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Instead of posting a summary of the last 2 days of the PDC, I decided to summarize the entire PDC as best I can by creating a glossary of terms. These terms came out of the PDC as either new, having a modified meaning, or greater importance than before.

WinFX

The code-name for the next generation of the .NET Framework. Key features of WinFX include Indigo, Avalon and WinFS.

Longhorn

The code-name for the next generation of Windows built on, and to work with, WinFX. Longhorn provides the user interface features of Avalon, the file-system improvements of WinFS, and the service support of Indigo.

Indigo

The code-name for a set of managed services in the .NET Framework created to support a unified coding structure for applications developed using the services model. In a very-real sense, Indigo makes the SOAP implementation available to all types of services, not just web services and unifies the three main development standards for architecting solutions using the services model, Web Services, .NET Remoting, and Enterprise Services, under one set of managed objects.

WinFS

Vast improvements in the Windows File System that take us closer to being able to view the file system as a relational database. The addition of extensible metadata schema on top of NTFS will allow users to view data in various ways without having to physically reorganize the data. For example, you could view documents by project first, then author, or author first, then project, without having to change the underlying structure of the file system. Currently, with folders, we can only choose one way or the other.

Avalon

The code-name for the next generation of graphics processing engines in Windows which, among many other things, will put much of the graphics processing burden where it belongs, in the GPU (graphics processing unit) rather than using standard CPU cycles. This will allow for vast improvements in application graphics without impacting performance.

Yukon

The code-name for the next generation of SQL Server. Yukon runs in-process with the Common Language Runtime allowing queries to be executed using any CLR language. Yukon also provides support for XQuery allowing procedures to return query results from XML data which was returned as a result of a T-SQL query. Yukon also provides full support for SQL Cache Invalidation.

Whidbey

The code-name for the next generation of the Visual Studio.NET IDE. Whidbey provides developers with the language tools that help create applications that take advantage of the new features of WinFX and aid in the development of applications that utilize the Services Model.

Orpheus

The code-name for the next generation of Visual Studio.NET after Whidbey.

Services Model

The design philosophy in which application tiers are divided into services by functionality. Often, these tiers are divided into Presentation Services, Business Services (Business Logic) and Data Services. Indigo is designed to support the creation and interaction of these services.

SQL Cache Invalidation

The interaction between SQL Server and ASP.NET that allows the database to invalidate HTML stored in the IIS cache when the data that the page is based on becomes stale. This ability exists, using new utilities from Microsoft at a table level from SQL Server versions 7 and 2000 and is available to the row level in SQL Server Yukon.

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Thanks to Microsoft's hosting of a party for all conference attendees at Universal Studios, I haven't yet put together a summary of conference day 3. I hope to summarize days 3 and 4 together and post them by late Friday morning.

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With the exception of the previously mentioned security problems the remainder of day 2 went quite well. I attended sessions on Web design using ASP.NET Whidbey, the new features in Visual Basic.NET under Whidbey, as well as a talk on using Whidbey to program mobile devices such as Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Some of the most interesting topics from these sessions included the concept of Master Pages, which is similar to a frameset without actually using frames, the new navigation controls provided with Whidbey such as the breadcrumb, sitemap, and menu controls, and the use of SQL Server Cache invalidation to improve the application performance by caching objects without having to worry about those objects becoming stale.

By far the most interesting items were in the Visual Basic features update. The new version of VB that ships with Whidbey will include even more tools to promote code reuse since as “Operators” which will allow us to define how operators such as the plus sign (+) or multiplication sign (*) work with our objects. We will also be able to define both narrowing and widening conversions for our objects which will allow the use of cType with those objects, we will have access to strongly typed collections (i.e. new collection(of myObject)), and will be able to make use of “Generics” which, among many other things, will enable us to create items such as nullable scalars.

I’ll post more from my information overload as time allows!

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The one major letdown from this conference so far has been security. Security guards have been juvenile in their dealings with developers, and have been invisible when needed. They order people near session doors to do their jobs for them, and will not provide any support for doing that job. It is too bad that something non-technical such as security can make busy sessions virtually impossible to attend and understand. Don Box’s latest talk on Indigo was such a session for me and I will not be able to know for certain what I missed in that session until the conference DVDs are released.

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The morning sessions of Day 2 were highlighted by drill-downs into Yukon and WinFS. The most impressive demo of the conference so far was done during the WinFS drill-down by Gord Mangione and Tom Rizzo. They used the Information Agents of WinFS to configure their voicemail application so that when a call came in from a client matching specified custom criteria, and the calendar showed that the user was busy, it would respond to the caller with the time the user's calendar next showed him free.

WinFS may finally make good on the decade-old promise of turning the file-system into a relational database. Its metadata features, including extensible schema, appear poised to make the file-system as programmatically accessible as a database server, with many of the same query capabilities including natural language or SQL style queries.

Yukon also appears to be a major improvement in development technology. This next generation of SQL Server provides CLR (Common Language Runtime - AKA, the .NET Framework) in-process to the SQL Server. This will allow developers to separate the application (or system) tiers physically as well as logically, improving performance, scalability, security, maintainability and extensibility. It will also allow queries to be written in any CLR language, provides structured exception handling for those queries (including in T-SQL) and will allow us to build queries that easily integrate data from various sources (including Web Services).

Needless to say, I am rather excited about many of these developments and am looking forward to installing Longhorn and Yukon on development servers when I return to the real world.

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Day 1 of the 2003 PDC was mainly architectural overviews of many of the up-and-coming features of the new Microsoft platforms and tools. The Keynote by Bill Gates and Jim Allchin gave many of us our first look at the new features of Longhorn, the code-name for Microsofts next generation operating system. The three key features of Longhorn that were demonstrated were: Indigo - the tools to implement application architectures built on the services model, WinFS - file system improvments that will allow us to organize and view data in new and innovative ways, and Avalon - the presentation engine that takes advantage of Indigo and WinFS (among other things). More details of this presentation are available here from Microsoft.

Afternoon breakout sessions included an Architectural overview of Whidbey, the code name for the next generation of Visual Studio .NET development tool. I also was lucky enough to see what was possibly the best presentation I have ever seen. This presentation, given by Don Box and entitled "Indigo": Services and the Future of Distributed Applications is a must-see and will hopefully be made available on Microsoft's website. Don related this history of object-oriented development to the current enhancements of the services architecture, and presented key guidelines for developing using this architecture, both now and in the future.

Tomorrow, I intend to look further under the covers of a number of these technologies including Whidbey, Indigo, Avalon, and possibly Yukon, the code-name for the next generation SQL server.

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Thanks to the fires in Southern California, my arrival in Los Angeles for the 2003 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference was delayed by about 8 hours. My flight out of Phoenix was cancelled and I had to rent a car and drive out to LA. Fortunately, everything worked out fine and I am looking forward to attending the conference starting tomorrow morning. I will post here with details as often as I can.