From the Editor - Southern California

October 6, 2008
 

There’s no getting around the fact the biggest news is PDC in Los Angeles from October 27 to 30th. Keynoting will be Scott Guthrie, who is corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, will be speaking about future Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications. You can be sure there will be some significant technologies being announced.

In the first keynote at PDC 2008 will be Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect of Microsoft), who will talk about the new world of Software Plus Services, with Bob Muglia (Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business (STB) at Microsoft) joining him, to unveil our new Cloud Computing platform.

In a second keynote, Ray will return to talk about building immersive user experiences and introduce Steven Sinofsky, who will give developers a first look at the next version of Windows, Windows 7. Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell will join Ray and Steven to dive deep on the latest Win32 and .NET platform advances that enable a next generation of user experiences spanning multiple devices, including a look at the latest developments in .NET, Silverlight, “Live Mesh”, and the rest of the client platform.

Recently, I delivered some fresh content concerning Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, ADO.NET Entity Framework, and ASP.NET Data Services in Fresno and Berkeley. The audiences were really engaged and that is easy to tell because you get a ton of great questions.

So what I did was create a really elegant WPF application that made use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET Data Services. Using this combination of technologies is very powerful because of the way the Entity Framework allows you to abstract away the gory details of a relational database. The audience loved the fact that you can deal with a customer object, and not be bothered by the annoying details of the physical database schema. Many application developers hate having to study database schemas to learn that a customer may have his or her information spread across many different tables, with all these crazy join constructs. The Entity Framework leverages Entity SQL, which allows you to write really clean SQL statements that don’t have dozens of join clauses. The bottom line is that you are programming at the conceptual level, not the physical database level, which provides beautiful, readable code.

The highlight of the second half was taking the thick client WPF application and porting Silverlight. Except for some minor adjustments, we were able to take all of our code and run it within the browser. The audience loved that part. The only changes we needed to account for were the fact that Silverlight is asynchronous, meaning you must use a callback function to populate the controls and user interface. That makes sense – web browsers must not sit there locked up waiting for answer from a web server. I could have run that application in Safari and Firefox as well.

Speaking of Silverlight, on November 3-5th in San Diego there will be a Silverlight Tour Workshop, which is a three-day course on Silverlight 2. It divides the content into three distinct areas: Design, Development and the Server-Side. Students should be able to develop Silverlight 2 applications once attending the workshop. The Workshop is structured with a mix of didactic lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs. Each student will leave the workshop having created several small Silverlight 2 applications. This variety of learning techniques will ensure that all students become proficient in the technology quickly and in an exciting way.

What else is exciting in the Los Angeles Area? I saved the best for last. It is the “The Underground @ PDC.” Whether you're attending PDC or not, The Underground is the place to be!

Microsoft and INETA have joined forces. There will be a fantastic speakeasy evening lined up, one that's sure to leave a lasting impression. Secured are some special guest speakers for sneak peeks of PDC announcement. There will be local sponsors, bringing together a great night of vignettes, networking, music, dancing, food and drinks.

Register early; there is limited space for this premier event.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008
6:00pm - 2:00am

The Edison
108 W. 2nd St., #101
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Thanks for reading,
Bruno

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