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June 2007
Today, three architects from 'the big M' turned up at work today and gave a stunning, enthralling five hour presentation (10am - 3pm) on their next generation of developer software and a peek into the world of some of their new technologies.
Warning: The following is extremely geeky. If you suddenly find the urge to hug your knees and rock back and forth, we highly recommend you try reading a blog about F1 instead... - Rich.
Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)
This looks like a decent enough upgrade from VS2005 to warrant caring about it. Coinciding quite nicely with the release of .NET 3.5 Framework and with enhanced support for XAML, WCF, WPF (at some stage this was called the Windows Pornography Foundation.... because it make everything look sexy - mad Microsoft boffins!!), and WF, it'll allow for good collaboration with designers using the Expression Suite...
Expressions Blend 2
A nice way to bring WPF funkiness to boring grey Windows. Looks nice, works nice, is built using WPF in an eat-your-own-dogfood kinda way... but it all seems a bit too Macromedia Director, which has been doing all of this rounded-edged buttons and vectors and timelines (quite a nifty idea for Win32 app effects nonetheless) for years... Nothing we've not seen before before, only this time it works on your windows forms rather than just adding a gradient to an animated splash screen widget.
AJAX and Silverlight
Easily the bit I was gagging to see. AJAX is Microsoft's way of making Web 2.0 easier to achieve. With AJAX, you no longer have that annoying 'flash' of the screen as your web-browser posts back data to the server. There is a new UpdatePanel control which wraps any regions of your webpage that need refreshing independently of one another. No more annoying flashes, only integrated, seamless posting back. Was quite impressed. I know AJAX isn't all that new (well, 12 months is a long time in IT) but it's the first time I've ever been run through the internals of it and I have to say it was impressive.
We were given a whirlwind tour of AJAX-enabled Web Services too and how JSON can be used as a lighter-weight alternative to SOAP, it all looks good, but I (and a few others) had our doubts about JS being used like that - what about injection attacks? It would be very easy to exploit, unless there's something they didn't tell us at the presentation. Quite possible that, seeing as our introduction to JSON was about 3 minutes long :).
Silverlight seems to be on everybody's lips at the moment (if you're a geek) and now I know why. Silverlight is, in my opinion, Microsoft's way of stepping on the toes of Macromedia (now Adobe) and with the v1.1 release of Silverlight (still in alpha, but they showed us a nice recent build and it works like a freakin' dream) has the full .NET CLR built-in, access to isolated storage, and direct DOM interactivity without having to resort to client-side-run JS. The presentation layer is primarily XAML too, so you can use Expression Blend to make your windows apps, then use the same XAML styles in your web apps too. In fact, there are some people out there now using the .NET CLR support within Silverlight to bring their fully-blown winforms to a browser utilising the tiny 4mb Silverlight plugin.
Amazing stuff. And you don't even have to use .NET, you can also program in JS if the need takes your fancy, although the .NET implementation is about 250,000 times faster than the JS code interpretation. You've been warned! :)
LINQ and Data Access
I've seen LINQ before in passing and it's laways looked a bit 'bleh'. Shoe-horning SQL-style code into C# development didn't make any sense and I'm happy with my T-SQL, data objects and generics, thankyouverymuch.
But then they started using it... and explaining it... and I started to realise just how bloody good LINQ really is and how enormous it is in the world of 3rd party platform and foundation development it could be. I can see companies out there completely ditching thousands of data object layer classes and replacing them with extensible LINQ-based objects that do the work of 50 lines of old-school code in a single 30 seconds statement. And it works with Intellisense so you can see your interaction with data develop as you filter, specify and hone the information you want.
Bloody good stuff, LINQ. Plus it's not just a way of accessing your SQL server, it has the XElement and XAttribute methods which allows rapid formatting to XML, as well as LINQ being abl to consume an XML doc as a datasource and LINQ through the data stored wtihin.
And then the nail in old-school coding's coffin: you can use LINQ to navigate objects in memory as well! I certainly wasn't expecting that.
It seems .NET 3.5 is a huge step up.
As for the Data Access middleware components that sit between the LINQ code and the datasource, we were shown just how flexible these are. And intelligent too. Constantly ensuring that the SQL statements (for example) it outputs are highly efficient, and ultra-performant. We'll get onto new SQL Server 2008 "Katmai" now.
SQL Server 2008 "Katmai"
Unless you're a DBA or a developer with a roving mouse cursor, you'll probably not notice much difference between the 2000 release of SQL Server and the 2005 (codename "Yukon") one, so why should you care about 2008's "Katmai" release?
With built-in full-database encryption (yes, even on indexes), completely overhauled auditing and data warehouseing features, and the completely useless (without server virtualisation that is) Hot-CPU support there's plenty to interest anybody involved in DB development work.
Windows Server 2008 "Longhorn"
Before you ask, I don't know who comes up with Microsoft's codenames. I do know that Microsoft Visual Studio's codenames - bar VS.NET which was named after Seattle's dormant volcano, Mt. Rainier - are all places in the Puget Sound region of Seattle, WA (Everett, Whidbey and Orcas.... Hawaii/Rosario being next on the list depending on your source) and it seems Windows' codenames are all mountains (XP was Whistler, Longhorn was originally Blackcomb as there is a ski resort called Whistler-Blackcomb near the Microsoft HQ in Seattle but eventually this changed to Longhorn after the Longhorn Saloon and Grill between the two mountains).
Here's a good source for more codename shenniganery.
Anyway, they didn't have a lot to tell us about WinServer2008... I noticed at one stage they mentioned on a Powerpoint slide that Active Directory was changing, but prompting what the changes were resulted in some blank looks and promises to get me some web addresses. There was some brief chatter about how cool IIS 7.0 is, but that's old-hat now as it ships with Vista. Also some vague talk of MMC 3.0, but that's part of .NET 3.0 so you can even find that on your XP machine with .NET 3.0 installed.
Nothing else really stood out. Just another Server OS release. :-/ I'm really interested to see the new GPO and AD implementations and how Vista UAC is handled in each.
Overall, a very interesting day. Massively impressed with the quality feel of all the new stuff coming out of Microsoft. Blend looks fun to use and allows anybody to create funky, visually unique interfaces built on highly-flexible XAML. Very very very impessed with the new .NET language features that LINQ brings such as type inference. That 'var' keyword is going to be used all over the shop now!! And good right we have to use it too. Lambda expressions seem nice too, but the examples I've seen today haven't pushed the boundaries of what it can do by any measure. Will be nice to see what some people out there actually use this stuff for... Microsoft has finally brought out a comprehensive, intuitive data access model that is simple to code with; and on top of this they've given designers a brand-new, massively customisable, vector based, XAML-driven presentation layer to play with.
I think we've just entered a new age in software :)
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