November 2006 - Posts
I guess two plus signs by the name of this great old language are not enough anymore. There are going to be a lot of cool features on "Orcas" and on the next versions. here are some of them :
- New MFC goodies for Vista UI
- Syslink (like a hyperlink, but nicer)
- Network address control
- Command link
- Split Button
- Support for Vista file dialogs, toolbars menus and more)
- LUA support in IDE & projects
- Meta Data based incremental managed builds and concurrency module compilation
- .NET FrameWork multi-targeting (so you can choose to what version of the FW to aim your deployment)
- Updated Spy++
- STL/CLR
- Class designer is back (but read-only... so... can we still call it a designer... time will tell...)
- More surprises on the near future
I guess there gonna be a bit of a struggle between MFC, WPF and Winforms (I'll place my bet on WPF)...
The sessions on the first day of the conference were partly basic at their essence, but a few lectures like the one of "Mike Pelton" about "3D graphichs,WPF or DirectX" were great. Mike was talking about WPF and its 3D abilities showing that there is no difference in event handling mechanism in responding to 3D events and 2D events, and how it's probably the easiest 3D so far. I'll also talk on further entries about WPF in code perspective.
A few nice things Mike illustrated were using shading effect with DirectX, moving transparent balls on a 3D surface, showing the triangles DirectX is working with building the objects and computing effects on them. Lots of his demos are in the SDK and are really worth seeing, even if you are not developing with DirectX yourself.
Another nice thing he showed was the Luna Demo of Nvidia, showing how to move a 3D figure and changing its attributes. And of course, the MIL language, for dealing with DirectX.
We had a really interesting meeting with Migel from the MONO project (a project which I was also contributing to it in the past) and we had a long chat about open code, the good and evil in big and small companies and, how his staff are spread on different countries and still work great , because of their natural environment. Migel is a brilliant guy, with strong opinions about everything and it was a pleasure having a chat with him.
In the Pre-Conference I attended two major lectures about FW 3.0, and a bit from Roy Oshorov Agile development. The FW 3.0 WPF session was nice especially at its last part where data-binding with WPF was introduced and I'll review it myself on the near future on this blog. Later on a bit slow one about "CardSpace" (formerly "InfoCard") to help one manage a few information security cards about himself, on a full rainbow of un-trusted sites with even anonymous details or wrong ones (yep, with my passport stolen, I can be empathic with that), and to full-trusted sites, that you want them to have your full details. It's a nice subject and a nice part of FW 3.0, but concentrating on WCF and WPF, even a bit WWF are more suitable for my playground at this time.
Roy was great, and his lecture was fluent and interesting. He also played a few songs at the end of his lectures which were great (I'm always in favor of music with everything :-) including software), you can go to
Yosi Taguri blog the short videos that we filmed, and see for yourself.
Time to refresh my blog and start writing again. I'm writing this entry from Tech-Ed Barcelona, on the middle of the conference keynote.
I was arriving Barcelona two days ago, and if any of you are reading Roy Oshrov or Yosi Taguri blogs, you should know by now that I was mugged on a broad daylight at the airport.
It's pretty amazing that even though I noticed the theft at the moment it happened, the thieves were out of sight, and neither I nor Alon, or the escorting Microsoft staff at the airport saw them. After my "identity" was stolen (practically everything from my passport to my PocketPC), we went to the police and… well… no help (not surprisingly) from that direction except tones of papers, and hand copies.
If any of you wondered about the title of the blog above, from that moment on, and especially because I'm holding a delegate title in the conference, I changed my title to "Anonymous Delegate" :-)