Where do you go when you can't get to or can't afford the Professional Developers Conference (PDC)?

MSDN Developer Conference (MDC)!

It's a great little cram session for all the hot technologies that Microsoft is planning on getting out there (Azure, jQuery in VSTS2010, Oslo, etc), with recaps of what is out there now (jQuery in VSTS2008, Silverlight 2, etc).

MDC doesn't go into depth and explanation like PDC does, but it wets your tongue and encourages you to go out and research the stuff yourself. With 3 tracks each consisting of 4 presentations, you can pick and choose the route you take and get introduced to the things you want to learn. Since I couldn't be in three places at once I'll recap the sessions I was in on.


Session 1: jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX
There is a lot of buzz flying around about jQuery right now. A 15kb package that contains one hell of a powerful library for navigating and altering the HTML.DOM. I knew it existed but didn't know the details of what it all entailed or how it would integrate into ASP.NET. While the examples presented were limited in nature I really liked the ease of navigation and the ability to quickly attached delegates to events of HTML objects.

Session 2: Writing Services for Azure
Azure is one of those things that I'm not confident about yet. While the end result I believe will be a good thing for small businesses especially with the globalization of the product, I just don't see it right now. I know, Azure is still CTP and they're testing it out with a small group of servers at MS, but unless you're heavily integrated into mesh or live services the limited .Net and Sql Services just isn't that appealing to me.

Session 3: Business Applications in Silverlight 2
I went to this one in hopes that I could gleam something new that I didn't know from Silverlight2. I've been playing with SL2 since Beta 1 and have done multiple demos and projects all the way through to what SL2 is today, so I knew that a lot of the information would be repetitive. The beginning 30 minutes or so was all the basics and I was starting to lose interest with a thought of walking over to the room with Azure talks... but then...

Josh Heyse, who was presenting the demos, went into a CTB (still don't know what the "B" stands for) of a project code named Alexandria. Search around on the web and you'll notice that Alexandria started showing up in 2006 as a code name of Microsoft's focusing around a media device(?). However, I assure you that what I saw in that demo was NOT media based.

I've also read that some people think that Alexandria is a code name for Silverlight 3.



Silverlight2 consumed Alexandria. What do I think Alexandria is?

I think Alexandria will be a means to eliminate writing business logic twice through means of WCF. When Josh was presenting he wrote validation, error checking, range validation, updates, selects, etc. ONCE! He wrote it once in the service and SL2 knew how to consume and process it. When attached to SL2 controls, the controls had been coded with the business logic automatically and the UI handled it without having to make a call back to the service.

Genius! I can't wait to hear more about it and REALLY can't wait for it to hit CTP.

Session 4: F#
I wanted to hit this session because I've been hearing things about F# that made me realize I need to start using this and have it in my arsenal. I won't say much since it was an "Intro to F#" and you can find this information all over the place. I am excited about it being procedural instead of object oriented and I'm very excited about how easy it is to utilize multiple cores.

WrapUp
MDC is well worth the $100 and trip to Chicago from Milwaukee. Microsoft never lets you down with trying to get you excited about their products (and they always have a kick ass spread for lunch).

Random fact: Windows 7 support 256 processing cores.