About 60 people attented yesterday's meeting of the DotNed user group. Just before leaving my office my first Longhorn startup screen came up and on the train-ride I had been reading .NET books bought on the PDC. I was totally on the right frequency for todays subject : the PDC.

To kick off DotNed's Michiel van Otegem gave an overview of all the stuff presented on the PDC. He showed the startup screen of Longhorn, with a running clock, but alas he didn't get the intended demo working. His Longhorn installation worked on a moderate notebook under Virtual PC, switching off some of the Longhorn services, like licensing, makes it less resource hungry. I'm not going to repeat Michiels overview of the PDC. Last week I had been typing all that out for a submission for the sdgn, it will be on that site sometime soon. Michiel has some good contacts at Microsoft, quite noteworthy were his rumours on the release date of Whidbey : the beta on the Amsterdam TechEd and the final at the end of 2004. With Yukon coming possibly after that. VS.NET Whidbey makes a far more mature impression than Yukon. Besides that Yukon makes a big commitment to Xquery and that still has not been standardized yet.

The second presentation was by Alex Thissen. Alex is a trainer with Twice IT, the hoster of the meeting. His first impressions of the PDC are allready on the sdgn site. For DotNed he did a very good presentation on creating asp.net Whidbey apps. It was long but still he didn't have the time to show all the new stuff. There is just to much. Alex created a new blank web-solution and added new components one at a time ending with a site full of advanced functionality. The most remarkable part of the show was that he didn't code a single line. Everything was done by setting properties and editting some xml files.

To finish Bastiaan Beumer of  Hummingbird did a presentation on creating add-ins for VS.NET. It took some time for the presentation to take off as Bastiaan got a little messed up with the small screen resolution (800*600) which, in combination with all the VB.NET code,  led to a somewhat chaotic view. Having read (part of) the book his presentation was based on (Inside Visual Studio.NET) I knew where he wanted to go. At the end of the talk we all saw the ooh's and aah's of a VS.NET add-in. And the speaker showed his real nature: a developper. Thanks man, for having the courage to do a presentation.

A good event is never complete without socializing. It was late but the snacks kept many of us on the scene for some chatter. Finally I met another dnj-blogger Jonne Kats who was the lucky winner of the meetings prize. The goodies table had a whole pile of new gems : Chris Sells,  David Chappel, Billy Hollis and Yasser Shohoud. Havn't seen them yet, so I don't know about any surpring side-shows. The trainride home was another pleasant reading.

The next meeting is planned on january 22 2004. See you there.

blog on,

Peter