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TechEdNZ07 I originally meant to blog at least once a day during the event, but unfortunately I forgot to take the charger adapter for my Harrier (yeah, I know. I'm so embarrassed).
I didn't get back till Thursday night and I've spent a couple of days catching up on things (and sleep).
Since I obviously didn't attend every session any impressions I give of the dominant themes are naturally coloured by my own interests (although I will refrain from discussing young women with feathers on their heads, despite having found that very interesting).
One standout though not only from my own impressions but from talking to other developers was Silverlight: actually, I'm very pleased about this because it means that I'll be able to bring it up as an option without spending so much time trying to explain what it is. Of course the really cool stuff will come about a year from now (guessing wildly) when 1.1 becomes available.
I think Silverlight will also provide a pathway for some developers leading to WPF, which hasn't received the attention it deserves outside compulsive early adopters like yours truly. Partly I think this may be because Microsoft oversold the designer/developer split, leading many developers to assume that WPF wasn't for them. I expect this to change.
Another biggy was obviously Visual Studio 2008, although I was surprised that more wasn't being made of it.
Of the features that will actually be available when Visual Studio 2008 is released (so excluding Silverlight 1.1 and the ASP.NET Futures stuff), the most significant in terms of new language/platform functionality (as opposed to IDE improvements) is probably LINQ...we all tend to zoom in on LINQ to SQL but I hope people don't ignore the other flavours: I recently worked on adding support for some fairly complex new business rules to a commerce site, which involved writing predicate syntax queries against generic collections - a very cool feature of .NET 2, but it would all have been much, much easier with LINQ.
As regards LINQ to SQL, I do hope developers will see it not so much as Just Another ORM or Something The DBA Probably Won't Like and actually get a feel for the benefits of adding querying capabilities to the language itself (seeing beyond the database scenarios will help in this).
I'm curious as to what LINQ to XML might be able to bring to the interaction with POX web services, although in those cases where XML-RPC is used, it's so bloody awful I doubt anything would help (no doubt Darryl would say I was being cynical about that :-) ). But that's not the fault of LINQ.
The LinqDataSource for ASP.NET should complete the process of making drag-and-drop databinding for web applications backed by a database not only useful but also respectable. Being able to bind to ObjectDataSources and thence to TableAdapters in VS 2005 was a good step in this direction, but maintaining the relationship between database, adapter, datasource and control can be a source of pain and anguish (and cryptic error messages), so LinqDataSource is a very welcome addition.