Monday, June 13, 2005
PDC: Day One
Yesterday was the first day of PDC. It all started with the Opening session early at 9.30 AM. Most of it was pretty formal stuff except for a presentation by Rafal Lucaweicki, where he outlined future technologies that will change the way developers work. As ever, his lecture was pretty interesting.
The most unfortunate thing about this event is that we have good speakers, talking on great topics BUT at the same time! We have four tracks running in parallel and first off for me was the Connected Systems track where Rafal gave an overview of what exactly is a connected system, and some brief information on Service Orientation. His vision of service oriented machines sounds very sleek, but may take a long time coming. Most of his description was pretty abstract in nature, and is a great topic to research on for us developers.
Connected Systems, as you would imagine, are based on Service Orientation. This is the new phrase we're hearing at this year's event ... every year there's something new being talked about it and this is pretty much it this time. SOA calls for a greater degree of independence of little modules of business processes so that we design our logic without worrying about other factors (for e.g, the type of database connectivity etc.)
Next on was Stepehen Forte with his lecture on Data-Driven Cahcing using SQL Server 2005. Most of this session turned out to be pretty ordinary except for Steve's antics and his jokes. He is a real animated character (like most Americans, I'm told). The only new thing I learned during this session was the introduction of DB Specific datasource controls in Whidbey along with the addition of SQLCacheDependency which allows us to define cache dependency based on changes to a certain database table (A much needed addition, I must add).
He didn't talk about Web Server Caching (mentioned on MSDN as a future enhancement in ASP.NET), instead he chose to talk on pretty much old stuff, OutputCachine and the Cache API.
I stuck around to take his third session, which was about XQuery in SQL Server 2005. The MS guys have added a brand new datatype, called XML to the db fields. This is testament to the fact what a huge success it has been, it is extensively used in Longhorn and its underlying technologies. We can now store xml directly in the database, in its own specialized field and query it using new ways called FLWOR (pronounced as 'flower') expressions, where F=FOR, L=LET, W=WHERE, O=ORDER BY and R=RETURN. These queries can be used in conjunction with traditional TSQL, which is pretty cool. We can output results as an XML datatype or a SQL scalar record. Moreover, we can manipulate data to output new XML using 'sqlcolumn:' and 'sqlvariable:' attributes. I'll post a link to his presentation as soon as I find one.
The new XML fields can be constrained by a schema, where can set conditions like allow only certain tags to be accepted or set limits on the attributes of those tags etc. Nice stuff.
More lies ahead on the second day of PDC, looking forward to that. My professor Saqib Ilyas will be delivering his lecture too, on Web Services. Will post tomorrow's details hopefully tomorrow :P!
The most unfortunate thing about this event is that we have good speakers, talking on great topics BUT at the same time! We have four tracks running in parallel and first off for me was the Connected Systems track where Rafal gave an overview of what exactly is a connected system, and some brief information on Service Orientation. His vision of service oriented machines sounds very sleek, but may take a long time coming. Most of his description was pretty abstract in nature, and is a great topic to research on for us developers.
Connected Systems, as you would imagine, are based on Service Orientation. This is the new phrase we're hearing at this year's event ... every year there's something new being talked about it and this is pretty much it this time. SOA calls for a greater degree of independence of little modules of business processes so that we design our logic without worrying about other factors (for e.g, the type of database connectivity etc.)
Next on was Stepehen Forte with his lecture on Data-Driven Cahcing using SQL Server 2005. Most of this session turned out to be pretty ordinary except for Steve's antics and his jokes. He is a real animated character (like most Americans, I'm told). The only new thing I learned during this session was the introduction of DB Specific datasource controls in Whidbey along with the addition of SQLCacheDependency which allows us to define cache dependency based on changes to a certain database table (A much needed addition, I must add).
He didn't talk about Web Server Caching (mentioned on MSDN as a future enhancement in ASP.NET), instead he chose to talk on pretty much old stuff, OutputCachine and the Cache API.
I stuck around to take his third session, which was about XQuery in SQL Server 2005. The MS guys have added a brand new datatype, called XML to the db fields. This is testament to the fact what a huge success it has been, it is extensively used in Longhorn and its underlying technologies. We can now store xml directly in the database, in its own specialized field and query it using new ways called FLWOR (pronounced as 'flower') expressions, where F=FOR, L=LET, W=WHERE, O=ORDER BY and R=RETURN. These queries can be used in conjunction with traditional TSQL, which is pretty cool. We can output results as an XML datatype or a SQL scalar record. Moreover, we can manipulate data to output new XML using 'sqlcolumn:' and 'sqlvariable:' attributes. I'll post a link to his presentation as soon as I find one.
The new XML fields can be constrained by a schema, where can set conditions like allow only certain tags to be accepted or set limits on the attributes of those tags etc. Nice stuff.
More lies ahead on the second day of PDC, looking forward to that. My professor Saqib Ilyas will be delivering his lecture too, on Web Services. Will post tomorrow's details hopefully tomorrow :P!
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