I drove down to Wheaton, IL for the Chicago .NET User Group's Codeapalooza. They have a lot of sessions, and its impossible to see all them, here is the coverage of the ones I chose to go to. I'll be updating this post after every session, so feel free to check back throughout the day.
SQL Server 2008 for Developers by Sam Nasr: Best Quote - "I drank the punch a long time ago, so I only really know Microsoft stuff." Covered quite a lot from platform features, to T-SQL, data types and reporting services.
Talked about new data auditing features, but then mentioned the four common fields that everyone adds to a table (CreatedBy, CreatedDate, ModifiedBy, ModifiedDate) but didn't really talk about how the two work together, or if the new data auditing features is a standardization of that classic DBA paradigm. Auto Synchronization of data with a SQL Server Compact Edition database. Cool!
Definitely some cool new T-SQL features, like the ability to pass in an entire table into a stored procedure. Would that really simplify writing bad code? FileStream Object Storage looks cool as a good alternative to binary blobs, with better management than just storing a path as a string in a table. Finally you can create and initialize a variable in one statement! Plus some new operators like +=, and the ability to insert multiple rows in one statement. Both of those are a long time coming. Intellisense!!! Thankfully the Intellisense improvements are with SQL Server Management Studio 2008, even if you're connecting to a 2005 Server. Very nice. There is of course more (like grouping sets), but some of that stuff is beyond me since SQL is not exactly my forte.
HierarchyID looks very much like an XML Data Document (especially with the methods), but it doesn't support moving to XML built in. Very strange. But for creating tree structures in your data, it looks very cool. Nasr concentrated on using it for organizational charts, but tree structures are a very common solution to a lot of programming problems. This simply creates first class support within T-SQL for a common database paradigm for a parent child relationship with an ParentID field.
WPF Demystified by Dave Bost: Best Quote - "Where are the designers? It's hard to tell, I don't see a turtleneck or a beret."
WPF in and of itself is a huge topic, so you're not going to cover it in an hour. So this was treated more as a showcase of what WPF can do. He interestingly focused on developer vs. designer, and how that is handled by WPF and new technologies (no more battleship gray). Focused, once again, on the fact that .NET 3.0 runs off of the .NET 2.0 runtime (in other words... there were additions... but not changes). Important note... the .NET 3.5 SP1 requires .NET 2.0 SP1 runtime. You cannot run 3.5 SP1 applications on the 2.0 standard runtime (without the service pack).
Unfortunately... this talk wasn't as in depth as I'd hoped. It really was the same overview presentation I'd seen many times. Here's XAML... Windows Forms isn't dead... etc. There is Expression Design, Blend and Web (which replaces Frontpage... Frontpage is Dead!). There is also Expression Media. Lots more tools in that family than I was aware of (with virtualization so they can run on Mac). Best question: "Is this Standards Based, or Standards Compliant?" Excellent spin! I always ask about SVG because XAML looks so similar to SVG. Not surprisingly, nobody at Microsoft seems to realize (or is willing to admit) that XAML was invented 10 years ago and was called SVG.
He shows some cool sample XBAP applications on the internet that demonstrate the power of XAML. The coolest was the British Library's "Turning the Pages". You can use it to virtually read their collection of precious old books which are normally under glass and unavailable to regular library visitors. There is also Vertigo's Family.Show which is a XAML application to visually represent a family tree. And of course, don't forget Scott Hanselman's Baby Smash which is great for keeping your kids out of trouble when they start pounding on your keyboard.
So how do you start? Learn XAML first, and then find out what parts of XAML work in WPF and in Silverlight. The goal by Microsoft is to make Silverlight and WPF more similar. Its not always possible because the browser environment restricts us in many ways. Then he worked through one of MSDN's Virtual Labs, which you can do to also.
Of course, Expression Blend doesn't have built in integration with source code control. Supposedly it's coming, but I consider that a must have if you want designers and developers to work together well. I also don't like how the XAML designer in Visual Studio is so pared down. It forces developers (who don't have a designer on staff) to buy two applications. Doesn't Microsoft realize that developers are cheap?!
