Whidbey

End of a busy week

Blog Author — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 03:30:00 GMT

Well, that's it...TechReady1 is at an end, as with all conferences there were some high and low points (usual lows, level of content...length of sessions etc). The highs were pretty good though!
C# 3.0 is just looking amazing - you'll just love this stuff when you see it at the PDC; there have been some *sneaks* which may or may not be true and I guess there will be some controversy about some of the new stuff...but I just love it! Seeing Anders Hejlserg's presentation and Chalk Talk you can tell how excited he is about this stuff too...just get your butt to the PDC!
A lot of thought is going into the whole smart client / occasionally connected scenarios - this is going to be a big area for the future and some of the stuff that's planned is pretty cool (new Whitepapers on this stuff are due soonish...).
Some great keynotes - lots of stuff I can't talk about yet (it kills me to say that...working for Microsoft is a two-edged sword!) some great stuff coming in Vista and Office as well as some great stuff for Enterprise customers certainly looks like it's going to be an interesting year ahead! Oh, I have a video snippet of Jim Allchin playing guitar today...hope I grow up to be just like him ;-)

Well, I'm off to try and get a machine loaded up with C# 3.0,Vista Beta 1, VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon) and BizTalk 2006...wish me luck :-P (actually...pretty sure this is totally impossible right now...just in case you were wondering...)

Bit of a long shot - anyone have an example of XML Configuration for System.Transactions?

Blog Author — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 22:57:00 GMT

Well, I’m currently beetling away on my presentation for Tuesday – “Transactions with System.Transactions in .NET 2.0” have to say, it’s a big area (well, System.Transactions isn’t, existing EnterpriseServices is…). I’ll get together a list of resources on this after my presentation (not sure if it’d be wise to give away too much ). One thing I can’t find anything on though is configuration of System.Transaction transactions using the application config file so, anyone know anything about this please let me know (I can’t believe the docs just don’t exist)!

Visual Studio 2005 may become Visual Studio 2006 - that sucks!

Blog Author — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:33:00 GMT

Just read here, of course this is pure speculation right now but it would seem likely that if this is true (Sql Server 2005 is being delayed until Q3 2005 or so...) the Visual Studio 2005 will also be delayed by at least that much. This would be a terrible move - especially as MS are already encouraging people to move to using the 2005 products early and devoting entire editions of MSDN magazine to the product (which doesn't even have a go-live license yet!). The latest betas of VS 2005 seem pretty stable and ASP.NET 2.0 appears to be pretty feature complete (especially as many of the cooler features have recently been ditched) , for many developers the SQL Server and VS releases do not need to be linked at all - it'd suck if you couldn't use the new cool CLR in DB features but it's not a killer.
In short, please Microsoft just get on and release VS 2005 as soon as it's ready - you'll get a lot of happy developers that way!

Well, I'm back...and comments on some books...

Blog Author — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 23:04:00 GMT

Had a nice, relaxing holiday, read a few books, I can recommend Charles Petzold's Code and kind of recommend Homer, Sussman and Howard's Introducing ASP.NET 2.0 - I say 'kind of' because I found it really patchy in the writing style...but then I've never liked one of the authors' styles (not Rob's :-)).

Code is a pretty unique book, goes right from morse code, through binary arithmetic, electronics and right on to microprocessors and finally code - ties it all together in a way that my CS classes never did, not very easy going but very interesting and informative!

Introducing ASP.NET 2.0 gives coverage to most of the new ASP.NET 2.0 specific features - it's NOT a coding book though, more just a general overview of what the new bits are - anyone know a more codey .NET 2.0 book?

RSS server control from Jason Salas

Blog Author — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:05:00 GMT

I've posted a couple of times about using RSS from ASP.NET, so this interested me a fair bit, Jason Salas has posted a nice server control which allows very simple generation of RSS feeds based on a query to a SQL Server database.
There's been a bit of chat about whether such a control should be included in Whidbey - to be honest I think it's a bit late for this and I'd rather time was spent improving what's already there than adding arbitrary new features.

Well that's the PDC DVD ordered...

Blog Author — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 04:17:00 GMT

Just called up MSDN UK and asked for the PDC DVD, should be here around mid-November apparently. So if you're in the UK and an MSDN member (if you're not, get your company to join - only cost £520 if you join the 'Empower' ISV doohikey), call up now - you get to speak to a lovely lady! I can't wait to get my mitts on Yukon and Longhorn (Whidbey is old hat now :-))...reminds me, must get my new test machine ordered...

Told you...WWWCoder writes an article on upcoming features in Whidbey...

Blog Author — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 00:13:00 GMT

Read all about it here...ah, sweet metablogging :-)

Interesting User Agent...

Blog Author — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 08:49:00 GMT

Just noticed this in my User Agents....NET CLR 2.0.31022 - now the version I have from the Alpha is .NET CLR 1.2.30703 - is this new string the PDC build?

Whidbey toolbox controls

Blog Author — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 08:43:00 GMT

Now it's after the 26th, the NDA is lifted on the Whidbey alpha...which is nice :-) Anyway, thought I'd provide a look at the new ASP.NET toolbar for Whidbey here.
There's lots of really nice new controls which are also much easier to use; one example, you can now drag them into the HTML source window instead of having to switch into design view (which is REALLY useful!). I dare say that this stuff will be all over the web as of tomorrow morning. Someone was asking about the Portal stuff...well that is really fantastic, you have the option of creating a new ASP.NET intranet site - which essentially makes a complete framework (using masterpages etc...) for an intranet. Anyway, more from other, more capable writers very soon I dare say :-)

Whidbey Alpha - don't expect too much...

Blog Author — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 06:08:00 GMT

With all the hype about the distribution of the Whidbey Alpha at the PDC, I can't help but worry that people will get their hopes up a bit much...just remember it's an Alpha, whilst phenomenally cool and displaying lots of the new .NET 1.2 (or 2.0, not sure what it's called right now!), it is a very early version. Expect lots of stuff in this version to still a bit buggy and incomplete - not saying it won't be a whole lot of fun, I'm just saying take it for what it is.
I know there's no chance in hell that I'd ever expose any of my Alphas to the public!