Non-SharePoint Stuff

TechEd has been a good opportunity to pop my head up out of the Sea of SharePoint and check out some of the interesting new/other technologies coming out from Microsoft. Since the conference this year has been not as SharePoint centric now that 2007 is an established product, there have been plenty of opportunities to have a look at all kinds of stuff. Here’s a quick overview of things I wouldn’t mind checking out in my free (ha! yeah, right) time.

• LINQ
  Extends the .NET framework for easy data query & transformation operations in a functional programming type approach. LINQ will be integrated into Visual Studio 2008, but you can use it now. I also found this very nifty LINQ to SharePoint provider on CodePlex that I will need to check out (could it be the end of having to manually compose CAML? Oh I hope so)!
• Dynamic Data Controls
  This ASP.NET library provides a set of web controls that bind to data sources and cut out a lot of the typical, repetitive drudgery of setting up a rich, data-driven web application with data listings, views, insert, update & delete operations & UI. And, even better, combine them with LINQ for some really simple, clean, maintainable code. We got a demo of the library that will be ready in the August ASP.NET futures download.
• WPF/XAML
  The Windows Presentation Foundation is a framework for developing rich applications using a declarative XML format (XAML) to control UI, and .NET managed code to handle the business logic/functionality. Having seen the demos, I think XAML is what XHTML should be! Well formed and with tons of functionality (like, *gasp* columns!). Better still, WPF applications will be able to work as web applications as well as Windows client applications.

Veerrry interesting… Is it especially geeky of me to contemplate chucking a sickie just so I can play around with new development technologies?