Wednesday, June 15, 2005
PDC: Day Three
With the departure of Rafal, the only "great" speaker left was Clemens Vasters. I attended two of his sessions on Avalon and Indigo, both had brief intros to WinFX also. Clemens is a great speaker, he's from Germany but his english is excellent. Although, he claims to be closer to Indigo more than Avalon, but his work on one Avalon app where he designed an animated CD case using XAML was just beautiful. In his own words, he "could look at it all day!". This new vector-based graphics engine that powers Longhorn is quite wonderful actually. For the first time, we'll witness the wonders of 3D graphics in windows apps. The only downside is, that one has to know XAML in order to write effects making use of Avalon technology but I'm sure there will be designers available in time which will simplify the task considerably.
Clemen's other talk on Indigo was interesting as well. As it turns out, Indigo's services will be implemented over components. They have the ability to run separately from IIS even. A lot of stuff here was new to me ... but I'm sure I'll run into them in the near future.
The other talk was about ASP.NET 2.0 given by Goksin Baker. It started with Master Pages, which are a real nifty addition I must day ... will reduce the use of User Controls in some cases. Bascially, you place all your common content across your website like the (left navigation menu) in the master pahe as simple HTML, and the portions of page which will chanage on a page-by-page basis are represented by 'ContentPlaceHolders'. The control for this purpose is the control. All sub-pages will make use of controls to add content of their own to a specific place holder (distinguished by their ID, obviously). So, the actual page that is served on the web-server is a combination of the master page and the content page, which has filled the content place holder on the master page with its specific content.
Next on was Themes, which contains skins specified in '.skin' files. Skins are defined by defining styles of the different controls we'll be using on our website. This information will go into the .skin file, and for it to be applied ... it's parent Theme must be applied first (since Themes contain skins).
Besides this Goksin gave a brief insight into the 50 or so new controls added in 2.0. Some of them is pretty common stuff, already developed like LoginControl, CreateUserControl, FileUpload etc. but some were really interesting AutoCompile, Callback and Wizards. Looking forward to working with them.
It all ended with the closing ceremony late in the evening, where everyone gave a rousing farewell to Clemens and the rest of the speakers, thanking them for travelling to a place like Pakistan, and especially Karachi. I hope they'll be back next year.
All in all, PDC like before proved to be a great learning experience about what's hot and where technology is headed in the next few years, future areas of research and development and lots of new ideas.
Clemen's other talk on Indigo was interesting as well. As it turns out, Indigo's services will be implemented over components. They have the ability to run separately from IIS even. A lot of stuff here was new to me ... but I'm sure I'll run into them in the near future.
The other talk was about ASP.NET 2.0 given by Goksin Baker. It started with Master Pages, which are a real nifty addition I must day ... will reduce the use of User Controls in some cases. Bascially, you place all your common content across your website like the (left navigation menu) in the master pahe as simple HTML, and the portions of page which will chanage on a page-by-page basis are represented by 'ContentPlaceHolders'. The control for this purpose is the
Next on was Themes, which contains skins specified in '.skin' files. Skins are defined by defining styles of the different controls we'll be using on our website. This information will go into the .skin file, and for it to be applied ... it's parent Theme must be applied first (since Themes contain skins).
Besides this Goksin gave a brief insight into the 50 or so new controls added in 2.0. Some of them is pretty common stuff, already developed like LoginControl, CreateUserControl, FileUpload etc. but some were really interesting AutoCompile, Callback and Wizards. Looking forward to working with them.
It all ended with the closing ceremony late in the evening, where everyone gave a rousing farewell to Clemens and the rest of the speakers, thanking them for travelling to a place like Pakistan, and especially Karachi. I hope they'll be back next year.
All in all, PDC like before proved to be a great learning experience about what's hot and where technology is headed in the next few years, future areas of research and development and lots of new ideas.
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