• Grigori Melnik’s Blog
• Ajoy Krishnamoorthy’s Blog
• Microsoft P&P Team Site
• Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance
• P&P Team Room Video
• P&P Upcoming Releases
• Patterns and Practices Summit, November 3-7, 2008

ALM is the enterprise software development holy grail that IBM sought for years and invested in with the Rational tools. And although there is a tremendous value in prescriptive guidance in enterprise development models, there is a natural tension between the ALM crowd and Development as a Craft advocates. ALM, after all, is all about quantifying, measuring, predicting, planning, and economies of scale. Ironically, the kind of transparency and predictability called for by the minimalist Agile community is the same goal of ALM tooling offered by Big Blue and now by the new blue in Redmond.

How are Microsoft products staged to lay across the ALM model? The story today is mixed.

Your familiarity with these products may lead you to the same conclusion that many have already reached. The products in the stack currently fail to integrate cleanly and many provide only a starting taste of the functionality needed to realize the ALM vision. The story is obviously a little muddy today. But what's next?

Team System Rosario promises much improvement in the areas of tracking, design, quality assurance, and development. Significant bridges are also being started toward improving the release management story.

That won't do it all, of course. There are other pieces needed in the stack that will need to be freshened up including operational support tools. Microsoft is in hot pursuit of filling this gap with a host of products under the System Center umbrella of products. An actual helpdesk management system to displace the TechExcels and Remedys of the world is essential here.

The point is, MS has its sights set on a complete ALM story and are focusing on the midsize market, as Microsoft is so good at doing.

The Good

A focus on ALM in the Microsoft stack will have a tremendous impact on software development and delivery as we know it. Interoperable components in the pipeline will help bridge those gaps in midsize organizations that are typically only filled in large enterprises. Transparency will be ubiquitous.

Given the open nature of products being developed at MS these days, I have high hopes that these systems will truly be pluggable, so that if you want to bridge TFS to Remedy (for example) doing so is not rocket surgery. Web services are great, aren't they?

Concerns

There is a fine line between managing for predictability and 'command and control'. Tools like those in this stack are like guns. They can be used for good, but misuse is more common than not.

Tooling like this gives every non-tool Agilist out there genuine pause, and with good reason. The history of stewardship in complex models like this is less than stellar. That is to say, this tooling can provide huge value, and the basis for crushing souls. Let's be careful how we wield them.

Ward Bell is the Vice President of Product Management at IdeaBlade, which makes a .Net ORM product called DevForce. I met Ward and had a great discussion about ORM solutions and the evolving world of ORM and business tier technologies from MS and others.  Ward was good enough to share 30 minutes or so on the mics and you'll be hearing hi interview on the Elegant Code Cast in the weeks to come.

Platforms for SOA and Business Process Management: Comparing .NET and Java

This session looks at the worlds of Java and .Net while paying particular attention to the problems found in the ESB space. For example, how does each stack solve for workflow, rules, messaging, etc.

David Chappell has presented this session at the Java One conference, so it is important to remember that this information as been vetted through the Java community.

The basic message came down to this: Sun's stewardship of Java has promoted a fragmentation of technologies implemented in the Java language. This is great news for MS, who provides a unified stack of solutions in these spaces. The presenter asked the room this question, "Who believes that many solutions to workflow is good for the Java community?" About half the room went one way, the other half went another.

This gets to the core truth of the whole 1 vs. many solution discussion. Developers obviously love choice in their tools. After all, developers like to tinker and play with new technologies. Are these people also the ones most capable of making core platforms decisions for an enterprise? Typically not, because there is a bias toward new technology adoption over uniform practices.

As an example, the speaker told a story:

A Java developer asked him at a conference, "Help me construct an argument for my management to get permission for me to use Spring."

"Why do you want to use Spring?" asked David.

"Because it's cool, man," answered the developer. "I want to play with it because everyone knows it is a better way to write applications."

"You should be fired," he answered.

The point here is that executives and logical decision makers who choose platforms are interested in the long game, not what technology is cool. Can I depend on vendor support? Will the product continue to evolve and grow? These are the questions that yearn for an answer of a unified platform that can be depended on to carry the business forward.

