Tuesday at DevTeach
I’m in Montreal this week for DevTeach, a user group-oriented developer and SQL conference that is one of my two favorite conferences. Montreal is a great city (particularly for the stomach!) and they do a great job with the conference.
Yesterday were the pre-cons, covering .NET 3.0, VB.NET, and SQL. I sat in on part of Kevin McNeish’s .NET 3.0 session and learned lots of great information about Windows Workflow. It’s great how that technology has matured into something amazingly powerful.
The Tuesday morning keynote has started. Jean-Rene has announced that DevTeach is hitting the road. The next stop will be Vancouver 26-30 November, and will include both DevTeach and SQLTeach. I hope to be there; that should be a great time to be in Vancouver!
The main keynote event is Pablo Casto, Microsoft’s ADO.NET wunderkind. Julie Lerman’s excitement about the keynote was justified (causing her to miss the Vermont .NET User Group meeting for the first time ever to get here in time). Pablo talked about the current thinking at Microsoft about the Microsoft Data Platform. ON the surface, this is the same sort of thing they’ve been talking about since the introduction of ADO, but baby, it’s come a long way since then!
The Microsoft Data Platform:
- Provides a uniform way of describing business data
- Gives each app and appropriate view of the data
- Enables the creation of services, from reporting to synchronization to integration
- Applications and services use the same data model
A key part of the platform is the Entity Framework and the Entity Data Model, which is coming of age. I’m blown away by the possibilities of what this all means for application infrastructure. But what I didn’t know until today—apparently it was announced a couple of weeks ago—is that all this will not ship with Orcas. Instead pieces and parts will RTM at various times in 2008. That sucks, but so be it.