July ended with an awesome time at techready! Visual Studio Orcas Beta 2 is already out. With new features of .NET 3.5 already integrated into the new studio, it's going to be super exciting to develop applications based on LINQ framwork. Since I am not supposed to disclose much about techready as it's an internal thing for MSFT's. All I can say is developers should remain tuned to the nextGen revolution of technologies. I can certainly talk about certain aspects of techready though, which are specific to technology like Studio Orcas and Server 2008. It was good fun to attend an ASP.NET session conducted by Scott Guthrie and Windows Server 2008 kernel enhancement session conducted by David Solomon and Mark Russonovich. All I can say is that MS rocks!!! There were also insights provided on SoftGrid Application Virtualization platform and the kind of super duper things that are happening around Software Virtualization. There will probably dawn a day when one wouldn't need to install applications, it will follow the plug and play capability that most hardware today enjoy.
One of the newest features of .NET 3.5 is LINQ - Language Integrated Query. The next gen technology will provide the ability to filter, query, enumerate and project data using query syntax defined in LINQ enabled languages. These LINQ enabled languages essentially make use of extension methods that allow making successive calls to an object while efficiently concealing the underlying complexity. It would be interesting to know that what lies at the core of LINQ enabled data sources is the IQueryable<T> / IOrderedQueryable<T> and IEnumerable interfaces! At the base the major chunk of the work is done inside the CreateQuery and the GetEnumerator methods of these interfaces respectively. I would be wrting more about how to implement the IQueryable in my next post. So stay tuned!
Apart from that other interesting experiences cover buying MS Zune. I am quite excited about my new Zune....though I faced some initial issues while getting started....it's an awesome device, with wireless capabilities built in. Storing and sharing music can't get easier....actually it CAN!!! Soon Zune 2.0 will come out and what is simple today will get even more simple, easier , fast and elegant! So keep a look a look out for that as well!
Cheers!!!