Fire Hose Drinking Time

Well it's PDC time and time to have truck loads of emerging technologies thrown at us.

Shannon, Nick & John will be able to give us the view direct from LA, but so far some of the blogger geeks have kept me up to date.

The announcements that have caught my attention so far (and some of them we knew were coming, so they're not entirely new) are:

• Azure - "Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications".  Ok, we've heard all about cloud computing for quite a while, and this looks like a down payment on the promise.  The CTP is up now.
• The next Rosario CTP - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 - is up.  It's still just a VPC image, but we'll get this up and running soon.  The marketing dudes have had a field day with the hype - enough to make you puke : "Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 mark the next generation of developer tools from Microsoft. Designed to address the latest needs of developers, Visual Studio delivers key innovations in the following pillars:
  Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
  Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an organization and traditionally not every one of the roles has been an equal player in the process. Visual Studio Team System 2010 continues to build the platform for functional equality and shared commitment across an organization’s ALM process.
  Enabling emerging trends
  Every year the industry develops new technologies and new trends. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development and deployment.
  Inspiring developer delight
  Ever since the first release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has set the bar for developer productivity and flexibility. Visual Studio 2010 continues to deliver on the core developer experience by significantly improving upon it for roles involved with the software development process. .NET Framework 4.0 contains numerous improvements that make it easier to develop powerful and compelling applications.
  Riding the next generation platform wave
  Microsoft continues to invest in the market leading operating system, productivity application and server platforms to deliver increased customer value in these offerings. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 customers will have the tooling support and the platform support needed to create amazing solutions around these technologies.
• Windows 7 - our guys will get an alpha edition Tuesday
• Office 14
• C# 4.0 and beyond
• Oslo - more marketing hype : “Oslo” is the code name for our platform for model-driven applications. The goal of “Oslo” is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, a new language and tools.  It's all there on MSDN at the
Oslo Developer Center

I'm following jb's blog for some early highlights - and he's got articles about most  the above.  He's from Mindscape who are giving us awesome service for their WPF property grid (thanks Ivan).

App Arch Guide

J. D. Meirs and the patterns and practices team have release ver 2.0 of the P&P Application Architecture Guide book.  I've downloaded it, and it's on the reading list.