Today was a day o' panels, so it's difficult to sum them up... so I'll go ahead and just sum up the PDC as best I can.

Collaboration and Communication.

If you really want better details, hit the archives or hit PDCBloggers... there's a zillion times more info than I would think to give you in a single blog entry. But really, *so* much of the coming wave involves collaboration among people as an integrated part of an application (e.g. two people working on different pages of a Word doc at the same time, not just saving to disk and emailing changes back and forth)... and it will all be powered by the XML-based messaging bus, for now called Indigo.

Pretty good stuff, if you ask me. There are some killer apps just waiting to be thought of and developed, and I all but guarantee you that the people and groups innovations that Longhorn (and WinFS/WinFX) is bringing forward will be a big part of it.

Really, at this point, there is no excuse for not developing compelling software. The RAD advances in Whidbey, combined with the killer WinFX APIs, now reduce the trivial stuff, the annoying crap where noone in your group could ever agree on how to develop it (the small piece of my brain still devoted to proper grammar is cringing after reading that, but I digress), to almost nothing.

Your mission now is to find the really difficult answers... and most of these answers don't have questions written for them yet. People didn't know they wanted IM until they got it; now, just try and cut off your 16-year-old for even a day... I dare you. A similar killer app is out there, just waiting for the right mind to come across it.

Will you be that guy/gal? Will I? Only time will tell, but the clock is now ticking folks, with 3-4 years to go.

Go get to it... I know that I am.

- G

A few links to sum up this week's events:

The Longhorn Developer Center @ MSDN

ASP.Net Whidbey

Visual Studio.Net Whidbey (and a bonus: Orcas, VS.Net.Next.Next)

SQL Server Yukon

How could I forget this?

MSR's section on social computing

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Yesterday, I attended a variety of sessions, from the Personalizaion changes for ASP.Net, to what became a Longhorn design and usage challenges talk from Hillel Cooperman, to mobile and Indigo/Avalon based peer-to-peer apps... a full day in a full week. There was also the attendee party, which was a well needed break.

At this point, I think I've managed to realign my thoughts to where they should be... I'm no longer at the "hey cool" point in my train of thought... I'm much farther down the road of trying to amalgamate all the new technologies into a coherent architecture... there is a big emphasis on peer-to-peer and other forms of social computing this week, and a good 75% of the sessions I've attended had some sort of blog demo... so there just might be something to this whole blog thing.

Just maybe.

OK, my battery's beeping at me... I forgot to recharge back at the hotel last night (crap), so I must leave you for now... more later, to be sure.

- G

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I was just sitting in on the one .NetCF development session I allowed myself, and at one point someone mentioned that the .NetCF that will come along with Whidbey will not depend on Yukon. When I heard that, I thought, "cool". However, I overheard from quite a few people, "But I thought Yukon was part of Whidbey."

Perhaps now you understand why I don't typically find myself in a mobile development mood... but onto the real information.

The Whidbey bits that we got here at the PDC didn't include anything new on the .NetCF front; SP2 for the current .NetCF will include a number of improvements, including significant performance improvements, with more to come once Whidbey hits.

BTW, for anyone still confused:

I hope my brain isn't that fried yet... if it is, there's no hope for tomorrow.

- G

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So I RDP'd into my machine at home, to check on my personal email and a few other things, and came to notice that my page file was hovering around 1.5GB... "Holy cats," I said, "I gotta reboot!" So, I did. I consequently was disconnected, and I hadn't reconnected until a little bit ago... apparently, either my RSS aggregator was at fault, or something in the reboot, but my aggregator's OPML file has been hosed... 300+ RSS feeds, gone.

This makes me sad.

As I walked to my next session (Indigo + Avalon = Smart Connected App), I realized that this was perhaps the development gods' way of forcing me to build my own damn aggregator, this time on the Longhorn platform, WinFX and all. I might just do that once I get home... there's not nearly enough room on my laptop for Yukon, Whidbey *and* Longhorn... not gonna happen.

I may be wrong, but I think the CPU just breathed a sigh of relief... my brain is approaching critical mass, and is about to topple over into "fried" territory, so I wouldn't be surprised if the delusions are far behind.

While I'm on the topic of new blogging apps, I had an opportunity at lunch to speak with one of the members of the Longhorn/Aero team, specifically in the "People and Groups" um, group. I have now become convinced that a few years from now - maybe only a couple, maybe 5 or 10 - social software is going to cease to be a division of its own... it will simply be a piece, an architecture upon which everything has at least a little investment.

Well, the session's starting, so I'll leave this here... more later today, probably.

- G

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If there ever was a day that embodied "subject to change", today would be it. Chaos abounded, and plans changed... but such is life.

Apparently, the PDC organizers thought we'd think Indigo is just a flash in the pan, and that Don Box doesn't really know what he's talking about... it's the only reason I can think of that would justify putting the first half of the Indigo intro/overview sessions in a medium-small room... and the second part in an even smaller room... or so I assume.

I assume because I wasn't even *close* to getting into the second one. You see, the first room was so jam-packed full of people by the doors, sitting on the floor, and I'm assuming swarming around the TV in the hall, that as the session ended... chaos. Imagine rush-hour traffic, on the day before Thanksgiving... yeah. So, eventually I make it over to the second-part session, actually beating Mr. Box over there, only to see that it was already full, with a giant crowd formed around the TV, and LA Convention Center bouncer at the door. One side note - the "bouncer" tried to get smart w/ Don, asked to see his ID and wanted to know why he was barging past him into an obviously full room... Heh.

Regardless, I went sessionless for that hour, as the ASP.Net Master Pages/etc session was the Hands-On lab in session form, and having to watch *that* on a TV in the hall was just too much. So, I headed over to the room for the ASP.Net Caching vWhidbey session... I was *not* going to miss out on that one.

The caching session was well worth while, providing new ways of managing caching for SQL 7, 2000, and Yukon. Of course, the coolest way of doing it was Whidbey<->Yukon, but the SQL 7/2000 way was also quite useful... check it out here... it's about halfway down the page.

Monday night, during the Weblogging BOF, someone had mentioned that the session on Avalon/Longhorn's identification system would be worth while to us social-software types. I went, and it showed up some pretty slick coding conventions, including the one-line way to launch an IM session with a contact garnered from anywhere in the system through WinFS. Very nice.

So, I leave you now with tonight's BOF sessions in front of me. I'm planning on hitting Smart Client apps, Nuts and Bolts, and "Tales From the Front Line", provided I can stay awake... mayhaps, I'll find another burst of energy somewhere. :)

I'm almost glad that Yukon/Whidbey is coming about halfway along the way to Longhorn... makes prioritizing all this just a little bit easier.

A really little bit.

- G

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