The Matt Faus Blog

Well, after spending the week in Seattle for the MVP Global Summit I thought I’d send a quick recap of the week’s activities. Overall, it was a really awesome conference. In both formal and informal settings, I was able to meet with those at Microsoft responsible for the creation of InfoPath and talk about pain points, new features, and anything else that came up.

Tuesday was a keynote by Bill Gates in the morning followed by some awesome demos from a lot of the product teams at Microsoft. Wednesday and Thursday was geared towards the MVP feedback to Microsoft and included several roundtable discussions where both sides could discuss aspects of the product. The first one of these was especially cool because there were more Microsoft reps than MVPs, so it was very focused.

The other sessions were good, but several of them were joint sessions with either the Access or SharePoint MVPs. This joining up wasn’t bad, but I got the feeling that there just wasn’t as much effort put into the InfoPath MVP experience. This should be said with a grain of salt, however, because there were only four of us. Anyway, below are my takeaways from the weekend.

• A very interesting addition included with .NET 3.0 is called Language Integrated Query, or LINQ. The idea behind LINQ is to make querying data sources, whatever they may be, incredibly easy. To do this you setup a DataContext, which can be XML, SQL, or an IEnumerable object. When this is done a whole bunch of code is automatically generated to represent the data store as objects. Once this is done querying the data becomes much easier, but that’s not all. The crux of LINQ is all of the “extension methods” (more on this later) that are added to the working namespace and can be used to create SQL-like queries (using a bunch of new keywords added with .NET 3.0) to issue queries against the established DataContext. Once the results are found they can be parsed with more LINQ calls to quickly find what you are looking for. There are a lot of really big pros in this, but also some cons. The “extension methods” seem to me like thinly veiled “multiple inheritance” and could lead to lower code readability. Also, anonymous types with the ‘var’ keyword are usually necessary, which definitely reduces readability.
• Microsoft Developer Roadmap

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  • Visual Studio Orcas with the latest VSTO promises incredible power to expand current Microsoft Office products. The demo given was the creation of an awesome looking Outlook add-in in 5 minutes. Full ribbon integration and a widely exposed object model make the expandability of Office applications easy and powerful.

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  • For web development, there have been some libraries added to generate AJAX scripts on ASP.NET pages so that operations require fewer postbacks. Can you say Web 2.0?

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  • Friction-free deployment – more advancements on error logging, and APIs to have programs “call home” to download the latest bits.

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  • XAML XAML XAML! A really cool new product with Office 2007 is the Expression editor that presents a Macromedia Flash-looking interface and outputs .xaml files. The power of this is that it completely separates UI design (something that almost all developers dread) from functionality. Once the .xaml files are created then they can be slapped onto a WinForms application to create a beautiful and functional piece of software. You could think of a .xaml file here as being a XSL stylesheet for a WinForm application. I’m interested to see how we could leverage this technology in the SmartSearch desktop and mobile clients.

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