Last week, the DevDays were held in The Hague. I went there with all of my dev-collegues. Although we had seen a lot of stuff at the PDC back in november, there was plenty of new cool things to show. It was a pretty different experience from the other DevDays that I’d been to. First of all, we had no booth. That was a first. And, I had no talk to give. That was a first too. So, I could see any session I want, didn’t need to rush back to the booth in between sessions. Actually, I was much more enjoyable in general.
I saw a couple of Silverlight 3 sessions. There are some cool new features coming like H.264 and AAC support, 720p+ smooth streaming, 3D graphics, pixel shader, easing functions (animation effects), a Bitmap API, control skinning, bitmap caching. Deep linking and the ability to run a Silverlight application out of the browser. Read more about Silverlight 3 here. I really liked Mike Taulty’s fast paced style, doing lots of demo’s fairly quickly. I also liked the fact that he kept his demo’s small and simple. As he said at the beginning of his talk that was intentional. I too believe that if you’re introducing people to new concepts or new features, keep the demo’s as simple as possible. You probably have a crowd of pretty decent developers (given the fact that it’s the DevDays), they’ll think of ways of using there features in their own apps.
The ‘what’s new in WCF/WF 4.0’ session was good in terms of delivery. Aaron Skonnard did well, but … at the PDC I had been given the impression that WCF 4.0 had support for XAML-based services. And that proved to be only partially correct. It’s true if and only if you build a WF Service, that is a workflow exposed as a service. I was heavily (and visibly even: there was a customer who saw me shake my head and knew why) disappointed. It’d be so great if we had a XAML based WCF Service. That would alleviate us from the burden of config files. Although a lot of work has been done to simplify the config-files in WCF 4.0, having a XAML-based WCF Service would be even better. Way better I suppose. Because then we’d have compile-time checking of all the classes, interfaces used in the XAML file, just like WPF does. Anyway, the changes in WCF 4.0 are good, but I just expected more of it after what I heard at the PDC.