PDC Sessions

http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Schedule/Sessions

Silverlight Session Placeholder

Joe Stegman

@Ian2: Whoever designed that web page should be taken outside and shot.   OK that's a little OTT, but really it's a huge lists of sessions, would have been nice if it used my whole screen rather than miniscule list box with scroller!!

@Ian2:I don't think silverlight 5 is out of the question, with RTW at MIX. It would be pretty much what they have been doing since the beginning.

If there is going to be any tablet info for Windows 7, this will be where it shows up.

The tablet thing is a little odd, not sure it would be a Silverlight specific announcement though? (I would buy one if it was!)

If I could only pick two sessions, it'd have to be these:

• Anders Hejlsberg: The Future of C# and Visual Basic
• Bart De Smet: LINQ, Take Two – Realizing the LINQ to Everything Dream

The C#/VB session is a given, it's what most of us write programs in for .NET and it's everywhere; changes to these languages can change everything about how we program.

The LINQ session should also be pretty good, although perhaps a lot about rehashing things. LINQ solved the "impedence mismatch" between the different triangular (XML/XSLT/XPath), rectangular (RDBMS/SQL) and circular (in-memory object graphs) data but for circular, in-memory queries, the performance mismatch between LINQ to Objects and imperative old-school code remains in effect, even though monadic comprehensions have huge potential for optimization. I hope the PL guys have some thoughts on that as it sticks out like a sore thumb.

@PerfectPhase: another serious problem of that list is that you can not get a direct link to a specific session, really frustrating

@ Felix9. You can get a direct link to a session by clicking the ICS icon either on the schedule or sessions view.  If there is not a time, those sessions will be released Thursday morning, en mass. Hope this helps.

the ICS icon points to an .ICS file which is not what I want, I just want to send a link of a web page about one session then say: hey look this, interesting huh, blah blah blah. and he can also navigate to other sessions or pdc pages from there.

now I can only send others the link of the list then tell him the category and session name and ask him to find that session in a huge list by himself, duh.

Yep, definitely interested in the C#/VB and LINQ sessions and the F# session as well. The biggest frustration I've had with using F# together with C# and .NET projects and libraries is that the various "databinding/mapping/serialization/etc." systems in the various MS .NET frameworks (mapping in LINQ to SQL/EF, model binding in ASP.NET MVC, serialization in WCF, etc etc etc) all seem to assume mutable properties and default constructors. It would be great to either have ORM (RRM?)/services/whatever frameworks designed for F#, or a nice package of adapters etc. Of course I'm having to create some of the latter myself ...

oh and Silverlight for iPhone makes little sense, but Silverlight for Android makes a lot of sense. The time's about right to start talking SL5 too.

Silverlight for Android had not occurred to me, that would really put the cat among the pigeons.

Suspect SL4 tech preview for WP7 or SL5 for desktop .. should be interesting.

@Ian2:I think it would be silly to keep WP7 a version behind the desktop. At some point, they need to be in sync.

Native Silverlight hardware?

• Silverlight TV (Apple/Google TV Box)
• Silverlight Watches (OK, unlikely)
• Silverlight / BING based Sat Nav?

By the way. I see there's a bunch of new apps based on Metro Drummer on your (Ian's) site.
Have you tried making any videos of them yet?

8 hours ago, Ian2 wrote

Native Silverlight hardware?

• Silverlight TV (Apple/Google TV Box)
• Silverlight Watches (OK, unlikely)
• Silverlight / BING based Sat Nav?

@dentaku:I had a go but I don't really have the equipment and wasn't happy with the results.  Will try again when I get some time.  Off to PDC tonight so will probably be when I get back now.

maybe the most 'revolutionary/radical' change on the SL front could be the LiveLabs Volta striking back, something like 'develop in Silverlight 5 and deploy in HTML 5/ECMAScript 5'.

I was thinking about this when I saw the summery of Erik Meijer's recent talk on Wintellect's Devscovery:
https://www.devscovery.com/Sessions/Detail/Redmond%202010/2/2

the most important problems of the idea 'compile SL app into HTML/JS' is that SL have many builtin features which may not available in HTML/JS, like video decoders, now HTML5 has builtin video capabilities as well, and Canvas for 2D, and there are also offline storage apis for JS in some browsers, everything are evolving rapidly, maybe at some point we can really see that happens.

but such an annoucement will definitely feature Erik on the stage, so its unlikely for this PDC, huh

@contextfree:  Was wondering, if you used the POCO and T4 support in EF4 you could probably make it build a F# friendly set of immutable Entities, the ObjectContext could then track their state using Snapshots rather than proxies which should work. 

@CKurt: Actually, I think Silverlight for XBox is very plausible.  In fact, I blogged about that very subject last night (among other PDC predictions). 

And I think Silverlight 5 Beta is a very good possibility.

I don't think Silverlight for Android Phone will be announced as it will steal WP7's thunder quite a bit.  I don't see Silverlight appearing on any ARM processors outside of the Windows & Symbian brands for awhile.  An x86 Android tablet on the other hand...