ADO.NET Entity Framework with Fakher Halim:
This guy has his presentation almost way too prepared. He might as well have been reading off of a teleprompter. Maybe not good for this type of group. Actually, we never really got to see much code at all. He mostly explained why we should be using something like the Entity Framework. For God's sake, this guy is drawing a keyboard and mouse on the white board! I wish they had brought somebody in to actually talk about the Entity Framework. This dude is a PhD, talking at such a high level that it's useless. A wasted hour. I feel sorry for this guy because he's got to watch people file out one by one.
As it turns out, this guy was also sitting in the front row of the WPF talk I mentioned earlier, and he kept on asking questions that were totally off topic and taking us away from what were were all there to talk about. He kept complaining that forms weren't looking like forms any more, and that we were breaking the old fashioned user experience paradigm. At some point, old dogs have to learn new tricks.
ADO.NET Data Services with Jim Fiorato:
This is all new to .NET 3.5 SP1 (and used to be called Project Astoria). It's a pattern to present data on the web in a way much simpler than SOAP. The results of data calls in web services are definitely not human readable. So web services are great, but they're not easy to consume unless you're in Visual Studio and possibly Java. This fits really well with the new MVC and JSON technologies coming around.
Data Services can either return data in an ATOM format or in a JSON format for use in Javascript. I'd never really seen JSON before, but he had an example of a data structure in JSON... and it's super readable. This all fits very well with the newer paradigm of RESTful services coming around. I'm going to the REST presentation later, so this will bookend very well with that.
This has not been a good afternoon for presentations. This guy has a Mac Book, and for some reason couldn't get it to work with the projector. So they had to bring in another laptop, and get Virtual PC installed... and well... the presentation isn't as good as it could have been.
Once he finally got everything up and running, he basically created an Entity Framework project and exposed it value a WCF service using ADO.NET Data Services. Essentially all this does it allows you to translate a URL into a LINQ query seamlessly. He spent half the time just typing URL's into a web browser and showing the results. No code for parsing the URL, or any code written. All that query string functionality comes built in out of the box.
The idea of a query interceptor was pretty cool, in that you can now perform extra logic before the query takes place and then modify the query based on that logic. For instance, you can modify a GET to only return data based on someone's permissions. There was an excellent question on Transaction support. For this model, there is no real support for Transactions. At that point, you are best going to full blown Web Services. This is great really only for fast read only data access.
Rest and JSON using WCF and ADO.NET Data Services with Larry Clarkin: Best Quote - "You can explain any software concept using Star Trek. After all, Capt. Kirk was the first blogger." It's tied with "The new Hello World is - Let's build a blog!"
We had low expectations to begin with since he came into the room and said "Well, I haven't finished my presentation yet." Way to represent Microsoft Larry! And true to form, he actually started out by not talking about REST and JSON, but instead started talking about photography... specifically showing Sea Dragon. Looked pretty cool. Deep Zoom is actually part of this, and is built into Silverlight. It is similar to Google Maps in that it delivers the different pieces of resolution in tiles, but it is much smoother. It might actually use the new JPEG 2000 in order to do part of the render. He also showed Photosynth (which I hadn't heard about). It allows you to splice together different angles of a location, and using the EXIF data out of the picture along with spatial recognition, it creates a 3D scene. One note that Larry mentioned is that you shouldn't use cropped photos, because the focal length is not synced with the result of the crop, and that screws up the software. Finally he showed AutoCollage, which loads a whole slew of photos and tries to auto create a collage based on what the software thinks is interesting.
So this ended up being a much more overview look at REST (Representational State Transfer) and JSON (Javascript Object Notation), and even some old school (at least in the .NET time frame) serialization. Of course, I remember writing MFC serialization code in C++. He started by showing what the XML Serializer will do for you out of the box... which has been available since .NET 1.0. I do think he spent too much time talking about existing technologies, when the topic was supposed to be REST and JSON. Though the attributes you can apply to the classes to control XML Serialization also apply to REST serialization since REST is still XML, though much simpler than SOAP. Is REST better than SOAP? REST is much simpler than SOAP, but SOAP has more features for transactions and such.
Why JSON? Well for one, it avoids the angle bracket tax. However, its also great for use with Javascript since all parsers know how to deal with JSON. After all, it's called Javascript Object Notation. So there is no need to parse the data on the client side, so application development is faster and easier. It's also faster to run on the client running Javascript. But don't use JSON for a thick client or for Server-Server communication. For that, you ought to be using XML (through SOAP or REST).
Then he showed some code on how to deliver JSON through a WCF service. Overall though, he gave a great overview presentation.