PDC Keynote- Gordon Mangione on Yukon and WinFS
The keynote on Yukon and WinFS was delivered by
Gordon Mangione. Gordon pushed the .NET integration with Yukon and strongly emphasized the flexibility that comes with the .NET platform. One interesting note was Gordon's claim that Reporting Services was written in C# entirely. Although I knew that managed code was used, I had not heard that previously. Gordon also talked about the web services integration with Yukon. While SqlXml has enabled this for a while, the infrastructure is greatly improved with Yukon. There was a lot of emphasis on business intelligence as well. If you've been keeping up with Yukon, there wasn't much new here but the material was well presented. Tom Rizzo's demo included the updated SQL Workbench GUI. There is now a GUI driven way to build a stored procedure, and this has some similarity to the query builder functionality in Enterprise Manager. They also demo'd the web services functionality in Yukon and the T-SQL support. I'm interested to see how real customers will use and deploy this functionality. Xml data types were discussed as well. The highlight of the demo was Whidbey and Yukon integration. The tools have really come a long way in the past year.
One quick rant on this presentation. I don't know why Microsoft emphasizes ease of deployment of applications from Visual Studio. I don't know anyone that works in a managed environment that allows developers to deploy applications to production servers without going through a change management process. Ease of deployment doesn't carry much weight in my opinion, especially when it is from the IDE directly to the server. If a change management system was integrated into VS, that might be more interesting.
Onto the WinFS portion of the keynote. The tenets of WinFS are the following- help users find information, help them relate the information they have, and enable them to act on the information. The vision for WinFS is massive, and it really ties strongly to some of the work that I saw from Microsoft Research a couple of weeks ago. WinFS is based on transacted NTFS, and marries database-like services into the programming model for accessing information on the PC. There will be support for object-based programming, along with T-SQL and XML to access WinFS data. In the demo, there was an XML schema shown that can be edited to extend WinFS functionality. While working within the shell, your custom schema extensions can be selected using a field chooser and can view and sort information in new ways. The demo also showed the "Natural Language" search functions. The demo looked cool, but I don't know enough about how this worked to comment on it. Overall, the demo was very good.
But the biggest news out of this whole session- Gordon stated SQL Server will NOT be ported to non-Windows plaforms. I was shocked. :)
