Jason Nadal

With all of the new classes in 2.0, I sometimes find myself guessing at the dll's in order to find out how to reference them in a project. Case in point: with the MONAD namespaces (System.Management) , I didn't realize that they were actually found in the “Program Files\Longhorn Command Shell Preview” folder.  Another point (from 1.1), the System.ComponentModel.Design namespace is actually held in System.Design.dll. I was recommended to use Reflector to search for the classes, but what about classes that are not included in the framework?

The new yield keyword lets you return a value from an enumerated method.  You can use this wherever either you can't use a ref or out param, or when you can't use a return value.

After installing Whidbey, and looking for some of those new Avalon projects under C# Projects, I realized that the Longhorn SDK actually installs additional project templates for Whidbey.

Just thought I'd let everyone know that we can install this on multiple pc's if we want. Now I can have a virtual pc install, as well as a dedicated install.

During the final breakout session I attended, Rocking the web with ASP.NET, the last question asked by the attendees was whether the winform and the web worlds would totally converge, now that we have an abstracted user interface model.  Scott Guthrie's response was that he didn't see this happening in the Whidbey timeframe, but he believes with the next version of VS (”Orcas,” from the future products timeline; not mentioned by name at the PDC to my knowledge) would allow for 3 user interface models. One would support fully rich user interfaces, and be the complete Longhorn/Avalon experience.  One would allow for total ubiquity of platform for the client.  And one would support “adaptive” rendering to the client. This should be relatively easy now that they have XAML/BAML.  Point towards resources (images, movies, behaviors), and the client will figure out how it can best show those resources to the end user based on the specs of the machine it's running on.  In conversations throughout the week, DonXML was speculating about the timeframe; it seemed a natural course, now that Microsoft has brought the User Interface into the XML world. Only time will tell; the popularity of Longhorn will determine how long those legacy platforms have to be supported.

First install of VS Whidbey, and what do I discover? Web projects are not considered normal “projects” anymore.  Under File->New, the first two are Project and Web Site. The only web project in the first option is Web Control Library. Also, upon choosing Web Services, Visual Basic and J# are there (as well as C#), even though I chose not to install VB or J# during the install.

Throughout the conference, my view on Microsoft and their policies towards developers has changed a great deal.  I had always pictured them as aloof, just wanting to make their products the best they could, and release them to the public, and leaving the support to MS support services.  OK, I was half right.  What they really want is for the developer community to help them find out what the best product is, and make it for the public. 

At the CES 2003 show, MS revealed their prototype for their Media2Go device.  It seems to be running on a scaled down version of  XP MCE. Full article by Paul Thurrot is available here.