Tech-Ed - First day impressions
I thought it would be difficult to summarize the first day. But I have seen a pattern emerging today while I was attending the sessions on .Net Framework 3.0.
The focus on .Net Framework 3.0 seems to have been on making our work as developers easier and yet more powerful. If you were to take a look at Presentation Foundation, you will notice at first, that building a user-interface is not what it used to be. And I do believe that some developers might not even like it. But if you step away, you immediately see the advantage. A UI for a webapplication can be designed in the same way as the UI for a WinForms application. The end result is a XAML file which can be used in both types of applications. A developer can simply focus on the logic behind the design.
The same is true for WCF. This part of the new .Net Framework 3.0 makes building services so much simpler. And the same is true for consuming those services. You can even allow a client and a server to engage in a duplex conversation. In that scenario, a client calls a webservice and the webservice can call the client. The client would then also need to provide a service interface, for which the service specifies the contract.
LINQ, which will be part of C# 3.0 (and the next version of VB.Net), offers the same thing. Making it easier to work with datasources in the form of any object that implements the IEnumerable. Imaging being able to create a query in code that combines data from Collections, DataSets or DataTables and XML. The possibilities are enormous.
For me it was an interesting day, and I hope to use many of the new technologies I have seen today very soon.