Since I'm probably going to change my mind a million times between now and October 27, here's a preliminary agenda for the sessions I plan to attend at the PDC. I'm going to try to write an "elevator pitch" for each of them afterwards, but I can't make any promises.

Monday, October 27, 2003
	8:30 AM	11:45 AM	Bill Gate's and Jim Allchn's Keynote
	11:45 AM	1:30 PM	Lunch
	12:15 PM	1:00 PM	.NET Framework: Tips and Tricks for Building Managed Components
	1:30 PM	2:45 PM	Visual Studio "Whidbey": New IDE Features for XML and Data Access
	3:00 PM	4:15 PM	Programming SQL Server "Yukon" Using Managed Code: Building Store Procedures, Functions and User-Defined Types
	4:45 PM	6:00 PM	Introducing MSBuild: The Universal Build Engine for Visual Studio "Whidbey" and "Longhorn"
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
	8:30 AM	9:30 AM	Eric Rudder's General Session
	10:00 AM	11:00 AM	Gordon Mangione's General Session
	11:00 AM	12:30 PM	Lunch
	11:30 AM	12:15 PM	Designing Mobile Applications: Programming to "Longhorn" Data Synchronization
	12:30 PM	1:45 PM	“Indigo”: Building Services (Part 1): The Fundamentals
	2:00 PM	3:15 PM	“Indigo”: Building Services (Part 2): Secure, Reliable, Transacted Services
	3:45 PM	5:00 PM	The Future of Network Applications: Make Your Software Cooler and Your Life Easier Using the Next-Generation of Microsoft Networking Technologies
	5:15 PM	6:30 PM	"Indigo": Using XSD, CLR Types, and Serialization in Web Services
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
	8:30 AM	9:30 AM	Rick Rashid's General Session
	10:00 AM	11:15 AM	ASP.NET: Programming with the Data Controls in ASP.NET "Whidbey" (Part 1)
	11:30 AM	12:45 PM	ASP.NET: Programming with the Data Controls in ASP.NET "Whidbey" (Part 2)
	12:45 PM	2:00 PM	Lunch
	1:00 PM	1:45 PM	CLR: Tips and Tricks for Faster Managed Code: How To and What's New
	2:00 PM	3:15 PM	.NET Framework: What's New in System.Xml for "Whidbey"
	3:30 PM	4:45 PM	ASP.NET: Building Server Controls for ASP.NET "Whidbey" (Part 1)
	5:00 PM	6:15 PM	ASP.NET: Building Server Controls for ASP.NET "Whidbey" (Part 2)
	7:30 PM	11:30 PM	Party
Thursday, October 30, 2003
	8:30 AM	9:45 AM	No Session Selected.
	8:30 AM	10:00 AM	Real World Innovation: From Idea to Product
	8:30 AM	12:00 PM	No Session Selected.
	10:30 AM	11:45 AM	No Session Selected.
	10:30 AM	12:00 PM	“Indigo:” What’s Next for Connected Apps and Web Services
	11:45 AM	1:30 PM	Lunch
	12:00 PM	1:30 PM	Lunch
	12:15 PM	1:30 PM	No Session Selected.
	1:45 PM	3:00 PM	No Session Selected.
	1:45 PM	3:15 PM	Architecture Panel: What is Service-Oriented Analysis and Design

Thanks Stef for showing the feature.

In a bold move, Sony announced yesterday to reduce the number of parts it's uses from 840.000 to a mere 100.000. Sony is not the first to realise less parts can mean reduced costs, as the car industry has been reducing parts for quite sometime. The reduction in parts will have a dramatic influence on the number of suppliers, who's numbers will be reduced from 8400 to 1000.

This is part of a 3 year plan costing ¥300bn aimed at restructuring its electronics division, where the recent problems have been concentrated.

(source: financial times)

Read all about it and download the preview version of IE (doesn't touch current version of IE).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate

The big change is there is an annoying ok-button for every applet the page contains.

"WinFS"- The digital aid meets meta data. Store all your "stuff" and find it seemlessly with hundreds of rules.

"Indigo" - SOAP 1.2 + WS-*. The future of distributed computing

"Avalon" - Cool UI graphics, no Windows message pump and a declarative programming model.

"Yukon" - SQL Server next with the beauty of an XML data type to store all those XML documents.

"Whidbey" - VS.NET next with some great innovations in the XML programming model.

source

The power of .Net globalisation, for maximum wow set the browser's primart language to japanese.

http://e-doc.no-ip.com/blog/

from: Clemens Vasters

Rebecca Dias has a great post on SOA, broadband and outsourcing. Most important lessons:

Outsourcing WILL happen!

If you outsource everything that is of value to your customers, your business will die and you will become a commodity.

So the lesson to learn here: Do the stuff you're clients find important, quality assurance and service, and outsource the less visible things, which someone else can do as good, but a lot cheaper, e.g. boring development chores : "Do I need to write another DAL ?".

Note to self: this last sentence is bad, work on it.

I had a lot of trouble with a XPath query yesterday and didn't find a lot on google, so I'll post the solution I found here.

<foo>

<bar xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">content goes here</bar>

</foo>

The problem I had was creating a query to get the content of the bar element, since it's not in the default namespace. The solution I found appears to me as a nasty hack, so any comments pointing to a better solution are welcome:

/foo/*[local-name() = 'bar' and namespace-uri() = 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml']

Ingo Ramer posted a number of his white papers targeted at application architects, designers and developers who are working with .NET and Web Services technologies. Currently there are 3 available but 4 more are coming soon. My personal favorite:

The Flowchart Lie
or: Why do we still use request/response to handle asynchronous business processes?

These come highly recommended since Imgo is one of the most knowledgeable in the field (and not yet swallowed by the big house).

Reading this post by Nikhil Kothari, it's clear the asp.net tema is doing their best to support recent w3c standards for accessibility and markup, which I believe is a good thing. The biggest improvement will be for people who use screenreaders and search engines, who regularly throw a fit when confronted with excessive javascript.

I finished a first version (v 0.9) of a blog aggregator for the root of this site. Some work still remains, the design sucks for one, http headers are ignored and the caching could be better, but I'm quite happy with the asynchronous webrequests.

The code needs some touching up, before I can post it here. I'll try to get it up later this week.