I am very excited about PDC05. I arrived LA on Sat night. I heard PDC usually generates a lot of excitement in the developer community and I immediately felt the energy of this PDC from a dev lead from MS and an architectur from ISV as soon as landed LA airport. He is so passionate about PDC and .Net!

 

Getting into the pre-conference the next day was not an easy task as I did not know how to find $600 on spot to pay for it J. Somehow I managed to get into today’s session for .Net Framework 2.0: The smart client perspective by Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka. I heard most of the features already, but it was still very cool to see other developers got excited about the new Framework.

 

Some highlights

 

- Smart client emphasizes the intelligence in the UI and take full advantage of the client machine. It enables the device adapability.

 

-  New data feature

There are plenty of new features and I particularly like the new data binding enhancements. The data sources window is so cool that it displays the schema of these objects and provides the

ability to drag and drop tables and columns onto a Windows form. I also appreciate the work from the dataset designer. We can double click to get the code for the data set and intercept the event for row change, column change etc.

 

Parent-child relationships for strongly-typed datasets is automatically understood by VS. e.g. all visits are loaded when click on each patient.

 

-  New language features

There are plenty of language and IDE new features. I really like "My" addition in VB. What a speedy dial to Framework for VB!

 

-  ClickOnce

  1. Vision – bring the easy and reliability of web application deployment to client applications. It handles the install, updates and uninstall of the smart applications
  2. Design Goals
    1. Safety of web application deployement
    2. Easy to install
    3. Easy to update
  3. Visual Studio Support is neat. It has integrated VS support as it doesn’t need a separate MSI or installer project. The publish Wizard auto creates deployment directory.
  4. ClickOnce vs. Alternatives
    1. Vs. No-touch

Richer, applies to broader range of apps

Complete replacemetn

    1. MSI

Complementary installation technology

Could use both

    1. App updater component/block

Can be tweaked, more control

Use BITS background transfer

An alternative for certain type of apps

  1. Other blog entry

I am very glad to see the excitement around .Net Framework new features

 

A couple of random, but interesting observations

  1. People made fun of reboots caused by Framework when discussing the bootstrapping in ClickOnce. I cannot wait to see the impact of reboot improvement work our team did for Whidbey based on the Watson data.
  2. There were actually more than one woman(3 in total) in this room that holds 120 people.
  3. The first question people ask about ClickOnce during the presentation is how do I deploy Framework? I bet Brian is going to have some interesting findings about Framework deployment session with customers in the next few days.

This was just pre-session. I cannot wait till the keynote session on Tues. Stay tuned.

 

Thanks
Hong

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