This post was written after the Teched was finished
What's new in .NET 2.0 for The Developer
Generics in the CLR 2.0
- both presented by Juval Lowy. Very interesting peak at the near future. If you don't know what generics are, you better start reading about it, because generics is the feature that will narrow the gap in performance between managed and unmanaged code.
BTW, for those who are asking why the edit and continue feature was not implemented in C#, opposed to VB.NET:
Juval let out a secret. He sits on a board which decides which features to add to the C# language and compiler.
Every attendant gets a number of points, and he can give any number of these points for any feature he believes is important. The features with the most points get implemented. The last time the board took a vote, the edit and continue feature got 0 points, which means it probably won't become implemented in the feature, unless a lot of pressure is applied by developers and clients.
Juval went on to demonstrating the difference between VB.NET and C#:
As opposed to VB.NET where a programmer typically starts coding away, then running and editing on the fly, in C# the developer spends most of the time thinking: maybe we should do it this way ... but then again maybe we should do it that way.
Although this is exaggerated of course, Juval's point was that disabling edit and continue leads to better design.
On the other hand, .NET is all about productivity.
What do you think?
XML with performance in mind
In a very good presentation, Yair Shivak presented the new XML XPath 2.0, which will give the XPath power with the performance of the 1.1 XmlReader
bottom line of presentation was: If you haven't been using XML in your applications yet, it's now the time to learn how, and in CLR 2.0 it will be even easier, and the performance will be much better too.
Scalability
presented by Clemens Vasters, this was an architectural talk about scalability and the different ways to scale an application, with examples from the real world such as how Hotmail, Google, Ebay and Amazon scale.