After a week of geeking out, PDC 2008 is over. It was an intense week with a bunch of interesting announcements and promising technologies.

The highlights:

“Dublin”: an application server build upon IIS 7 (Win2k8) hosting WCF and WF 4.0. But it’s more! Besides hosting WCF and WF, it also includes tooling (in the IIS management interface and Power Shell commandlets), templates in Visual Studio for deploying and a database filled with management information. (See also: BB18).

“Geneva”: an STS (Security Token Server) which allows you to extract the authentication from your applications (making it the problem of the IT professionals ). Using the Geneva Server and the Geneva Framework federation, extracting metadata about your users from diverse sources (age, shoe size etc.) becomes a matter of configuration instead of a matter of fragile hardcoded queries. (See also: BB42).

C# Futures: dynamic types, a little love from the dynamic languages for their static cousins. (See also: TL16 and TL10).

Boku: the best presentation from MSFT research, a ‘game’ which allows you to program using an Xbox controller.

“Oslo”: a language “M”, a visual modeler “Quadrant” and a repository. Everything is data, the quadrant visual modeler is stored as data in the repository. “M” (and MGrammer and MSchema) allows you to define your own DSL for your problem (e.g. music library with songs), build a grammar for it and create an object graph in memory. Quadrant is a visual modeler for your Visual DSL, which gives your end users a very rich editing experience. I did a hands on lab with “Oslo” and Dublin, modeling a WCF and WF solution and deploying it all from Quadrant, very slick! (See also: TL23 and TL31).

Windows Azure: making hosting easy and cheap. Combined with all the announced services (.NET Services, SQL Services, Access Services, Workflow Services etc.) this is a very compelling story for hosting your websites and –applications without the headaches of scaling and maintenance. (See also: ES16 and BB01).

CodeContract class: the new CodeContract class in .NET 4.0 allows you to defined pre- and post-conditions for the parameters of your methods (should never be null) and uses static analysis to verify those conditions. (This and more changes to the CLR in 4.0 see: PC49).

Expect more detailed posts about these and other subjects after my vacation.

See you at PDC 2009 (17 November 2009 – 20 November 2009).