The PDC until Day 1

So today was the first day of the PDC event. Sunday and monday I’ve followed the preconferences on SQL 2005 and the 2005 BI tools. I must say I was quite impressed with the capabilities and features of the BI part. Especially the integration services are a great replacement for DTS, which was quite slow and not so robust in a lot of cases. The level of robustness, performance and features in the new Ingeration environment are going to make this a real contender on the ETL market I think.

But those were the pre-conferences. Today we had a keynote by Bill Gates (of course) and a lot of the Microsoft architects, and they showed us the new presentation features with Avalon (I’m sorry, Windows Presentation Foundation ), Indigo (Windows Communication Foundation) and a cool new language environment called Linq, which offers rich query and data manipulation functionality as a first class .NET language.

I really hope this will be offered in the near future, as most of the LOB apps today in the Service Oriented world requires lots of data mappings, querying etc. In a database environment you’ve got DataSets and stuff, but in a Web Service world, dealing iwth object graphs and quering those is a lot harder and requires mostly manual coding. These new languages are going to offers huge productivity gains, as well as quality, because things can be compile-time checked.

Finally I followed some sessions about concurrent programming, which offered some new insights on the correct way to do multithreading and locking of shared data in .NET.

We also got ‘The goods’, which is a set of 5 DVD’s containing all the latest ‘2005’ (Yukon, Vista, Team System, WinFs etc.) stuff. Nice to have on DVD, although most of the stuff was a version I already had through MSDN… So it would have been nicer to have hot-of-the-press versions for that..

In short, it was a nice start, although I have a feeling the best is yet to come….