David actually cited the Garter quote that predicts the ultimate death of the J2EE platform in favor of vendor supported Java platforms by IBM and Oracle. If that actually comes to fruition, it is fascinating not just for its technical implications, but also for the comment this makes on the ultimate viability of community-based technology stewardship.

Maybe this 3 legged race of IBM v. Oracle v. MS offers an easier soup to stir than one consisting of many open source implementations. Interesting talk. The most interesting part of that discussion is the notable absence of Sun as a player in the Java discussion. What a weird world.

My favorite quote of the session, "Model Driven Architecture is where the rubber meets the sky." Awesome. This comment on the huge abstraction of MDA feels right on.

FDD With Team System

Joel Semenuik provided a great overview of how his organization uses a formal Feature Driven Development process in conjunction with Scrum to deliver software. They do this using of Team System, which is no surprise since Joel is the co-author of Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System with Martin Danner.

I later learned from Martin, who used to be my office mate, that he and Joel are sponsoring a CodePlex project to aggregate open source process templates. What a nice idea! One stop shopping for process templates. I went hunting for it, but couldn't find it on CodePlex yet.

How I Became a Team Build Muscle Man

Steve Borg blew packing material all over me when the build failed in his demo. To be more precise, he had a build monitor application hooked to a fan that blew packing peanuts all over me when his build failed. Nice. It tok 10 minutes to get all the stic clingy bits off me.

Anyway, Steve ran through a demo on using Team Build for CI and for deployment. It was pretty good, although I think many of us could have done without the Richard Simmons imitation. :)

Deploying to IIS

Steve used the MSBuild tasks found in the SDC CodePlex project to deploy his web application to IIS on a deployment and smoke test machine.

Deploying SQL Data

Even better, he used Visual Studio 2008 DB Pro to create a DB sample data loading script and deployed that to his test DB server via the SDC task DeployDatabase. This ensures that his web tests will always be run against his app with the same underlying data. This makes writing and running automated web tests as part of your build MUCH easier.

Misc

Also in 2008, we get the new BuildStep task that we can use to emote nice messages into our build log to provide some debugging information. Handy.

Implement the ITask interface to create your own tasks BTW. This is easy, I've actually done it!

WIX (Windows Installer for XML) is an open source tool that MS actually wrote and released to CodePlex. It is a nice little tool that helps us build MSI installers for our application. This utility is actually used by MS to create their installers like the MS Office and other binaries. This is basically a Visual Studio project that works like MAKE, but better. You can use WIX to accomplish all kinds of things like prepping your target machine's dependencies as part of the MSI. Nice.

Source Control Branching Strategies

This was a great after-hours Birds of a Feather session that deserves a post of its own and will get it.

Here's the takeaway: I had no idea source control strategy was a religious issue or that one can see an organization's dysfunction in a source control system's folder structure.

Now I know.

Guess what? SilverLight, Visual Studio, Unified Communications, surface computing, and robots are going to save the earth. So will WCF.

Brian Harry on TFS Now and Future

This was a great session. I know we are all tired of hearing it, but Rosario really is the release of TFS that will be the ONE. We are all struggling with Work Items and being able to manage our work the way we actually think of our work.

The one question I posed was simply how may an organization manage one single backlog of work within TFS and parse out that work to separate teams? The answer is that for right now, there isn't a good story here. I will be blogging later in the summer about how I am solving for this in our organization.

Open Q&A on TFS - Jeff Levinson

Jeff is a Team System MVP and trainer and consultant for NW Cadence. He talked people through a lot of the typical questions that get asked soon after you install TFS in your organization.

1. What source control branching model makes sense for me?
2. How can I customize my work items?
3. What's in the service packs?
4. How should I deploy for my build environments?

You get the idea. Here are some likeable nuggets I took away from this session.

• If you are installing TFS into an organization with fewer than 500 active developers, install it all on one box.
  
  I have installed on one machine for simplicity's sake and recommend the same model , but I had no idea the scalability of that model went as high as 500. Jeff claims that this kind of load will only flutter the CPU. Bear in mind, though: This is NOT regarding the build machine. Build machines need to be separate and preferably virtual.
  
• Microsoft will be paying closer attention to X in Rosario. X can equal any of these things:
  • Project server integration
  • Portfolio server integration
  • Query-able link control in work items
  • Tooling for testers, and that doesn't mean test tools for developers.

