Live! from Orlando: “The cooler the code name, the more boring the final product name.”

I now know the dual purpose of bringing a laptop to a conference...not merely to stay in constant communication with the folks and environment you were seeking a break from, but to serve as a rare and welcome heat source. Coffee was nowhere to be found (probably reserved for the gold passport lounge) or else I would have been tempted to bathe in it. But I digress. [In all fairness to the conference organizers, coffee was available in the morning and evening, and attendees were advised to wear layers. For future reference, layers should be interpreted as "a parka."] On to conference content... Rich Turner opened the day with much ado about WinFX: the managed code programming model for Windows that is "largely language agnostic," allowing one to share code across applications. Turner shared such Microsoft insider tidbits such as: "The cooler the product code name, the more boring the final product name." Hence "Avalon" became WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and "Indigo" became WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). The WinFX components all followed the W [something] F pattern except for the Windows Workflow Foundation which couldn’t be called WWF for "obvious reasons," said Turner to an appreciative audience. (Even though I was a token female in the audience, the reference to the World Wrestling Federation didn’t go completely over my head.) Turner devoted most of his keynote to WPF, the Windows Presentation Foundation, used for developing "rich user experiences" with vector-based visual elements. Turner wowed the audience by resizing a form, demonstrating that all the form elements (buttons, listboxes, etc.) dynamically resized and maintained their relative positions (without code). The edges were smooth and images zoomed without that annoying pixel distortion. Turner demonstrated a fish-shaped command button liberated from rectangular confines. The technology includes reading features that reformats text into readable columns on the fly. The audience was clearly impressed with WPF, but when Turner tried to demonstrate WCF (the Windows Communication Foundation) we were rewarded with a brief glimpse of “beginning dump of physical memory” as the system encountered a fast and hard failure and required rebooting. I have to give it to Turner, though. He was smooth and just kept talking, cracking jokes with the audience. At one point he admitted, "This is a Frankenstein build, unfortunately." At another point he shifted some blame to the hardware, saying, "We’re crippled by hard drives..." Yet, Turner later showed he could be self (or Microsoft) deprecating as he asked the audience, "Is anyone still running Windows ME? No? Not one? Good." At another point he asked, "Did anyone get the VB6 to VB.NET wizard to work? (Laughter.) "Right. We learned that we shouldn’t provide you a tool that takes you 80% of the way and leaves you to figure out the 20% we got wrong." Of course from other comments he made, it seems that what they really learned was not to even attempt such wizards and provide nice white papers instead. And we know how helpful white papers are. WF (Workflow Framework) will provide architecture for sequential, state machine, and rules-driven workflow. Turner claims it is much more sophisticated than what is in Biztalk. Did I doze off during this one? My notes are limited. I'm thinking he must have had to rush through this one due to the aforementioned technical hurdle. Another technology that Rich Turner introduced was Infocard, which "replaces the username and password with cryptographically strong identity tokens." The purpose of Infocard is to "help users manage their digital identities and control to whom they're willing to exchange their identity information." Will the technology community be willing to entrust Microsoft with *all* their passwords given their security track record? (That's the question that was burning in my mind.) Yet, it seems like an interesting idea and certainly "password fatigue" is a growing problem with users. Betas and CTPs are available from MSDN. Today was rich with content, so I'll save the highlights of the SQL Server 2005 sessions, where Andrew Brust quipped, "Real-time business intelligence: until recently it was an oxymoron," for another blog. And then there is Russ Ryan's riveting talk, What Goes in the Sausage, sizzling with an explanation of "bug hell" and the powerful quote, "Superman just doesn't scale."