This is just the most exciting thing which has happened to me for years; in less than a week I'll be the newest Program Manager on the UIFx team (the team responsible for Silverlight, Winforms, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX etc...).
It is a bit surreal, when I started this blog 5 years ago I was a developer living and working in Edinburgh (for the best company pre-Microsoft that I ever worked for, StormId) using and loving ASP.NET...now I get a chance to help design the future of the product. Over the past couple of weeks I've been getting caught up on the stuff which has happened in the product in the three years since I've been a full time dev; things like MVC, the development of AJAX and most recently Silverlight 2.0. One thing you find out when you stop using a product 8 (or 12) hours a day, every day is how rusty you get with this stuff.
I totally admit I was a bit underwhelmed by Silvelight 1.0 but the 2.0 release is just stunning...I can bind to a datagrid clientside in C# and have it work on a Mac! I got the chance to install the new dev bits yesterday and trawl through the tutorials which ScottGu posted on his blog (I'm told that everyone will get these bits fairly soon). I can't wait to see what people will do with this technology; makes it as easy to write a rich Internet application as it is to write a Winforms one...it's going to be amazing.
Apologies to Josh Twist with whom I had a drunken argument a couple of weeks ago in a downtown bar, you're right it's awesome...but I still say that it's the developers who write applications that will change the world, technologies just enable that to happen.
ASP.MVC...I've had the chance to read the specs as well as play with the latest bits for this framework. If you haven't worked with it you should! If you're developing an ASP.NET application which involves more than a few pages you have to use it! The last thing I did as a dev was to write what is basically an MVC based application for this site...it's based on a very different infrastructure (all configured and defined in XML) but in essence they're very similar. I am totally sold on this way of building applications and I'm really excited that we've chosen to build one into the product. I was reading through the specs and writing a little app thinking 'this is just beautiful'; it's so easy to understand and work with.
I'll update the post with links etc...later...