I’m coming back from the 2nd Microsoft ISV CTO Summit up in Redmond (I blogged about the first one here). A good trip with worthwhile content. I’m not sure any of it was really new, but I did see some cool stuff:
Expression Blend
The tool for designers to design and build WPF projects. Definitely cool.
I had two questions for one of the presenters (Eric Zocher) afterwards: when will Visual Studio look as good as blend (e.g., Blend uses WPF and allows smooth scaling of its own UI). Answer: um, maybe never.
Since Blend is basically a developer tool (for designers) that can create and edit Visual Studio, does it integrate with TFS? Not yet.
Of course, these answers don’t take away from Blend at all (and certainly TFS will eventually come even though outsourced designers may get little value from that).
I’m no designer, but I’m looking forward to playing with it. Though they haven’t announced this part yet, I expect it will be made available through MSDN Maximal (or whatever they are calling it now) or through our Gold Certified ISV Competency.
WPF/E
This stuff is very cool. Actually, Scott Guthrie demoed the WPF/E Vista emulator that Savas recently linked to. The great thing here is the unification of the presentation story here. I won’t go further into the roadmap because it is never clear to me at these NDA events what is open knowledge and what requires the secret-squirrel decoder ring.
AJAX ASP.NET
I tracked this as a really good thing (to greatly simplify AJAX for .NET devs), but I hadn’t taken the time to look at it or the demos. It is really cool. Aside from all it can do, the coolest thing is how easy you can enable it for existing ASP.NET applications. I would have tried it out already (i.e., in our Digipede product), but I stayed out too late last night to get into it.
WinFx dead?
I had a chance to ask Scott Guthrie directly about whether the WinFx name change was an indication of the death of the managed Windows API (as I argued here). His response, basically, naaah. Just a marketing change. I still disagree, as long as the managed API rides atop Win32, it isn’t the actual Windows API. In this case the managed API is either dead or were waiting for Singularity.
Swag
These events always come with some swag. This time we got a strange floppy neoprene folder (for small laptops here) and what I think is a screen cleaning cloth (though looks like a compressible handkerchief).
Cheers, though, to Microsoft for not giving us a bunch of junk for the landfill — I include in this: lamps, USB speakers, travel clocks. Also, I think it is great that they didn’t give us a whole bunch of resource CDs, trials, betas, etc. Last time they did and these are mostly useless. Not for the content, but because we all already have this content in MSDN or available through other partner programs.
They did give us one useful thing, though: a Vista Ultimate DVD/license. Frankly, that is my kind of swag.