.Net Jonesie - Summit Almost Over

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Summit Almost Over by peter@jonesie.net.nz

I thought yesterday was going to be boring, but, OMG, was I wrong! We had a whole day looking at upcoming and possible future features for Visual Studio - Orcas and beyond. Basically, some of the stuff they are thinking about for the next 5 years and more. We sat through scenario demonstrations and voted on the various elements.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything interesting about any of these new features so this is just a big teaser really, but I can say that life as a programmer over the next few years is likely to change radically.

The really impressive part of this day that I can talk about was the openness and trust shown to us by Microsoft. This is the first time they have solicited feedback at such an early stage in the design process from non-employees. They did have some worries about doing this of course - i.e., would we knock down something they thought was really cool - but overall, I couldn't find anything that was bad or wrong. There were a few things I didn't care about, but I'm sure others did.

We did have a look at some less secret tools and technologies too. For example Atlas. Tim: I'm sorry for not paying more attention to your Ajax blogverstation. I can now see how cool Ajax/Atlas will be. My impression is that I will finally be able to write web applications that behave as well as windows applications. If you didn't know, you can get Atlas now and it will be released soon (?) after VS2005.

One more thing, Workflow is EVERYWHERE. Get to know it now. Start thinking about how you can use it in ALL your applications. Download the beta from http://msdn.microsoft.om/workflow. Get Paul's book and read his blog for more links. I'm certain we will be seeing some demos of this in NZ soon and probably a user group session or two.

One more morning of sessions and then a barbecue and the summit is over. Half a day for shopping and then I'm on my way home. Hopefully, no more long trips this year!

Sunday, October 02, 2005 1:35:42 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

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