I’ve sent the past few days at Tulsa Tech Fest, a developer’s conference primarily targeted at enterprise and Microsoft developers. My focus at the show was to learn about .NET 3.5 and it’s new features and frameworks (primarily WPF ,LINQ ). I feel the need to warn that I’m some what of a skeptic with Microsoft stuff, partially because of previous bad experience and partially because I’m still a pretty strong mac and linux enthusiast.

C#

• Anonymous Types: cool, almost javascript like, I say almost because you can’t return them from a function or otherwise get them out of the scope of a single function.
• Static Type Inference: lazy man’s variable declarations, again, as they are now, not much use.
• Extension Mehods: awesome, the ability to extend functions (and I believe properties) to built in classes is extremely powerful and useful in a practical way. I’m looking forward to using this feature
• LINQ : A new way to deal with databases. The automatic database mapping and a cleaner look for building SQL queries, honestly I doubt this is going to change much, but it’s not a half bad feature.
• WPF : The big deal for me, hardware accelerated GUI comes to Windows (at last, after mac and linux).Expression seems to be pretty cool, the dedicated app for building interfaces (similar to mac’s interface builder), will hopefully drastically improve the appearance and form of Windows apps.

Other Observations

• Windows developers LOVE IntelliSense , something I didn’t expect since I usually leave it disabled. I got the impression that may of the developers couldn’t envision a world where you would program without it.
• Silverlight is a big deal at Microsoft and people seem to be getting genuinely excited about it, i still think Adobe’s dominance with Flash is too strong to challenge at this point, unless they’re willing to commit to decades of loss to get it’s acceptance up (like the Xbox project).

Tulsa Tech Fest was a blast and great opportunity to learn more about Microsoft platform development and the communities around them. Plus it’s hard to argue with a free conference with free food.

Update: sorry for all the edits, I’m experimenting with a beta version of ecto.