I write this piece as I fly back to Amsterdam from the beautiful city of Los Angeles—candy-eye for the tourist and conferencegoer; the Venice Beach, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica,
Universal Studios, and all—and most importantly from what was an extremely well-organized event, Microsoft PDC 2005. To me, the success of a conference lies in content-rich tracks, supplemented
by a great location, and I must admit PDC’05 left me satisfied on both counts.
Albeit a bit too long, the first keynote on Tuesday was really exciting with presentations on topics such as Vista, Office 12 and WinFX. I hadn’t taken a closer look at Vista before this event,
so it was all very new for me. I think Vista is a major step forward in enhancing the user experience of Windows. The improvements to security and stability, and the addition of nifty tools to the user
interface is the best way to let end users switch to a new operating system. For most of them though, the stability and functionality of the current Windows XP version is still good enough. In
a lighter vein, the keynote also featured a video of Bill Gates’ parody on the Google affair, which was quite funny and amusing.
In waiting for the keynote, I chatted up a Microsoft employee on the different ways in which Microsoft could convince its customers to switch to a new version of Office. What functionality
am I missing in my current Outlook? What would I definitely want to see added in a new version of Word? Well, I couldn’t really put a finger at that one big suggestion, but if there were one, it would
have to be better RSS support for my Outlook. Coincidentally, Microsoft asked a lot of people the same question: “What would you like to be added in a new version of Microsoft Office?” Nine
of the ten features they mentioned were actually possible with the current version of Microsoft Office, but for the fact that they did not know it existed. At least, Microsoft’s painstaking efforts
at making all the features easily accessible and smarter will now pay off with Vista.
The PDC was also in many ways, a “Foundation” event. Get used to it, you will deal with a lot of ‘foundations’ along the way—Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Windows
Communication Foundation (Indigo), and the brand new Windows Workflow Foundation. With Avalon, you can add 3D and rotating animations to your applications and perform a lot of other cool
and nifty tasks. But are Microsoft customers on the lookout for these kinds of features? At my company, we mostly develop office applications and low-level technical applications that do not
require these features. I am not sure how you will take to these features, but personally I think too much of feature-richness can be overkill.
It was almost impossible to catch a session where the “marriage” of Windows Communication Framework (WCF) and WPF was not showcased together. There were lots of them, including the
very good demo of Don Box and his friends, during the keynote. For me, the introduction of Language Integrated Queries (LINQ) was one of the biggest highlights of the event. With LINQ,
we’re taking a huge step forward in combining, accessing and editing data from different sources. For example, you can filter your object collections with natural “SELECT FROM” statements
and even join it to data stored in a relational database or XML file. The C# and Visual Basic implementation differ, but I think the latter is much more natural. The order of SQL statements is
exactly the same as in normal SQL. As a Visual Basic guy I also attended the session: “Future language innovations of Visual Basic 9.0”. There will be improvements and enhancements in
use of dynamic data, anonymous data types and not to forget, the ease-of-use of XML within the language.
PDC is also the place to meet people and make new friends. If you’re a developer, an architect, an analyst, if you code C# or Visual Basic, the PDC is a great place to meet people of your
genre and exchange passionate stories on XML, pivot tables, and all things Microsoft. PDC’05 was indeed a wonderful, well-organized event.
André Obelink (www.obelink.com) is an independent author for different developer-magazines and the community leader of VBcentral (www.vbcentral.nl). André is also chief editor of the
Dutch Visual Basic Group (www.vbgroup.nl), besides his role for INETA in the Netherlands. In addition, André is a MCSD and Technical Manager at AcouSoft, a company that writes software
for hearing aid specialists, audiologists and ENT doctors.