Developer Division Update

The Developer Division hour long session at the MVP summit was given by the corporate Vice President of the division by S. Somasegar. He started by presenting an overview of what has been happening within the division since the release of Visual Studio 2005 some 16 months ago. This included reviews of .NET 3.0 with WFC and WWF, ASP.NET Ajax, Team Foundation Server, the MSDN Wiki beta, and the March CTP of the Orcas release of Visual Studio. He then proceeded to bring out a presenter to do a demo of the Office 2007 integration with Orcas related to "forms regions". Essentially, as shown in the demo, within Orcas developers will have an add-in makes it fairly simple to integrate outside content into Outlook. The most interesting of the demos that he showed integrated additional features into contact management where clicking on a contact used Windows Live Services to pull down maps of the location within a pane inside outlook. He also showed a demo where business data on specific clients was brought up in a separate pane (using a WPF control highlighting the cool UI features) when an email from that client was selected. Interesting stuff.

Somasegar then went on to point out that "friction free" deployment was one of their big challenges and something they've been working hard on. He followed this with a demo of WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) (there was a CTP in February) and is the subset technology of WPF allowing rich multimedia experiences to be embedded on web pages using XAML and scripted using Javascript.

The demo was interesting in that it showed one of WPF/E enhanced capabilities to deal with inking. In the demo the user on the web was able to annotate an image or a video and then when posted back to the server (you could also use Ajax) and saved, the page would allow for searching the video stream for the annotation, seeking to it, and then replaying the inking on the screen.

He then answered a few questions and noted that PDC will be held this year in early October in Los Angeles.

At several points in the talk he was also very high on LINQ and urged those in attendance to take in the talk later today on the subject. It will also be included in Orcas and brings query capability down into the CLR and provides extensions to support both relational and XML data stores.