My highlights of the PDC 05:

• Linq and the associated C# 3.0 features
• IIS 7.0, plugable modules and xcopy deployment of configurations.
• Windows Workflow Foundation

Expect more indepth articles in the coming weeks, when I’ve had some time to experiment with everything.

I'm sure this will change a couple of times during the next week, but for now this is my schedule. If you can't make it, but would like to have my notes on a session, let me know (paul(dot)van(dot)brenk(at)tamtam(dot)nl).

Schedule for Paul van Brenk

With the PDC 2005 starting in a couple of weeks and the release of dasBlog 1.8 last Thursday, I present the TamTam PDC group blog. All content is supplied by cross-posting from our regular sites.

I'll be there, from 13-16 september 2005 in Los Angeles.

[pdc announced at MSDN]

Duncan points to some Hands On Labs downloads, a great starting point for developing on future platforms.

General session from Eric Rudder and Gordon Mangione

Two keynotes showcasing new features in VS Whidbey and Yukon. Go visit Early and Adopter for a more detailed description.

WSV301: Building Services (Part 1): The Fundamentals

Essentially Indigo is very simple; there are messages, services, ports and channels.

• Messages are in-memory SOAP envelopes
• Services are targets for message delivery
• Ports are a (named) location in network space
• Channels allow message I/O through a port

Indigo, the service model, integrates with the CLR type system, has WSDL support and supports message based (one or more requests and zero or more responses) and method based (one request, one response) programming.

The easiest way to prepare for Indigo today, is to use ASMX, the upgrade path from the WSE packages was unclear to me, but all specs supported and some more will be supported in Indigo (WS-*).

WSV302: Building Services (Part 2): Secure, Reliable, Transacted Services

Unfortunately we had to move to a different room, for the second part of the presentation and even Don Box has to jump through hoops to gain access.

DAT406: Building Reliable Asynchronous Database Applications with SQL Server "Yukon" Service Broker

Service brokers are part of the database application framework, building on the service based programming structure Microsoft is promoting. Items are asynchronously taken from queues and processed. Because all processing is performed inside a transaction, processing is much more reliable, resulting in higher fault tolerance and data integrity. Processing can be distributed over several servers, again increasing performance and reliability.

ARC382: The Future of Network Applications: Make Your Software Cooler and Your Life Easier Using the Next-Generation of Microsoft Networking Technologies

This session discussed the benefits of using ipv6, supported and the default in Longhorn with a new IP stack, which includes encryption, authentication, key distribution. IPv6 will enhance the "end-to-end experience", by increasing the number of public IP-addresses and increasing security. IPv6 is supported natively on Windows XP sp1a, Windows 2003 and Pocket PC 2003.

WSV303: "Indigo": Using XSD, CLR Types, and Serialization in Web Services

The performance of the xml serializer has been greatly improved for Whidbey and generics are supported. The binary serializer, supports generics as well and additionally supports versioning of types.

Serialization in Indigo. All serialization is moved to a single namespace and uses a new attribute DataContract, enabling you to specify how you want your types to be serialized. Every XSD schema and CLR construct is supported, including HashTables.

I finally found some time to write about the session I attended at the PDC, so without further ado day 1.

PDC Day 1 Keynotes from BillG and JimA.

I'm sure you’ve read all about this already, if you haven't: Early & Adopter have a great report.

MBL318 : CLR Under the covers: Implementing CLR for Smart Personal Objects Technology

A technology where requested information is pushed to a personal device (e.g. a watch), using radio signals. The devices are designed to be able to receive new pieces of (signed) software and install and use that without user intervention.

The biggest change to the CLR implementation that was done, was removing the JIT process and replace it with an IL interpreter, thus reducing the footprint and gaining control over the execution process. The Garbage collecting was revised from the standard generational GC to a more light weight "mark and sweep" method, including support for non-volatile storage. The non-volatile storage ensures the RAM survives crashes and reboots, coupled with a CRC routine to prevent corruption.

TLS350: XML in Office: Breaking the Mold for Document Concepts and Programming

Highlighted some of the new XML features in Office 2003.

• How to access to relevant business data in a document context, from a webservice.
• The advantages of storing data in structured documents, easier to reuse and data mine.
• Smart documents help to validate user input, using both schema validation, phone no. must look like ###-####, and business rule validation, customer must be in our database to order.
• Automated report generation, it's no longer required to install office on the server.

TLS347:Introducing MSBuild: The Universal Build Engine for Visual Studio "Whidbey" and “Longhorn"

MSBuild is the new build engine, build in VS Whidbey and shipped as part of the .Net v2 redistributable. This is also the build engine used by VS to build solutions, so finally it's possible to easily create a complete build environment without installing VS or writing big and complicated .bat files. The downside is, there always is a downside, they changed the project again.

According to Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart Microsoft will use this internally as well.

but right now, I'm helping, moving a couple of Sharepoint portal server v1 sites with local accounts to Sharepoint portal server v2 and Active Directory accounts for teamspace. Meet the rest of the team:

Now that the PDC is almost over, only a couple more session to go, I realise i've been a terrible blogger, I haven't blogged once. And there actually are a number of reasons beside the most obvious: me being a lazy bum. But when I get back home on sunday, I'll try to write something (interesting) about every session I visited.

In the mean time, all I can say is, both Yukon and the new C# features look very promising.

If he's showing all these cool features in whidbey asp.net, I will be at ScottGu's talk. Skipping all these other talks.

Some highlights:

• Url Rewriting using the new UrlMapping Service.  Build vanity urls on your site (/products/shoes.aspx is re-written to really be processed by /products/productcatalog.aspx?id=shoes -- but the customer never knows it).  Talk about how this makes http.sys kernel level caching possible for dynamic pages.
• Using ValidationGroups.  You can now have validator controls optionally validate depending on which button on the page is pushed.  You can group validation rules into “groups“ so that all controls within that group fire or don't fire.

• Building workflow on a page using the new asp:Wizard control.  Handle next/back, step1->n workflows easily now (no funky state management tricks for controls required).