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Last night I pulled down the latest RTM version of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 SDK, along with the integration tools to VS2005. At the TulsaDevelopers.NET user group meeting, BJ Pohl gave a demo on Workflow Foundation. When I first saw the technology, it was still pretty green. The latest stuff he put on the screen seemed to have a little more life to it. Since you can also define workflow via XML, it makes me wonder how you could allow end-users to define their own workflow and then dynamically handle that workflow at runtime.

Of course, the real issue with workflow is the expiration-style rules, such as an item sitting in a state for too long. Once I figure that out, I might have to look at how this could be deployed for a scalable application with multiple clients — each with their own idea of how workflow should (cough) work.

I’ve also been wanting to look at WCF and the dynamic bindings for internal communication over binary/TCP instead of dealing with the web service wrapper.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Apple notebooks for quite a while. While I currently have a 17″ Dell XPS Gen 2 gaming laptop, I find myself using it more for web surfing and software development than I ever do gaming. When you talk about the performance and size of notebooks, the small MacBook and MacBook Pro jump to the front of the pack.

Nothing that Dell offers is as thin as the MacBook line of notebooks.

With the upgrades from Intel coming soon, I’m thinking when the platform reaches the following level I’ll make the change.

• Santa Rosa Platform (DDR2-800)
• 4 GB RAM
• LED Backlight on a 15.4″ display with at least 1440×900 resolution
• Hybrid Flash Disk Drive
• Dedicated Graphics Card (nVidia 8400 or something similar)
• Leopard and Boot Camp
• 2.4 GHz+ Core 2 Duo with 4MB Cache

That would be enough of an upgrade to convince me to switch to the MacBook Pro. I would of course run Windows on it (hopefully 64-bit Vista by that time, if it is ready) most of the time.

So why buy a MacBook to run Windows? Because nobody else makes a 1″ thick, slick looking notebook with the support network of Apple.

Okay, this is in the seriously cool zone. I was working in Visual Studio, when I did a check for updates. It showed that a new video driver for the 6800 Ultra was available (released mid-December). So I figured, what the heck, I could use the FPS, go ahead and install it.

I went about my business in VS2005, working on a project, when the screen blinked to black. I waited a few seconds, then it came back on. I figured it was the driver update being applied and that it was now time to reboot. What? Install successful? No reboot required?

Too damn cool! I gotta give props here MS, that’s a seriously way-cool feature.

Well, since Vista is available, it would only make sense that .NET 3.0 should also be available. It seems that it can be installed on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 in addition to Windows Vista.

No compatibility for Windows 2000, but that might not be a big deal anymore.

Looks like all the .NET 3.0 stuff continues to use the Visual Studio 2005 platform for development so it might make sense to consider .NET 3.0 in your future SmartClient ambitions to get that next generation interface design today.

.NET 3.0 Framework Details Page

You can activate your Quick Launch icons by using Windows+1, Windows+2, etc.

Perfects for those of us that don’t like to grab the mouse unless it’s time to grab the mouse.

Okay, another really cool find in Vista today. Instead of trying to look for the program you want in the Start Menu, you just click the windows key (to open the start menu) and start typing the name of the program you want. The built-in search features of Vista will narrow down the start menu options to include only those that contain the string you typed.

You want to run Word, “type Word” and it lists Word as the default and Wordpad as another option. Just smash the Enter key and you’re loading Word.

It seems to work pretty well, I’m very glad they added that as it’s a great feature for us keyboard cowboys.

Add this in the column of really cool features that you didn’t expect. When you double-click the volume icon, you get a lovely set of mixer pots. These let you adjust the volume of all the running applications, in addition to a master fader. Talk about sweet, you can finally silence IE without diminishing the volume of your iTunes library.

Audio as a whole seems to be handled a lot better in this new version of Windows. It seems like the OS does high-quality audio internally now instead of the nasty KMIXER sampling we had before. Time will tell, however, and more advanced tools come out to check into the details.

This past weekend, I took some time to download the newly released Vista Ultimate from the MSDN site. Once downloaded, I put a clean 80GB drive into my XPS Gen 2 laptop (single-core 2.0 Pentium M w/2GB DDR2 SDRAM) and booted the DVD.

I must say, I’ve installed Windows variants of every type since 1.0 on a ton of machines. Considering all the extra hardware this thing has on it (Bluetooth, Intel Wireless, Gigabit Ethernet, GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc.) this was absolutely without a doubt the cleanest installation of Windows I have ever done, period. That is to say that it automatically installed every piece of hardware in my system without me having to download any drivers. That’s a first in my book.

I’m not being some MS fanboy either, I can’t stand installing Windows. It’s like a pain that won’t go away. Tracking down drivers, dealing with initial load issues, setup errors, etc. We’ve all been there and we’ve all cried the whole way down that dreadful road. Vista Ultimate installed clean the first time and everything worked. I was shocked.

As for the operating system, it’s pretty complete out of the box. Web browsing, e-mail, calendaring, contact management, all the stuff an OS should do for you is there out of the box (well, except for Java VM support, which I’ll figure out later). The sidebar is nice (it’s not Leopard nice, but it is a decent first attempt), the interface is very pretty and functional. Overall I’m happy with the look and feel.

There are a few things that aren’t so nice. I installed iTunes (flawless, no errors, and no restarts required) and went to add my network folders to my library. For some reason, it will not browse the network. I can see the shares in Explorer, but nothing shows up in the iTunes Add Folder dialog. Bummer, hopefully that will work itself out. I did find that you can drag a folder from Explorer and iTunes will add it to the library, but it wasn’t real happy about it, the UI choked until it had finished the job.

Windows Media Center is pretty nice, a little cleaner than before, but a lot of the online services seem broken since there were no Internet radio stations or other remote content features enabled. Maybe that’s something that has yet to be patched in for home users by January. I don’t have a tuner on that machine, so I could not get a feel for TV reception (or HDTV support for that matter). But you can be I’ll be tracking down an OTA USB HDTV card at some point to give that feature a workout.

Windows by itself is pretty boring, so I installed Office 2007 Ultimate as well. Guess what? Yeah, it lets you create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That’s about it. Nothing else to see here I suppose. It’s Office after all, not Quake VIX or anything.

Speaking of Quake, I haven’t loaded any games yet but you can bet that EQ2 is going to be loaded soon to see if it works. I’ll also be loading a variety of applications I use a lot to see how they roll. Since I’ve gone portable on all my mainstay applications such as email I’m not too concerned about Outlook at home. I’ll have to plug in the flash drive tonight and see how we prevail with my portable applications.

If I get time and patience, I may try to install Visual Studio 2005 and see how it runs on Vista. I know some problems were there with earlier releases, who knows if they still exist. I guess we shall see!