An Exciting Future: C# 4.0, Silverlight 3, MVC Dynamic Data, Live Mesh, VS 2010, ...

Last week I attended the Public Sector Developer Conference in Reston, Virginia. Summary: I can barely contain my excitement for just about everything Microsoft is doing right now for software development. In particular the first talk "What I've learned about Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 (and beyond), Silverlight 3 (and beyond)" was so exciting I almost gave a standing ovation.

What Marc learned about Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, Silverlight 3

So believe it or not this talk by Marc Schweigert (who is a fabulous presenter by the way) was a 90 minute distillation of everything that happened at PDC (which sadly I missed). Consequently it flew like a jet engine, gave barely a minute or two to every topic, and required either massive amounts of caffeine or a good amount of prerequisite reading. Fortunately I had both.

To summarize the presentation I'll just give my favorite upcoming technologies and sort it roughly in decreasing level of my excitement:

Technology: ASP.Net MVC Dynamic Data
Overview: Ruby on Rails for .Net
Impressions: As if ASP.Net MVC wasn't cool enough. This looks awesome! I want to try it on a real project.

Technology: ADO.Net Data Services (Astoria)
Overview: Expose LINQ ORM data (e.g. LINQ to Entities) to web services, now with better BLOB support
Impressions: Powerful, exciting (just a little scary)

Technology: Astoria Offline
Overview: Write disconnected apps that sync to ADO.Net Data Services
Impressions: Frikin' awesome. I can't wait to see/write disconnected apps.

Technology: ASP.Net AJAX - jQuery Support
Overview: ASP.Net will abandon its custom "roll your own" JavaScript framework and adopt a leading open source one .
Impressions: Amazing. I couldn't be happier.

Technology: Live Mesh Web Apps
Overview: Offline capable, in browser or on desktop apps (HTML/AJAX or Silverlight) that run "in the mesh"
Impressions: Wow, this is some really cool stuff, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this technology

Technology: SharePoint Integration
Overview: Build web parts, wsp files, etc directly in VS without an add-on
Impressions: Fantastic! Awesome! This was a major point.

Technology: Task Parallel Library (TPL)
Overview: Simplify parallelization and avoid programming in threads by using delegates
Impressions: This looks absolutely amazing, I can't wait

Technology: Parallel LINQ
Overview: Parallelize LINQ queries
Impressions: So easy, so powerful, so exiting

Technology: In Process Side By Side Model
Overview: Run both 2.0 and 4.0 CLR code in the same process
Impressions: Wow. Minimize existing app upgrade pain; free developers to use new features in old code bases; free language designers more flexibility in refactoring the C# language.

Technology: C# 4.0
Overview: Named optional parameters and dynamic types
Impressions: Named parameters: cool, dynamic types: controversial, but I suspect a very good thing

Technology: F#
Overview: Functional programming language to ship by default with VS
Impressions: I'm playing with this now, it's very interesting, but I'm not prepared to comment yet

Technology: Managed Extensibility Framework
Overview: Massively simplify creating desktop app add-on frameworks.
Impressions: This has the potential to change desktop apps to very light containers that load functionality as necessary. I am hopeful and excited.

Technology: VS 2010 IDE Improvements
Overview: WPF & XAML Editor better, Multi-Monitor Support, Built on WPF
Impressions: Cool, looking forward to trying. I like the dog-food approach, although as I've pointed out earlier dog-food isn't everything.

Technology: ADO.Net Entity Framework V2
Overview: The DBMS agnostic LINQ based ORM now with N-tier improvement, DDL generation, caching
Impressions: DDL generation was interesting, but apparently won't support deltas, that's for another product, maybe Oslo. Caching support looks fabulous.

Technology: WPF
Overview: WPF to have more controls, better usability in VS, and simplify ribbon programming
Impressions: Cool, but .. am I the only person who hates the ribbon?

Technology: Silverlight 3
Overview: 3D & GPU support; will work as well as WPF in VS; H.264 support
Impressions: 3D = Very cool; VS WPF = Cool, although I may still program in XAML; and H dot two sixty what?

Technology: Web Development in VS 2010
Overview: JavaScript intellisence improvements; view-state improvement, Deployment simplified (e.g. Web.Production.Config & setup packages); new controls (chart)
Impressions: Very nice.

Technology: ASP.Net AJAX – Client Templates
Overview: Simplifying AJAX without an UpdatePanel
Impressions: I'm lazy so I'll probably stick with UpdatePanel & server based approach, but I'm very happy to see the new client based focus as an additional option

Technology: Workflow Foundation (WF)
Overview: More controls, faster, better debugging
Impressions: I haven't really had a need for it WF, but the enhancements sound good.

Technology: Oslo
Overview: Create DSLs that do things like help manage databases
Impressions: I fail to see what problem this solves, but Martin Fowler thinks it's cool, so I'll keep an eye on it.

Technology: SQL Data Services
Overview: Basically Amazon S3 (cloud stuff)
Impressions: In case you didn't know I love referential integrity, so I'm not a big fan. What did impress me is Microsoft will merge the LINQ serialization approach with ADO.Net Data Services. Nice benefit to multiple technologies within one company.

Summary

There's so much going on it's a little overwhelming and I'm sure I missed stuff, but you can see why I'm so excited. I vow to never miss a PDC again.  Anyway I hope this post helped clear up the vast amount of exciting new technologies coming out soon.

Comments

Carl said…
You should really read up on SQL Data Services and what S3 is.. first S3 is a data storage solution, for big things like files.. maybe you are confused with SimpleDB which is a no relation database, but SQL Data Services is.
Lee Richardson said…
Carl,

I saw a demo of it: SQL Data Services has no referential integrity, it's just name/value pairs. And it is frequently compared to S3, which is also name/value pairs. Check out this infoQ article and in particular "Neil Hudson describes this fundamental data unit as "a Flexible Entity Model, where no schema required". Maybe I'm missing something ...