We’re halfway through TechEd 2008 for developers in Orlando, and I’ve seen enough to make a few random observations:
- Silverlight is going to be big. I’m likely the last person to know the tremendous differences between Silverlight 1 and the upcoming Silverlight 2. I’ve dabbled in the past with Silverlight 1 — and was generally underwhelmed. The XAML and vector-based UIs are cool enough, but having to do all the coding in JavaScript was a bummer. (Yeah, I know you can do pretty much anything in JavaScript, but the development experience doesn’t seem like a step up from C# in Visual Studio.)
In any case, Silverlight 2 looks to be pretty similar to WPF in many ways (though slimmed down for the web). The XAML stays, but the Silverlight runtime now contains a slender port of the .NET class libraries, and development is now in a .NET language instead of JavaScript. The runtime framework includes the classes necessary to perform web service/WCF calls, transform XML, etc. It also comes with a set of controls (e.g. text box, button, list box, etc.) and can perform data binding. And in case you can’t get yourself into enough trouble with that, there’s even support for threading.
I plan to blog a lot more on this topic, but judging anecdotally by Microsoft’s emphasis (Silverlight was the first technology called out in Bill Gates’ keynote on Tuesday) and by the developer buzz at the sessions related to Silverlight, it looks to me like it’s ready to take off.
- The answer is "both." The question is the age-old one for systems that deal with files: do we store the file 1) in the database or 2) on the file system? With SQL Server 2008’s filestream capabilities, we can store files on the file system, but the database engine will be responsible for controlling access to the file, which will be referenced on actual data rows. This file is subject to the same transactional semantics as most other fields, is backed up with the standard SQL backup, etc. Pretty cool stuff.
The SQL Server program manager who gave a presentation I attended made mention of SharePoint using this capability in future releases — which is not surprising. It will be interesting to see if this capability — in concert with some usability improvements? — helps drive SharePoint replacement of corporate shared drives.
- Andrew Connell is a rock star. No, really. As he announced a couple of weeks ago on his blog, the SharePoint booth here is giving away copies of his new book that was released this week. Tuesday morning (the first day of TechEd), the books hadn’t yet arrived; they showed up in the afternoon, and the booth turned into a pack of screaming fans as AC signed copies and worked the crowd. (OK, maybe it looked more like this.) What kind of geeks line up for a book called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007?!?
And, yes, as a matter of fact, he did sign my copy. (And Talha’s, too.)
At least he’s got a sense of humor about his popularity: when someone asked him if he could address the book to someone else, he responded "To who? Ebay?"
