PDC Day 1
Posted by bsstahl on 2003-10-29 and Filed Under: event
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.