Application Lifecycle Management Panel Discussion

An entire stage of Team System MVPs, discussing Application Lifecycle Management. Rich Hundhausen, Jeff Levinson, Mike Azocar, Steve Borg, Jeff Beehler,  Mickey Gousset, and several others.

This is about ALM which includes all phases of the lifecycle, so how are we helped by rapid delivery.

I only asked one question of the panel. "What's the view forward for integrating the entire ownership lifecycle? Don't we really need tooling like support in TFS for System Center to get where you are all talking about?"

Answer: It turns out that MS is solving for different phases of the overall ALM problem at different phases with different tools. TFS for developers, System Center for I.T., Project and Portfolio Server for the business folks. What ties it all together? Nothing yet. Maybe BizTalk will do the trick, eh? Right.

Scrum-tastic Process Template

Presented by, Mike Azocar, the author and project manager of the actual CodePlex project for the Light Weight Scrum Process Template for Team System (whew).

I am particularly interested in this work because of the aforementioned focus I have on customizing the Scrum process template from Conchango.

Nuggets:

• An interactive system can never be fully specified - Wagner's Law
• Scrum is appealing to many organizations because it is:
  • Simple
  • Free
  • Transparent
  • Common sense
• "No one runs beyond 3 or 4 sprints before changing their out-of-the-box process template." - Mike

Lastly

Keep a watch on this page, which hosts videos from the Tech Ed floor.

Oh, and I met Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks. I told him it was sort of like meeting Madonna. He asked me not to follow him into the bathroom.

One recurring theme in that feedback has been around domain driven design, so among our other criteria we’ve put together an advisory council which includes some members with notable credentials in that area.

Eric Evans - http://www.domainlanguage.com/about/ericevans.html
Stephen Forte - http://www.stephenforte.net/
Martin Fowler - http://martinfowler.com/
Pavel Hruby - http://www.phruby.com/
Jimmy Nilsson - http://jimmynilsson.com/

Yes... I had to take a second look myself. That's an impressive list I say!

Its just words on a web page at this point, but I think this speaks loud and clear that MS is listening to all the valuable constructive criticism that has been given from the community. I commend the Data Programmability team for making such a great move, but mostly all those who have stepped up to provide their insight.

Along with this announcement, Danny is also requesting that folks continue to keep providing feedback.

Frickin' sweet!]]> http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/03/data-programmability-advisory-council/feed/ 0 http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-future-of-net http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:17:40 +0000 Jan Van Ryswyck http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/ That's the title of the latest .NET Rocks episode. No big deal, just one of the better podcast episodes out there. Microsoft, are you listening? Maybe you should put your chairman on a stage on one of your next big developer conferences, screaming out maintainability, maintainability, maintainability! Let the ASP.NET MVC framework be your first big success and your guide on the path for providing us developers some tools and most important, some patterns & practices for creating more maintainable software.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development. Additionally it introduces the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which simplify data access code in applications by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any data source and enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements."

IF YOU HAVE INSTALLED SILVERLIGHT TOOLS make sure you remove them, and make sure you also remove KB949325. See Hanselman, ScottGu or here.

Read more on MSDN, ScottGu and Somasegar

There are over 350 people registered for the developer track already. Come on down. Register here.

On a related note, I heard some rumblings that some future releases (such as v4.0 Asp.Net) will ship with all the unit tests!

One recurring theme in that feedback has been around domain driven design, so among our other criteria we’ve put together an advisory council which includes some members with notable credentials in that area.

Eric Evans - http://www.domainlanguage.com/about/ericevans.html
Stephen Forte - http://www.stephenforte.net/
Martin Fowler - http://martinfowler.com/
Pavel Hruby - http://www.phruby.com/
Jimmy Nilsson - http://jimmynilsson.com/

Yes... I had to take a second look myself. That's an impressive list I say!

Its just words on a web page at this point, but I think this speaks loud and clear that MS is listening to all the valuable constructive criticism that has been given from the community. I commend the Data Programmability team for making such a great move, but mostly all those who have stepped up to provide their insight.

Along with this announcement, Danny is also requesting that folks continue to keep providing feedback.

