This morning, it was hard to get up in time to get to the Conference Center by 8:30, since it required leaving at 7:30 from the hotel as usual due to the Los Angeles traffic.  I am not the type to get up early in the morning and prefer to work late instead.  Oh well, not much longer!

Today's general session was opened by Senior Vice Presidents Eric Rudder (Servers and Tools) and Steven Sinofsky (Office).  Eric introduced David Treadwell and Dennis Pilarinos, who showed how Windows Workflow Foundation or WinFX for short, allows development and management of applications could be managed in a very visual workflow format, such that the initial design of how a system will work, can be set out in a process diagram, and the underlying processes and code can be built up from within those processes.   Something that clearly will save time and ensure all avenues and scenarios are covered in the development design.

Next came demonstrations from Brian Goldfarb, Joe Marini, and Mark Boulter of each of the new web design tools, under the head of Microsoft Expression.  Clearly the suite of 3 applications will make graphic editing and web design and development very much easier, since they are built around interaction and integration with Visual Studio so that both the Visual Designer and the developer can work together on the UI and the code beneath it without either of them having to do part of the other person's job.   The Graphic Designer package allowed editing of photos and graphics in a very simple and professional way.  We were treated to the lasso tool perfected by MS Research to locate the edge of a person in the midst of another photo, and cleanly cut them out of the picture to paste into the foreground of another.   I have never seen it done so easily before.   There is a demo available for all of the packages too.

Eric then went on to introduce Visual Studio for Applications with the help of Shoshanna Budzianowski who gave us a walk through of how AutoCad (from AutoDesk) with VSTA embedded in it, allowed it to be extended to include events and forms tied into specific actions on diagrams created in the tool.  The example was when a particular part of a fictional projector was changed from plastic to carbon fiber.  Instantly the suppliers of carbon fiber parts were displayed, allowing a price comparison and then the exact specifications to be added to the diagram and ordered if necessary.   This formed a nice segue for David Mitchell (from UGS) to talk about how from the CAD perspective, XML and XAML in particular allows for data across different applications performing the same task, to be shared between companies and across the enterprise.

Finally, various improvements in document management and collaboration were demonstrated by Steven Sinofsky in the latest version of Sharepoint Services, from which I know my group will benefit.

After that, individual tracks and sessions began, and since I am interested in MSN, Web Services and Databases, I looked for those tracks and attended the following.   At the time of writing, all of the presentations made from the previous day across all tracks and sessions are available on the Download Site, but I have listed and linked below, the specific sessions I attended:

DAT200: Future Directions for Data-Driven Applications: Storage, Applications, APIs, hosted by David Campbell, General Manager of SQL Server.

Covering how data is now being born digitally rather than being created in analog form and then digitized/scanned, David explained that there is a larger amount of meta data that can be inferred from the media, files and any object needing to be stored and retrieved, since this metadata is being created upstream ie. when the object is created rather than being added manually later.   The raw objects can be located anywhere, but the meta data associated with them can be pulled together and analyzed, sorted, queried etc. A key point here was that there are things you can do if you pull this data together into a reporting structure to actually query and join the data rather than relying on Search for everything i.e. Query vs. Search, since the latter will rarely allow you to join and filter the data by other data or views from different sources.

Meta data can be inferred to.  For example, if a whole series of photos are taken within a short period of a couple of hours, then it is logical to infer that they were taken at a particular event.  The UI of an upload tool could reasonably ask the user for the event name and add this to the meta data of all of the photos, saving a lot of time.

David went on to talk about LINQ (ADO.NET) the Language Integrated Query, and showed how, with the addition of a DLL into the code for C# or VB.NET, the methods and verbs necessary to attach to, query, update and deal with the returned data are much more easily created in an untuitive way.   This actually began to remind me of the Visual Foxpro language set, since data access, querying and manipulation are native to that language.   We appear to be moving the more popular .NET languages in the same direction.   I am still a fan of Visual Foxpro, so anything that makes C# and VB.NET easier to use when dealing with remote and local data, is a great thing.    The whole LINQ feature is going to increase productivity of developers everywhere.

Shishir Mehrota (WinFS PM) made a presentation in this session too, showing us a StoreSpy application which is a developer tool to pull together and see what's in your store e.g. mail, meetings, pictures, house listings etc.

The data and views can be created against different sets of data, but then pulled into higher level queries within StoreSpy.  Even these queries can then be stored as views and then made available for filtering and data analysis, for reporting against your data ni new and very useful ways.

PRSL02: Cast Study: How Hotmail used Atlas and ASP.NET Web Applications and Services, hosted by Walter Hsueh, Development Lead of Hotmail Front-Door (the UI).

COM301: MSN Messenger: Extending MSN Messenger with Multi-person Instant Messaging Applications, hosted by Scott Swanson, Group Product Planner, and Carmen Zlataff, Lead PM.

OFF409: Windows Sharepoint Services: Advancements in Document, Content, and Data Storage, hosted by Dustin Friesenhahn, Program Manager for Sharepoint.

DAT313: SQL Server BI: Adding Reporting and Analysis to Smart Client Application, hosted by Jamie MacLennan and Brian Welcker

I will update this post with more information on my findings in each presentation later...