be the trigger that makes Infopath accepted as I always thought it should have been tightly integrated, even replace Outlook custom forms.

Listed to a good talk on Smart Clients although the focus was more towards PDA/Tablets but it was intersting that they said No to XML as a local data cache as quite righly it is not a database. Instead use SQL mobile so on the desktop you would have to use SQL express. It is interesting that you can access it via local file paths straight to the .NDF file or SDF with SQL mobile. It is possible to distribute the database file with the application and it doesn't need attaching to SQL server when opened by using the file path. SQL mobile will now work on the desktop PC if you have Visual Studio (for dev work). SQL mobile file sizes are cute too with the db being about 1.4 Mb and ADO.Net 224k. Not sure how efficient the storage is though so it will be interesting to see how big the file gets.

WinFS is another option for storage in the future.  More on WinFS in another post soon

They said consider pre-fetching as much as you can by attempting to predict information they are likely to need, travel info or weather etc etc.

Access the cache using RDA Remote Data Access libraries and the new background tasks libraries. There is even some display controls for this that you can drop onto the info bar at the bottom and these will keep refreshing on a time AKA Outlook.

Should perhaps look to Click Once also for application updates, maybe not we'll see.

More Info http://blogs.msdn.com/smartclientdata

We heard some more about the Linq project and the Inegrated query language. Se previous post for info about this. It's not just limited to data though as you can use the var type you can pull in collections of anything that Implemets IEnumerable<t> at runtime  and as it compiles type checking will then be done the check if you have not called things that don't exist.  MMM var I always missed that VB variant. 

One interesting point is that the query is not actually executed until the data is requiered. I'm still puzzled why the syntax is different in csharp than VB. For example in VB you do normal Select - From - Where but in cSharp it's From - Where - Select. Another thing on my stack to find out.  We were sitting behind Don Box for this talk so perhaps I should have tapped him on the shoulder.

Well that was about it with all that going into my head it's no wonder I fell asleep in the Terminator 2 ride at Universal Studios Last night. Yes believe it!!!!!!!