Oh yeah! It's November again, which can only mean it's time for TechEd! "W00t" doesn't begin to describe it - this is a solid week of non-stop dawn-till-dusk hardcore geekery.
Since the TechEd, this past year has been an interesting one for our implementing new Microsoft technologies - we've made the most of Visual Studio 2008, and LINQ has radically accelerated our application development. LINQ to SQL has (for us, at least) made the biggest difference, so it's with some surprise that we've recently been hearing that Microsoft might be ditching it to focus entirely on LINQ to Entities.
If that's true, it's annoying at least. Still, I feel sure we're in good stead to adopt the newer technology and it shouldn't be too painful a transition: switching from using Gentle.NET (our previous object persistence framework) to LINQ wasn't too bad, and we've ensured the reusable code libraries we developed for LINQ to SQL would be even more easily swappable for the next big thing. Either way, I'm eager to see what LINQ to Entities can do for us.
TWo other technologies I've been largely ignoring this past year have been MVC and Silverlight. I've been reading the odd thing about them but I've also been aware that they've not really been ready for widespread use in the real world just yet.
We've been using the MVC routing engine to give some of our sites friendlier URLs, where that's been important to the customer, but that's all we've used. Though the whole MVC model appeals to me for its purity and testability, adopting it in its entirity would play havoc all the AJAX UpdatePanel goodness we've been using for the last couple of years. I've been sitting back and waiting for Microsoft MVC to turn into a grown-up complete product and let a few other people find and solve the most common problems, so it'll be interesting to see where it's up to now.
Silverlight hasn't been that useful for the sort of projects we've done at Compsoft historically, so I've not been keeping too close an eye on it - especially as Microsoft were quite open about how half-baked version 1 would be. However, now version 2's out, and with a couple of our recent clients having businesses that could really benefit from the rich user experience it offers, it's definitely time to get on board.