If you are having trouble with your Vista beta 1 (see my note on it here) that you received from the PDC, Microsoft sent this note around in an email regarding the PDC:

Windows Vista Product Keys - some people have experienced difficulties with activating the Windows Vista builds distributed at the PDC, due to an error in the product key that was handed out. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently replicating the following updated keys to the activation servers; this process should be complete within the next 24 hours. { Note: updated keys are in the email }

I have to give Microsoft credit for rapidly following up. The email was full of good info on product releases and betas, etc.

Far be it from me to complain ;^), but the product key for Vista Beta 1 did not unlock the product!!!

Seems that Microsoft had a lot of problems with "The Goods" that they distributed.

I noted on Brian Noyes' blog that he is thrilled with the modifications to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) airport.

Well, Brian, I spent a miserable 7 hours cooped up in a tiny terminal/gate prior to boarding a packed "red-eye" back from PDC in LA at LAX. The more I travel, the more I see the quality and service diminishing within the airline and airport system. If I have a realistic option to travel, other than fly, like taking the train to NY from DC, I prefer the alternative. Is it any wonder airlines are going out of business?

Great speakers at PDC

XQuery in SQL Server 2005. Best practices for developers - watch out for an XQuery with a false value in the where clause - you may not get back what you expect.

At the PDC, Microsoft talked about a host of new technologies, servers, and systems that will be rolling out in the next couple of months and years.

A reoccurring theme among some of these technologies and platforms is the integration of RSS. I have seen articles and now seeing this information at PDC, I am very much convinced that RSS will be the informational packaging used between business, services, peer-to-peer, etc., etc.

 

Power out in LA. No big woop!

I am attending the .NET Framework 2.0 - The Smart Client Perspective. Great stuff. This one is being presented by Rocky Lhotka and Billy Hollis. I highly recommend checking out any presentation these two guys do -- they have some great material and they are very good speakers. Anyway...

Rocky was discussing architectures, basically where the business and data objects on what tiers (client, back end server, etc.) and what type of applications those create (browser based, rich client, etc.), and he expressed an idea on something I and many others have obviously have thought about... Building a presentation tier/client that accepts both data and metadata.

The purpose of the metadata is to provide information to the UI so that controls...probably smart controls...can populate themselves and handle validation --- without having to know anything about the business rules. So, the client has no business object at all, it communicates (perhaps remotely) with the business layer.

The smart controls would get data to help populate things like combo box items, and just enough validation logic to assist the user in entering valid data and prohibiting invalid information. This system would allow the UI to "reconfigure itself" within bounds to adapt to a slightly different domain (different user roles, different but similar data sets).

We developed something similar to this for a VB6 application that used a custom web-services layer for communication. We not only handled the validation issue, but we also handled event operations. An example was the population of a tree control from the data, purely handled by the UI, but we had metadata that determined not only what events were available, but also what operations were available on a per-element basis. The UI interpreted the operation information by turning on or off menu items, or revealing or hiding controls - like buttons.

While this scheme could handle a host of validation issues, there were some business cases that could only be resolved by comparisons against various tables within the datastore. Therefore, when an input operation was made to the business layer, we had a return call that told the client whether the operation had succeeded, and if not, why it did not. Also, calls made via these operations might inform the UI to "refresh" its overall data-representation (repopulate the tree control, for instance) since the data may have changed. This refresh reference could apply to a single entity type or for the entire tree.

Rocky hinted that Billy Hollis was going to talk about an implementation of such a system that he had done.

So, I didn't make TechEd, but I'm on my way to Microsoft's PDC.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's going on, especially in the XQuery area. Michael Rys is giving the following presentation which I'm hoping to attend:

DAT405  SQL Server 2005: Deep Dive on XML and XQuery

You can find out more about PDC here. Sorry, it is already sold out.

Did you want to attend Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference? Too bad, it's sold out.