In a full week of sessions at TechEd Developers 2007 in Barcelona, there is a lot of information to be assimilated, new contacts made and because of a professional change in the near future still very much a different TechEd.
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 features
With a RTM release by the end of this month Visual Studio 2008 is finally there. There are so many new exciting features to the C# and VB.Net languages and new functionalities in the IDE.
There is a great demo project called Dinnernow.net that uses several of the new technologies like LINQ, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, WCF, WF, Powershell, etc. I went to two TechEd sessions (presented by David Aiken and Matt Winkler) that gave an overview of the whole project and what I can say is this: check it out, it will really help you understand ways to use these new technologies and features.
LINQ: I got the chance to learn more about LINQ in two sessions at TechEd. The good news for SharePoint developers: there is already a LINQ to SharePoint implementation on the way which is part of my Resources for WSS and MOSS for some time now :-)
Bart De Smet currently has an alpha version available at codeplex. There is a small video interview with Bart about this feature on the TechEd site:
http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/news/Pages/day5.aspx. Scroll down to “LINQ to SharePoint Implementation” for the video.
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft is working on a new search server that is based for on the search feature found in MOSS 2007. Checkout Joris’ great post on this for more details.
There is also an “Express” version of this server, the release candidate is available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2007/11/06/announcing-microsoft-search-server-2008-express.aspx
Let’s make Popfly mashups!
With social networking sites like Facebook becoming more and more popular with all kinds of users, I love playing around with Popfly.
The Popfly explorer beta is out for download by the way.
I also had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about all kinds of subjects. The Belgian party on Wednesday was such a great opportunity. See you at a next event!
Check out some photos of the event:
