Yet another long day, I feel like I have been at this conference for a week already, I'm exhausted.
At this moment I am installing Longhorn on one of the extra laptops we brought for just such an occasion. I hope they don't monitor hydro usage per room because between the wireless router, 2 phones, 3 IPAQ's, and 4 laptops plugged in we must be over our quota.
After I install Longhorn, I'll be installing Whidbey. For those who don't know, Whidbey is the code name for the next release of Visual Studio. I'm a software developer and have been for 20 years. So when presenters are on stage using old editors and compiling on the command line. I'm with them and sometimes feel a little nostalgic. As much as I once loved K-edit I wouldn't trade Visual Studio .net for it now. Like any software VS.net has it's problems. But the development teams at Microsoft have done a wonderful job addressing a lot of the issues. Assuming they deliver what I saw today.
So what did I see today?
- I saw tools to make interactive development easier. Like smart tags. You can drop a control on a form then right click and make it something else. Maybe it was a textbox at first but them you decide to make it a date time picker. Just right click select DateTimePicker and you’re done.
- Ever want to try something by coding it? As a result you end up with WindowsApplication1, WindowsApplication2, WindowsApplication3 ... on your machine. Whidbey works like word, your project is not saved until you save it. So you could create a project write some code compile it and run. Then exit without saving and discard the whole thing. (Honest that's what he said.)
- I saw Paul Yuknewicz create an employee.user.vb. What's that you say? Well it's what Microsoft refers to as a partial class. You can have a class split across multiple files and they will be compiled into one. So the file employee.user.vb goes with employee.vb which goes with employee.xsd. You guessed it. It's an extension of a Typed DataSet. :)
- The new snap lines for aligning controls are wonderful. If you are adding multiple labels and controls just drag one near another and it shows you lines to tell when it's lined up with the other controls and the labels. It's hard to explain how nice it looks. I'll be happy to demo it when I get back.
- There is this thing called a DataSource Picker. To bind a control you can simply drag from you DataSource to the control and it binds it.
- There is this new control called a DataContainer, all I can say is PowerSoft DataWindow. (I'll save the comparison for another Blog)
- There are some enhancements to the XML editor. Nothing else to see here move along.
- Actually one really note worthy XML addition. You can set breakpoints in an XSLT file and debug it.
- Oh yeah I remember this is nice. When you add a datasource to DataBinding in the property window. You can grab the editor and stretch it out to see everything. It's really nice
Enough about Whidbey for now.
The exhibition hall was cooking tonight, must have been the free drinks. We stopped into a few booths, chatted with some folks, did a little shopping in the Microsoft Store. Can't tell you what I bought. My Daughters have been reading along, and it's for them.
It's time to unwind and relax, another long day tomorrow at PDC.