After using the latest version of Visual Studio for a while, I’ve grown to both like and dislike some of its features. The first Visual Studio incarnation I used was Visual Studio 6.0 (Aspen) back in 1998. In 2001 I had my first look at Visual Studio .NET (Rainier), which was the first environment for using the “brand new .NET thing”.
PDC08 kicked off today with the expected keynote by Ray Ozzie. He presented Azure, a web platform hosted in data centers all over the world. It will host web applications in “the cloud”, supposedly the best thing since sliced bread if we are to believe Ozzie.
I just read an article by Paul Graham entitled Microsoft is dead. He claims that Microsoft is no longer a threat to other companies and mentions four things that supposedly killed the company: Google, Ajax, broadband and Apple.
As mentioned in last post, Report from Microsoft Live 2007, Microsoft will be releasing full versions of WPF and WPF/E during the year. But don’t think that the competition is sleeping. Have a look at the freshly released Apollo by Adobe, a cross-platform runtime for bringing RIAs to the desktop.
Just as last year, Microsoft arranged a spring presentation of their upcoming stuff for developers. The speakers were Johan Lindfors and Robert Folkesson from Microsoft, as well as Patrik Löwendahl and Marcus Olsson from Cornerstone.
As expected, WinFX has now officially been renamed to .NET Framework 3.0. It contains the same lovely ingredients as its previous incarnation: WPF, WCF, WWF and now also WCS (Windows CardSpaces, previously known as InfoCard). However, don’t forget that the .NET Framework 2.0 CLR is still lurking beneath all this… Microsoft has a wonderful tradition of confusing developers with their naming choices (ActiveX, anyone?), and this must be one of the worst I’ve seen in a while.
I just got home from a day filled of Microsoft information. There were sessions on three parts of WinFX: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed Avalon), Windows Communications Foundation (WCF, codenamed Indigo) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). Even though all of them are interesting, my focus lies on Avalon.
Reine is a web developer, urban traveler and ice cream devourer.
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