Day 3 of the PDC05 was the day that some details on Atlas were unveiled. Check-out Scott Guthrie's lengthy posts on the topic: Atlas Unleashed and Atlas Keynote Walkthrough. In the breakout session PRS420 "ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2)" Nikhil Kothari discussed the Atlas framework, how to package it into reusable blocks and how to use the server-side programming model (server controls) together with ASP.NET Atlas. The slides and demos are available for download from Nikhil's blog. Check also Dion Hinchcliffe's Blog for an excellent write-up on Atlas.
When looking at Microsoft's Virtual Earth site, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access e-mail client, and Start.com I think that Microsoft did a good job in packaging the different JavaScript libraries into ASP.NET Atlas. However all of this might be not be so easy to use given the amount of code to write and its complexity. This experience will probably be enhanced from now till RTM. Note that the version of ASP.NET Atlas that runs on top of beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 is still a technology preview and won't RTM until next year.
On day 3 I also practiced a number of hands-on labs on the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation. The labs on WPF and especially the one using Sparkle showed very good the power of XAML and Sparkle for creating compelling user interfaces. Sparkle gives you access to buttons, menus and controls and lets you create animations through the timeline functionality. Sparkle isn't yet publicly available. The crashes experienced while using it (caused by Ctrl-Z or Undo functionality) explain why. But the proctors promised me that they're working on these knonw-issues.
The last day of PDC was a light one with the fun session "WCF + WPF = Magic" delivered by Doug Purdy & Chris Sells. The demo they did to show the power of both foundations normally wouldn't take any longer than 20 or 25 minutes. But these guys managed to get it cover the whole session. I never realized that showing DataBinding in Avalon through Indigo could be so funny ;-)!
Chris Sells has a new book out on "Programming the Windows Presentation Foundation". You can order it here.
PDC05 was just another great PDC. Lots and lots of new technology and deep technical content during all the week. Looking forward to Windows Vista and Office 12 (Server)!
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