My first reason for going to the PDC is that I just love to hear good stories on software development. The upcoming Whidbey has such an enormous amount of fascinating features, I just have to hear these from the people who created them. My second reason for going is writing on software development. As I am doing a book on "OOP with Whidbey" (for APress) the PDC is the place to be. I am not a part of the happy few who already have a copy of Whidbey running, my main source is "radio trottoir" and all other fragments floating around on the web. The PDC session overview looks like a feature list of .net 2.0. There is far to much to follow everything, I have to make a choice. Not just for sessions, but for subjects as well. I ordered the conference DVD so I'll be able to watch all tracks I didn't attend some time later back home.

My main track will be "Indigo and surroundings". What is Indigo ? To Don Box it is a state of mind, to me it looks like a way to route (xml-based) information through (inter-)networks at its own pace. Working with web services in .net 1 you have the choice to invoke a web-service synchronous and a-synchronous. And  that is about it. Reading through the session abstracts I see things like Building Occasionally-connected, Async Client Applications, and "Indigo" brings together the best of .NET Remoting, MSMQ, ASMX and .NET Enterprise Services . New in this context are message queues. The 2 version of compact framework will also support these. I had been working with mq's in net 1, it proved to be a good way to store (xml data) messages on a system until the receiver is ready for them, adding a new level of asynchronous operation to apps. All of that will be included in Whidbey. I will have to do quite an overhaul on my material on that. As quite a part is now in the framework I have room to cover more of the new stuff. My mind is in a certain state now, I'll see on the PDC how well the color matches. Just can't wait.

Blog on

Peter