I have been away from blogging for a while.  A little too much travel to keep up with multiple blog sites. In the past 12 months, I have been to Thailand, Japan, Seattle, San Fran, LA, New York 15 time, Orlando, Dallas, Tampa and various other cities. Basically around 120,000 airline miles.

 This week I am at the PDC, and I am really excited about the changes coming.

I will come back to my BizTalk blogs next week, but I wanted to talk about 4 great technologies that we are releasing soon or have already released.

Do you know the message you get when a program crashes and it asks you about sending information to Microsoft?

Do you know that when you clik yes it actually sends this information to a server that is used to be a gathering point for debugging crashes.

 
The server is actually winqual.
 
https://winqual.microsoft.com/

Did you know that as a developer, you can subscribe to this server and register your applications?

 
If you do, and if your application crashes and the end user chooses to send the information to Microsoft, you can go to this site and download the crash and debug it. It will also show you a list of crashes and provide you with the ability to actually send a message back with a link to a hotfix for your application after you fix it.

 
The LINQ project

The Language Integrated Query framework (the LINQ Project) is a set of language extensions to C# and VB and a unified programming model that extends the .NET Framework to offer integrated querying for objects, databases and XML.

LINQ’s query operators can be applied to any .NET array or collection of objects, effectively providing SQL- and XQuery-like capabilities for in-memory data. Essentially query-capabilities become a first class citizen in .NET programming languages.  In addition, LINQ provides two critical APIs code-named:

·         DLinq: for SQL relational data access
·         XLinq: for XML hierarchical data access

Windows Workflow Foundation or Workflow in general

This is bringing BizTalk like Workflow to the developer community without having to have a copy of BizTalk Server. This is like a developer version of BizTalk without requiring XML documents. There is actual c# or VB.NET code integrated. Events, code breaks, etc.. I would highly recommend checking this out at the site below.

http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/
 
There is also a series of hands on labs and documentation.
 

AJAX or Project Atlas

Yet another new tool to get excited about. This is a set of JavaScript libraries to build client side code that will work in conjunction with ASP.NET. Basically it gives a Client-side Jscript designer so that people don't have to build the libraries to do stuff like populate a table with data from a web services.

The bits are on ASP.NET. There is a whitepaper and hands on labs as well.

http://beta.asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=7&tabid=47