PDC Day 3

Keynote

Microsoft is releasing a set of tools that will allow you to create Avalon files, 3d tool to manipulate avalon files and new HTML designer. The new HTML is 1000% better than frontpage and from what I’ve seen is going to blow dreamweaver away! Pretty damn cool.

They also showed off the new Sharepoint portal services and how cool Infopath is going to work with it. Again like my previous post, Office 12 is going to change the way we do things. 2003 was a good start with with server integration, but this version is amazing. It always takes Microsoft 2 to 3 times to get it right but when they do its great. Sharepoint is really going to be that awesome product I’ve wanted it to be. We use it now at work but when this is released its going to be used like it should be. I am really digging InfoPath as a tool.

C# 3.0

HOLY SHIT. Anders has been smoking the good stuff! The things he is coming up with are amazing for the language. He has invented a new query API for C# called Linq. You will be able to create queries to any datasource writing C# code. I can’t explain it right now but it looks and feels right. I’ve always hated doing object oriented programming and then having to do things differently when I connected to the database. They just did not feel right together. Now this is going to change!

Tons of other features to the language. The one thing is that it takes the power of scripting languages that have used late binding but make it work in a way that your actualy using early binding! The compiler will know what your talking about and do the error checking and validation that you would not get from a scripting language. And to makes things even better, intellisense works! It’s totally wacky but I see it being the future of programming! I got a white paper from them on this and I plan to play around with this a bit and post what I find.

OK I gotta run. More tomorrow!