Potash Valley

I have now finished my third day at PDC. So far a lot of interesting new products and functionnalities have been introduced.

Azure
Among the most interesting and important announces Azure is the top one. As a developper perspective it's not so interesting, I admit. But as an ISV it should have a huge impact on how we work, and more particularely on the real business. For those who are not aware (if there is any) Azure provides hosting services for any ASP.NET web application. This means we can grow as far as we want, simply, and we hope it will be cheap. Currently ASP.NET is far behind PHP in terms of hosting costs and services. I hope and trully think that this will reduce this gap, with a deep focus on websites.

C# 4.0
Good stuff, but I don't think those changes are important for the common grammer.
Yes it will add a lot of possibilities but those concepts are too far from reality. I currently know a few companies who really use the power of C# 2.0, I even don't want to tell about C# 3.0. But more is better than less, and it has the advantage to tremendously simplify the interoperability code for COM and the Office suite.

Windows 7
As a developer the functionality which is most interesting is the ability to create bootable virtual machines. We will be able to take the full advantage of our hardware on predefined development environments.

Visual Studio 2010
The only interesting stuff I have seen so far is UML 2.4 management. Again a business killer functionnality, integrated inside the environment. Great for the users, with great looking designs also. We can already use it in our presentations.

WCF and WF
Those new versions will not only increase dramatically the performance but also correct all the issues we can have currently: lack of textual representation, versionning. The only problem is the release date : late 2009. We need this now !

Quadrant
Quandrant is a visual data management tool for diagraming. It can diagram anything, and is fully configurable using itself as configuration diagrams. Technically it uses MVC everywhere and nothing useful for the developer can be used. But the paradigms are very interesting. We'll have to wait for more practical stuff.

Looking forward for the last day.