PDC 2005 - Day One Review
The keynote was interesting, exciting and
exhausting! The technology innovations and overall
coolness just ran on for ages and became draining. It was also a first
opportunity for me to see billg speak for the first time which was an
experience. He had far less presence than I would have expected for a man
of such remarkable success but was still an entertaining and highly informative
speaker.
The highlights of the keynote for me:
- Seeing the upcoming Vista OS (they also have
hands on machines to play with in COMMNET area - nice touch!)
- Getting a better feel for Avalon's (I mean
WPF's) impressive capabilities with the Netflix, North Face and Microsoft MAX
presentations.
- Seeing LINQ and the Gentle.NET (and every other
persistence framework's) esque version of attribute-based O/R mapping that
must have been "ObjectSpaces" at one point.
- Seeing the LINQ example become integrated with
Indigo (I mean WCF) and ultimately Avalon (WPF)
- Noticing over 30 available wireless networks
available in the presentation hall!
The most overused phrases of the
day:
- "super excited"
- "super cool"
The best sessions of the day:
- Monad is just awesome - really well thought out
and extensible. Microsoft might be late to the scripting shell party but
what an entrance!!
- Thinking about the user experience - Hillel
Cooperman did a great job - I am firm believer in aesthetics *and*
function!
- Stefan Schackow did a nice job on custom
providers in ASP.NET 2.0 - much of the presentation could be summed up with
the word abstraction and learning to extend existing object
frameworks. This said, I still think it is a worthwhile effort as many
people are still just starting to figure it all out.
The exhibitor party was interesting - I got to hang
out with my friend Steve Smith and meet
Scott Guthrie (Microsoft) , Scott Cate (myKB) and Chris Page (MaximumASP). The
Microsoft Influentials party at the trendy LA club, White
Lotus, was fun and I also met the
Enterprise Architect for Dell - Brent Jackson
and had an interesting discussion about TDD and how it is being used to further
enhance Dell's software development practice.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of
thycotic, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Our product,
myclockwatcher.com is a
time and expense tracking system specialized for billable
professionals built on ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server using Test Driven
Development.