PDC 2008 Thoughts

Lots of interesting things from PDC 2008. Perhaps, before I list what I think is interesting I should say this it was great that I didn't have to troop to the west coast this year (I'm going to MIX instead) - all of the presentations were on the web so fast I felt like I was there.

Here, in no particular order, are the things that caught my attention:

• C# gets a BigInteger. Don't you just hate spending time writing something, knowing full well that eventually some else will write the same thing, and there's no reason to keep what you wrote? This isn't sour grapes, I'm glad to get a Microsoft version, and anything that reduces my code base is a good thing.
• Some other cool stuff in C#, but this looks to be a lot less ambitious than C# 3.0. I guess the dynamic stuff is pretty cool.
• ASP.NET gets some needed attention - all of these are super improvements.
  • More control of the generated HTML (I can't even begin to count the number of times I've had to write really crappy code to change the way ASP.NET generates HTML). I have my doubts this will get me everything I need, in fact, I think the ASP.NET page compiler needs some work as well.
  • ViewState is going to work the way is should have from the beginning: turn it off on the page, it's off, if a nested control needs it then it can turn it on.
  • The end of generated/mangled element ids. This alone will make CSS/jQuery much easier to use.
• ASP.NET MVC is in beta, but given what's happening with ASP.NET, is MVC going to be worth the effort? I've decided to write a new presentation layer for my blog so that I can post something more thoughtful about this later.
• Entity Framework vs. Linq to Sql. I know people have really strong opinions about this, but I honestly have a love/hate relationship with both. My biggest problem with almost everything MS does with the "data" parts .NET is that the tooling always has really egregious errors and design flaws that make building bigger systems (with more than a single developer) a real challenge. Incidentally, Typed DataSets were the same, the designer was a mess and the codegen was a giant pain with TFS. I don't want to just rant, but saving the visual layout of the EF designer in the XML model really screws up source control.