The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer

Day 2 AM

Posted by bsstahl on 2003-10-30 and Filed Under: event 


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.

Tags: pdc conference event clr 

About the Author

Barry S. StahlBarry S. Stahl (he/him/his) - Barry is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers since the mid 1980s. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 40 year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana in Tempe AZ and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp event where software creators come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.

For more information about Barry, see his About Me Page.

Barry has started delivering in-person talks again now that numerous mechanisms for protecting our communities from Covid-19 are available. He will, of course, still entertain opportunities to speak online. Please contact him if you would like him to deliver one of his talks at your event, either online or in-person. Refer to his Community Speaker page for available options.

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