PDC 2005 - Day Two Review

LINQ and DLINQ are very powerful technologies.  DLINQ seems very similar to Gentle.NET which we use on some projects.  The mapping capabilities seem a much better solution to writing lots of data access to business objects glue code ... and let's not even get started on the evils of code generation.  LINQ definitely seems to be the new announcement at PDC with lots of buzz and people talking about it.

I was fortunate to be invited to a private lunch with Soma along with other influentials and MVPs.  The questions put to Soma were really interesting and provided some inside info on the future of Microsoft's developer tools.  Let's just say that it is going to be a very fun ride!

MSBuild has certainly matured since I saw the early betas in 2003.  It now appears to be an equal partner to NAnt and in fact surpasses NAnt in some features.  The integration and use of MSBuild by Visual Studio is the killer feature in my opinion.  Having the same build process inside and outside of your development tool is a huge win!

The most overused phrases of the day:

• "super excited" (again!)
• "impedance mismatch"