Tim Rayburn
Tim Rayburn
Lead with grace and be wholly you.

.NET 3.0 Community Launch

This evening was the .NET 3.0 Community Launch event at the Dallas .NET User Group.  With our trusted leader Omar away in Ft. Lauderdale, on business I'm assured, Keith handled everything wonderfully and things went very smoothly.  Four local developers took turns walking us through the new features of .NET 3.0, starting with Shane Holder doing a short introduction and Windows Workflow Foundation mention.  This was short on details but DDNUG had recently had a speaker on WF so there was a reason.

Second up to bat was Abraham Saldana talking about WCF, this was a good talk but short due to the launch event format and I look forward to next month when DDNUG will be graced with the presence of Sam Gentile to talk about WCF.

Third up, talking about the red headed step child of .NET 3.0, was Trent Nix on Windows CardSpace.  Trent doesn't realize this but for sheer "it got people talking" his presentation on WCS won the night hands down but more on that later.  It was an excellent overview of Card Space and it's strengths and shortcomings.

Finally came my bud Dave O'Hara talking about Windows Presentation Foundation.  This was a good talk, driven by several of the examples I had seen before but still very cool.  It got a lot of interest from the crowd, and he even put me on the spot at one point when pointing out the namespaces at the top of the XAML pages for the quote:

"If it doesn't have namespaces it's nothing more than angle bracket delimited files."

Which I believe it Scott Hanselman as butchered by Tim Rayburn.

After the launch event several of us, Caleb, Dave, Shane, Abraham, and some others went over to a place called "Hole in the Wall" over on Harry Hines and 635.  Burgers, Bikes and Blues rule the day here, but on the back patio that night, under the glaring lights of Caleb's camera we had a great discussion about lots of stuff but mostly Identity, CardSpace and OpenID.  It was a great time talking with some really bright guys about the pickle that is the Identity problem.  Caleb recorded nearly the entire time for CommunityCast.TV and yours truly even threw down a challenge to the community at large backed with dollars, but for those details you'll need to wait until Caleb gets the videos posted.