When It Rains It Pours

I’ve been catching up on all the news from the PDC today (I’m not there). It’s a bit of a shame all of this news has to stay bottled up and released all on one day, but I suppose it does make for an exciting event.

I’m stuck with real work for awhile, and won’t be able to jump into the excitement just yet. The following graph illustrates my backlog for technology research.

Here are some highlights of stuff to revisit some day.

Language integrated query, set, and transform operations (LINQ) are the kind of features you expect to see in a “fringe” language before reaching widespread acceptance, yet they appear to be headed for mainstream C# and VB.NET. Matt Warren has a nifty code sample posted, and Frans Brouma has an early reality check.

ASP.NET fans get their first look at Atlas today. ScottGu has a post “Atlas Unleashed” which describes some details and the development model for Atlas. It looks as if Microsoft will provide a JavaScript library to make the client side a bit easier, although I see a great deal of “getElementByID” calls in the samples, which isn’t the type of easy I wish for. Hopefully the team will keep blogging and getting information out, as some people seemed to feel they were mugged in a dark alley with the beta 2 release of ASP.NET 2.0.

Office 12 (screenshots here) will release with Vista. These two need to dance together better than the pairing of SQL Server and the CLR in terms of scheduling and binary dependencies. I’m a minimalist when it comes to the tools I use everyday, so toolbars with big icons have me immediately looking for the options menu. I’m more interested to hear about improvements in the areas I use everyday. Will Word let me post to a blog? Will Word do code formatting?

Microsoft gadgets bring Konfabulator type widgets to Vista. Some of the widgets are scary cool, like the ones that can run on the lid of a laptop.

Now back to the mundane…