Microsoft Developer day

Some thoughts on a Microsoft Developer day that I was fortunate enough to attend:

1) Everything seems to have been mixed up into a huge identity crisis, so the file system is now a SQL database, databases can contain XML or objects, and video can be shown as the background on any control. Presumably all these design decisions MS are making are driven by a desire to improve things but it all seems so different that at this stage it's hard to tell how this will turn out. I am glad that Longhorn seems to be a long way off as it gives us all a chance to catch up.

2) I really must start doing something with web services, and reading about Indigo and Avalon.

3) Is it a good idea to keep saying to a room full of developers "You will need to write a lot less code..."?
ASP.Net 2.0 does look very impressive, and the code that you won't have to write is the awkward difficult stuff for handling things like paging. This is handled as everything else will be, declaratively, which is nice.

4) Whitehorse really should come with UML support out of the box, not as an add-on.

5) How is Linux going to compete with this?

Where did we meet?

It could only have been one of these places.


Unfortunately I've never been to Alaska or Hawaii, they are only shown red because I spent 3 days in New York. Well, that's the USA done!

You can make your own map here.