There is also a 
JUMP! meeting: overview of development days at Microsoft
Every now and then I find it useful to attend presentations about subjects not directly related to Infrastructure, Security or Architecture. For architects, this broadens the vision on the world. It is useful for everyone in the IT business to know what is going on in the world of Microsoft developers, and what is possible these days.
A few days back I was invited for an evening at LogicaCMG, where some presentations were held about the Microsoft DevDays 2007.
The Microsoft DevDays is an event that takes place in Amsterdam. It takes 2 days, where in 6 tracks, 54 presentations are given to Microsoft developers. Obviously, much information is presented during these days, and some LogicaCMG consultants who attended the event, presented the highlights:
Visual Studio 2008 - Orcas is the latest Visual Studio version, which now (finally) includes support for Java development, including code completion and debugging.
Silverlight is a cross platform (that is Microsoft and Mac) plug-in for browsers, that enables rich content. It is a competitor for Adobe Flash. A demonstration showed that it was pretty easy to produce rich content, including drawing, animations (using timelines) and events in a web interface.
LINQ can be compared to SQL statements that can be used in source code, where information in databases, or in classes (!) can be retrieved.
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) are new technologies that enable developers to design application User Interfaces (WPF) or communications between applications (WCF) easily. A demonstration showed the possibilities of WCF: a new version of the classic game Pong was implemented, using two systems: one server and one client. The communication between these systems was done using WCF contracts. Contracts define what needs to be communicated (for instance the names of the players of the game). How it is communicated is hidden for the application developers. This is done by the WCF layer. Very impressive.
DSL (Domain Specific Language) is a technique for automatic code generation from models. This is not new, as there are already tools for generating code from UML. DSL however, gives the developer the freedom to define their own modelling language, and use this specific language to generate code. This makes it possible to use or develop a modelling language, specific for a particular domain or business.
Popfly mashups is a new technology that makes it very easy to create mashups. Mashups are Internet sites that combine information from several other sites of web services to create new content. The live demo showed creating a mashup between Microsoft Virtual Earth and a news site. The news articles state the location where the news happened. The mashup took that information, converted it to coordinates using a web service and used the coordinates to point the news to a place on the world map, provided by Virtual Earth using "pins". When one clicks on a pin, the news is shown in a pop-up. All this was done with little or no coding, in a few minutes, just by visually dragging, dropping and combining web services together. The Popfly site is open for developers to test it, and relies heavily on the new Silverlight technology.
I found the presentations very impressive and entertaining. Microsoft has a lot of very user friendly tools, that give developers much (artistic) freedom. Nowadays, only a very small portion of developing is actually coding. Tools automatically hide the most boring part of developing from the developers.
Another thing I noticed was that much designing (specially UI's) is done nowadays in XAML, the Extensible Application Markup Language.
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