Frickin' sweet!]]> http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/03/data-programmability-advisory-council/feed/ 0 http://elegantcode.com Tue, 15 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://elegantcode.com/2008/09/02/code-cast-13-microsoft-patterns-and-practices/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=code-cast-13-microsoft-patterns-and-practices http://elegantcode.com/2008/09/02/code-cast-13-microsoft-patterns-and-practices/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:14:00 +0000 David Starr http://elegantcode.com/2008/09/02/code-cast-13-microsoft-patterns-and-practices/ Chris and David were lucky enough to sit down (okay, it was a conference call) with Grigori Melnik and Ajoy Krishnamoorthy from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices. Grigori and Ajoy covered a wide range of topics including Agile development practices within P&P, what P&P has to offer the community, and forthcoming products from the team. Show Links

• Grigori Melnik’s Blog
• Ajoy Krishnamoorthy’s Blog
• Microsoft P&P Team Site
• Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance
• P&P Team Room Video
• P&P Upcoming Releases
• Patterns and Practices Summit, November 3-7, 2008

ALM is the enterprise software development holy grail that IBM sought for years and invested in with the Rational tools. And although there is a tremendous value in prescriptive guidance in enterprise development models, there is a natural tension between the ALM crowd and Development as a Craft advocates. ALM, after all, is all about quantifying, measuring, predicting, planning, and economies of scale. Ironically, the kind of transparency and predictability called for by the minimalist Agile community is the same goal of ALM tooling offered by Big Blue and now by the new blue in Redmond.

How are Microsoft products staged to lay across the ALM model? The story today is mixed.

Your familiarity with these products may lead you to the same conclusion that many have already reached. The products in the stack currently fail to integrate cleanly and many provide only a starting taste of the functionality needed to realize the ALM vision. The story is obviously a little muddy today. But what's next?

Team System Rosario promises much improvement in the areas of tracking, design, quality assurance, and development. Significant bridges are also being started toward improving the release management story.

That won't do it all, of course. There are other pieces needed in the stack that will need to be freshened up including operational support tools. Microsoft is in hot pursuit of filling this gap with a host of products under the System Center umbrella of products. An actual helpdesk management system to displace the TechExcels and Remedys of the world is essential here.

The point is, MS has its sights set on a complete ALM story and are focusing on the midsize market, as Microsoft is so good at doing.

The Good

A focus on ALM in the Microsoft stack will have a tremendous impact on software development and delivery as we know it. Interoperable components in the pipeline will help bridge those gaps in midsize organizations that are typically only filled in large enterprises. Transparency will be ubiquitous.

Given the open nature of products being developed at MS these days, I have high hopes that these systems will truly be pluggable, so that if you want to bridge TFS to Remedy (for example) doing so is not rocket surgery. Web services are great, aren't they?

Concerns

There is a fine line between managing for predictability and 'command and control'. Tools like those in this stack are like guns. They can be used for good, but misuse is more common than not.

Tooling like this gives every non-tool Agilist out there genuine pause, and with good reason. The history of stewardship in complex models like this is less than stellar. That is to say, this tooling can provide huge value, and the basis for crushing souls. Let's be careful how we wield them.

Ward Bell is the Vice President of Product Management at IdeaBlade, which makes a .Net ORM product called DevForce. I met Ward and had a great discussion about ORM solutions and the evolving world of ORM and business tier technologies from MS and others.  Ward was good enough to share 30 minutes or so on the mics and you'll be hearing hi interview on the Elegant Code Cast in the weeks to come.

Platforms for SOA and Business Process Management: Comparing .NET and Java

This session looks at the worlds of Java and .Net while paying particular attention to the problems found in the ESB space. For example, how does each stack solve for workflow, rules, messaging, etc.

David Chappell has presented this session at the Java One conference, so it is important to remember that this information as been vetted through the Java community.

The basic message came down to this: Sun's stewardship of Java has promoted a fragmentation of technologies implemented in the Java language. This is great news for MS, who provides a unified stack of solutions in these spaces. The presenter asked the room this question, "Who believes that many solutions to workflow is good for the Java community?" About half the room went one way, the other half went another.

