So the last day of PDC 2008 is over. The brain has been cooked for a few days…
This very day did not have any keynote and I kicked off with a session on the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint. I have note used this add-in since the first releases of it since I didn’t like it that much but had instead relied on manual packaging and deployment as well as STSDev. But after this I might think about moving over and try it out once again. During the session a basic site was built with some lists, event handlers and a Silverlight application using the new Charting controls.
Then I headed over to listen on the work on the Open Xml Formats SDK. Some nice demos of how you can merge, edit and create documents without using the Office clients. Some demos on how to integrate it to SharePoint was included. Version 1 is now available and based on the ECMA OOXML standard and version 2 will be available when Office 14 hits the street.
Next I sat down and tried out some more of Azure and Quadrant. The Quadrant tool is amazingly interesting and at the same time confusing – I wonder what it eventually will end in…
I ended the day with an introduction to F#. Really good session and Luca Bolognese explained it well by creating a real-world solution using F#. The syntax is really weird for me who is a natural-born-imperative-programmer, but I can see the usage for it and I hope that I can try it out in a project sometime. F# is currently available as a CTP but will RTM during 2009, and my guess that it will be installed with Visual Studio 2010.
PDC 2008 was a great experience and it will return to LA next year. I have had the fortune to meet some really smart people from Microsoft and from other companies. I will return home with a head full of new stuff that I need to dig into deeper and a bag full of merchandise. Now I just can’t wait to start working with all of this exciting stuff.
One thing I missed though was any “official” news on the Office 14 clients and SharePoint 14 platform.
Having one more day here in LA I will try to get some hours out in the sunlight instead of sitting inside and being a geek.
That’s all folks.