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Towards Developer Nirvana

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Day two of the Professional Developers’ Conference had Microsoft showing off new versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server.

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Codenamed Whidbey, Visual Studio was the first to be unwrapped. A lot of new features have made their way into this. These include

1. XML documentation, with the ability to add updates later on, both from Microsoft and others.



2. Improved debugging; edit and continue on a debug error is now back

3. Improved printing of projects.

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4. Automatic snap-on lines that align controls on a form, as they are brought near to each other

5. Auto-correct for spelling

Agent 008?





We met him at the breakfast table. South Indian Gentleman, with his nametag turned around (was it by accident or by design?). A bit of casual conversation later we asked the inevitable question. Where are you from? And the answer held the biggest surprise for all of us at the table, particularly those from Microsoft. Turns out that the Gentleman in question is an evangelist at Sun Microsystems! But what are you doing at a Microsoft event? " Just checking out what is happening and how the developers are reacting to it". Seems that this is not as uncommon as it may sound.

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6. New ASP.net login controls that eliminate the need for writing login code

7. Web page personalization built-in to ASP.Net

8. Automatic data sorting and paging in ASP.Net

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9. Location services get location information automatically into the application ( at this point it is not clear whether this feature is supported outside the United States. It is highly likely that it is not.

A major add-on is Whitehorse, a deployment-planning tool in Visual Studio that helps the developer map the applications components to the infrastructure policies in place. Whitehorse can take care of things like which part of the application can be or cannot be installed on which server.

These apart, the most significant improvement in Whidbey is the elimination of many lines of coding effort, particularly in coding for security. The presentation claimed upto 89% savings in terms of lines of code in specific instances, when compared to previous versions of visual studio. Web service security enhancements in the Indigo layer of Longhorn ( the next version of Windows) also help in reducing the coding effort.

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Another major focus area in Whidbey is the Tablet PC and mobile devices. Many new form factors and screen resolutions are supported, and the Tablet PC SDK is being updated. Camera support for mobile devices is also added. Picture taken by, say a camera cellphone can be included automatically in the application. Inking support also gets a major boost.

Whidbey is expected to be commercially available by the middle of 2004.

Oracle Vs Yukon?





As part of the delegate kit, you get a beta copy of Yukon. You also get a dvd containing the Oracle on Windows Technology Kit, including Oracle 9i Release 2 for Windows and Oracle 9i 64 bit.

Also in the exibition area of the conference are bright red bean bags sponsored by Oracle for visitors to relax in.

Obviously everything is fair in love and software marketing!

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Next on show was Yukon, the next version of SQL server. In Yukon, all services are now exposed as web services, and the .net framework is now integrated into Yukon. The first change you would notice in Yukon is the new start page, which lists the common tasks. Making the presentation, Gordon Mangione, asked the assembled developers for feedback on what else to be included in the start page. So, one may not have seen the final version of this as yet.

Another cool feature in Yukon is the ability to export reports to multiple formats, including Excel, Word and PDF. Not only that graphs can now be included in the reports, and creating the graphs in the first place is by simple drag and drop.

The biggest change in Yukon is its tighter integration with Visual studio. Now you can use Visual studio to program SQL server. Cross language debugging is also supported. In fact, Microsoft went as far as to ask the assembled developers to forget T-SQL, and instead use Visual studio languages (Transact SQL is used to write stored procedures in current versions of MS SQL server). Is this going to lead to a unification of the roles of the database developer and the application developer? One has to wait and see.

Krishna Kumar in Los Angeles, California, USA. The author traveled at the hospitality of Microsoft

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