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DevDays – Whidbey

I attented Microsoft DevDays 2004 on Tuesday over in Atlanta, GA and I must say I am really quite impressed with the everything I saw there.  The day started out like it was going to be a very high level overview of how to do this and that but after about the first 3 slides, it turned into exactly what I was looking for.  I chose the “Smart Client” track which basically explained how to create applications that are as easy to deploy and maintain as web applications but have the rich user interface and power of a traditional fat client application.  After seeing what they showed us, I must say that smart clients will be the way of the future.  I’m planning on doing more exploration into smart clients on my own and I will make posts on TheSpoke with any interesting information or tips/tricks I run into along the way.  But now the for main reason for this post….Whidbey.

If you haven’t heard of Whidbey, it is Visual Studio .NET 2005 and it is going to be one of the greatest IDEs known to man for .NET development.  I haven’t had a chance to install the Alpha build I got from DevDays but from the 1 and a half hour presentation at the DevDays closing keynote, I can honestly say that I could not have been more impressed with what is already added in this alpha version.  It’s not really stable and that’s what you expect from an alpha build, but it does have a good number of the new features added in and working as I type this.  I’m going to be posting each of these features and how they work and why I think they are wonderful as I have time to try them myself.  But to get you interested, here are a couple of the more impressive features:

* Master Pages – Site wide templates for ASP.NET websites enforced by VS.NET

* Code completion like you’ve never seen it before (you’ll just have to wait for the blog on this one)

* Automation everywhere (want a login box here? just drag and drop it onto the form because VS.NET has it prebuilt and will take care of everything for you)

* Personalization (if you don’t like the layout of the site then change it and the site will remember it automatically with NO CODE from the developer)

Plus a ton more…hopefully next week I will be able to find time to start blogging again and start getting some of the material I promised online.  Until then, thanks for reading and don’t forget to check back here in a couple of days.