Whidbhey
My initial intention in this PDC was to attend the sessions on Yukon to see if something new might be discussed. I'm an MVP in SQL Server and have been working with Yukon for the past month or so, so any new information that I can soak in can help me, but I was mistaken!! The sessions did not go beyond what I had already worked on, thus, I shifted my focus to Whidbhey, the next generation of VS.NET and man, its got cool features aimed at productivity.
Seeing all these new features and intelligence makes me think that one day programmers might become obsolete!! The infrastructure does most of the underlying work and abstracts away all the hard work that you now just code business logic. In the good old days, you had to code almost everything yourself and in-fact that is what distinguished programmers. You used to have demi-gods with whom you would discuss this how some internal working is going on, but now, things look different. Today, I guess domain knowledge is all that matters and the tools are becoming so intelligent that one day they might start thinking for us!! (remember Terminator)
Well, that was an interesting digression, but back to Whidbhey. Some of the cool features that I like are with respect to editing, formatting, and oveall productivity. Another good thing is with respect to accessibility. This used to be the realm of accessibility experts, but with the introduction of this feature, hopefully all of us would be accessible compliant! Smart tags are used extensively inside of Whidbhey to improve productivity and this is really cool. There are some nice personalization stores introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 that aids in providing rich personalization to end-users, with just one line of code (that rocks!!).
Well, that's the information that I have on Whidbhey as of now, as more sessions at PDC are pending. Maybe I'll start a seperate blog for each feature that I feel is interesting.