This gets to the core truth of the whole 1 vs. many solution discussion. Developers obviously love choice in their tools. After all, developers like to tinker and play with new technologies. Are these people also the ones most capable of making core platforms decisions for an enterprise? Typically not, because there is a bias toward new technology adoption over uniform practices.

As an example, the speaker told a story:

A Java developer asked him at a conference, "Help me construct an argument for my management to get permission for me to use Spring."

"Why do you want to use Spring?" asked David.

"Because it's cool, man," answered the developer. "I want to play with it because everyone knows it is a better way to write applications."

"You should be fired," he answered.

The point here is that executives and logical decision makers who choose platforms are interested in the long game, not what technology is cool. Can I depend on vendor support? Will the product continue to evolve and grow? These are the questions that yearn for an answer of a unified platform that can be depended on to carry the business forward.

David actually cited the Garter quote that predicts the ultimate death of the J2EE platform in favor of vendor supported Java platforms by IBM and Oracle. If that actually comes to fruition, it is fascinating not just for its technical implications, but also for the comment this makes on the ultimate viability of community-based technology stewardship.

Maybe this 3 legged race of IBM v. Oracle v. MS offers an easier soup to stir than one consisting of many open source implementations. Interesting talk. The most interesting part of that discussion is the notable absence of Sun as a player in the Java discussion. What a weird world.

My favorite quote of the session, "Model Driven Architecture is where the rubber meets the sky." Awesome. This comment on the huge abstraction of MDA feels right on.

FDD With Team System

Joel Semenuik provided a great overview of how his organization uses a formal Feature Driven Development process in conjunction with Scrum to deliver software. They do this using of Team System, which is no surprise since Joel is the co-author of Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System with Martin Danner.

I later learned from Martin, who used to be my office mate, that he and Joel are sponsoring a CodePlex project to aggregate open source process templates. What a nice idea! One stop shopping for process templates. I went hunting for it, but couldn't find it on CodePlex yet.

How I Became a Team Build Muscle Man

Steve Borg blew packing material all over me when the build failed in his demo. To be more precise, he had a build monitor application hooked to a fan that blew packing peanuts all over me when his build failed. Nice. It tok 10 minutes to get all the stic clingy bits off me.

Anyway, Steve ran through a demo on using Team Build for CI and for deployment. It was pretty good, although I think many of us could have done without the Richard Simmons imitation. :)

Deploying to IIS

Steve used the MSBuild tasks found in the SDC CodePlex project to deploy his web application to IIS on a deployment and smoke test machine.

Deploying SQL Data

Even better, he used Visual Studio 2008 DB Pro to create a DB sample data loading script and deployed that to his test DB server via the SDC task DeployDatabase. This ensures that his web tests will always be run against his app with the same underlying data. This makes writing and running automated web tests as part of your build MUCH easier.

Misc

Also in 2008, we get the new BuildStep task that we can use to emote nice messages into our build log to provide some debugging information. Handy.

Implement the ITask interface to create your own tasks BTW. This is easy, I've actually done it!

WIX (Windows Installer for XML) is an open source tool that MS actually wrote and released to CodePlex. It is a nice little tool that helps us build MSI installers for our application. This utility is actually used by MS to create their installers like the MS Office and other binaries. This is basically a Visual Studio project that works like MAKE, but better. You can use WIX to accomplish all kinds of things like prepping your target machine's dependencies as part of the MSI. Nice.

Source Control Branching Strategies

This was a great after-hours Birds of a Feather session that deserves a post of its own and will get it.

Here's the takeaway: I had no idea source control strategy was a religious issue or that one can see an organization's dysfunction in a source control system's folder structure.

Now I know.

Guess what? SilverLight, Visual Studio, Unified Communications, surface computing, and robots are going to save the earth. So will WCF.

Brian Harry on TFS Now and Future

This was a great session. I know we are all tired of hearing it, but Rosario really is the release of TFS that will be the ONE. We are all struggling with Work Items and being able to manage our work the way we actually think of our work.

The one question I posed was simply how may an organization manage one single backlog of work within TFS and parse out that work to separate teams? The answer is that for right now, there isn't a good story here. I will be blogging later in the summer about how I am solving for this in our organization.

Open Q&A on TFS - Jeff Levinson

Jeff is a Team System MVP and trainer and consultant for NW Cadence. He talked people through a lot of the typical questions that get asked soon after you install TFS in your organization.

