Development Central

I was at DevConnections in Orlando last week. It was definitely educational.

The major item of interest was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). I attended two sessions on it presented by Miguel Castro (who is an excellent presenter) and a post-conference seminar taught by Juval Löwy. Castro stressed that the Visual Studio wizards are the worst way to do WCF, and Löwy emphasized the many benefits that WCF offers over Web Services and traditional OO development. I came away believing that SOA (service-oriented architecture) may actually be feasible.

Microsoft is coming out with a new distributed cache called Velocity. This is primarily for web sites; what I found interesting was that Windows PowerShell is the designated tool for administering Velocity.

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie made a point of mentioning integration with open source projects (specifically NHibernate and NUnit) in his keynote. Good to hear.

There was a cool demo of installing Silverlight 3 applications locally and running them outside the browser in a sandbox. Interesting, but on the edge of my radar.

WinForms didn’t get much love. Sigh.

Anyway, hi to the all nice people I met! It’s good to be back, though.