Fairly Symmetrical

So I'm here at DevDays 2004 in Austin. I probably would be enjoying myself more if I weren't sick, but oh well.

The rest of this post is in the Extended portion, so those of you who don't care can skip it. :)

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The keynote hit a couple of topics I've had no exposure to (BizTalk and InfoPath), but whuch sounded useful in the right circumstances. Obviously everyone at previous DevDays has been very excited about Whitehorse. From working (in previous lives) with Rose models and a few less-capable modeling tools (including Visio), it does seem like Whitehorse will be very cool to work with. It didn't sound like it really brought any new revolutionary capabilities with it, so much as it took current capabilities to their logical conclusions in terms of power and usability -- the ability to write code and have the model constantly synchronizing, or vice versa, for instance.

The last part of the keynote was concerned with security and finally with upcoming technologies from Microsoft. XP Service Pack 2 sounds very much like Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into not only improving security, but doing so in a way that is much easier to use (and more secure by default) than had been the case previously. I'm sure there will be a certain amount of pain for a lot of application vendors in getting their apps to work in XPSP2, but I think it's well worth it. Not only the firewall is being improved: there is a new attachment API for both Windows/MSN Messenger and Outlook Express to protect from malicious attachments and allow antivirus applications to hook in in an approved manner.

The Smart Client track is interesting. Microsoft is really pushing this "smart client" idea, where clients need only be occasionally connected, but maintain virtually full functionality all the time -- for instance, Outlook 2003 is a reasonable example of this. The expectation is that applications will often need to run on highly mobile devices that can't guarantee network quality or even connectivity. This is probably a smart bet to make; even with the rapid adoption of Wi-Fi, there are still places and times where the network isn't available. (For instance, for some reason there's no wireless access here at DevDays, so I'm blogging in SharpMT, which will upload the post later when I do have a connection.)

The extent to which Microsoft has bought into the Patterns ideology is also very interesting. I think I've heard the word "pattern" a dozen times so far, and I'm only 15 minutes into the first session after the keynote. It makes a lot of sense -- any company which produces as much sample source code, in as many languages, as Microsoft has to be interested in ways in which to abstract those samples -- but it is interesting nonetheless.