1. What source control branching model makes sense for me?
2. How can I customize my work items?
3. What's in the service packs?
4. How should I deploy for my build environments?

You get the idea. Here are some likeable nuggets I took away from this session.

• If you are installing TFS into an organization with fewer than 500 active developers, install it all on one box.
  
  I have installed on one machine for simplicity's sake and recommend the same model , but I had no idea the scalability of that model went as high as 500. Jeff claims that this kind of load will only flutter the CPU. Bear in mind, though: This is NOT regarding the build machine. Build machines need to be separate and preferably virtual.
  
• Microsoft will be paying closer attention to X in Rosario. X can equal any of these things:
  • Project server integration
  • Portfolio server integration
  • Query-able link control in work items
  • Tooling for testers, and that doesn't mean test tools for developers.

Application Lifecycle Management Panel Discussion

An entire stage of Team System MVPs, discussing Application Lifecycle Management. Rich Hundhausen, Jeff Levinson, Mike Azocar, Steve Borg, Jeff Beehler,  Mickey Gousset, and several others.

This is about ALM which includes all phases of the lifecycle, so how are we helped by rapid delivery.

I only asked one question of the panel. "What's the view forward for integrating the entire ownership lifecycle? Don't we really need tooling like support in TFS for System Center to get where you are all talking about?"

Answer: It turns out that MS is solving for different phases of the overall ALM problem at different phases with different tools. TFS for developers, System Center for I.T., Project and Portfolio Server for the business folks. What ties it all together? Nothing yet. Maybe BizTalk will do the trick, eh? Right.

Scrum-tastic Process Template

Presented by, Mike Azocar, the author and project manager of the actual CodePlex project for the Light Weight Scrum Process Template for Team System (whew).

I am particularly interested in this work because of the aforementioned focus I have on customizing the Scrum process template from Conchango.

Nuggets:

• An interactive system can never be fully specified - Wagner's Law
• Scrum is appealing to many organizations because it is:
  • Simple
  • Free
  • Transparent
  • Common sense
• "No one runs beyond 3 or 4 sprints before changing their out-of-the-box process template." - Mike

Lastly

Keep a watch on this page, which hosts videos from the Tech Ed floor.

Oh, and I met Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks. I told him it was sort of like meeting Madonna. He asked me not to follow him into the bathroom.

One recurring theme in that feedback has been around domain driven design, so among our other criteria we’ve put together an advisory council which includes some members with notable credentials in that area.

Eric Evans - http://www.domainlanguage.com/about/ericevans.html
Stephen Forte - http://www.stephenforte.net/
Martin Fowler - http://martinfowler.com/
Pavel Hruby - http://www.phruby.com/
Jimmy Nilsson - http://jimmynilsson.com/

Yes... I had to take a second look myself. That's an impressive list I say!

Its just words on a web page at this point, but I think this speaks loud and clear that MS is listening to all the valuable constructive criticism that has been given from the community. I commend the Data Programmability team for making such a great move, but mostly all those who have stepped up to provide their insight.

Along with this announcement, Danny is also requesting that folks continue to keep providing feedback.

Frickin' sweet!]]> http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/03/data-programmability-advisory-council/feed/ 0 http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-future-of-net http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:17:40 +0000 Jan Van Ryswyck http://elegantcode.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-net/ That's the title of the latest .NET Rocks episode. No big deal, just one of the better podcast episodes out there. Microsoft, are you listening? Maybe you should put your chairman on a stage on one of your next big developer conferences, screaming out maintainability, maintainability, maintainability! Let the ASP.NET MVC framework be your first big success and your guide on the path for providing us developers some tools and most important, some patterns & practices for creating more maintainable software.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development. Additionally it introduces the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which simplify data access code in applications by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any data source and enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements."

IF YOU HAVE INSTALLED SILVERLIGHT TOOLS make sure you remove them, and make sure you also remove KB949325. See Hanselman, ScottGu or here.

Read more on MSDN, ScottGu and Somasegar

There are over 350 people registered for the developer track already. Come on down. Register here.

On a related note, I heard some rumblings that some future releases (such as v4.0 Asp.Net) will ship with all the unit tests!