microsoft pdc.

I'm here with others at the PDC and thought I'd send a message: WOW.

In all seriousness, I was blown away by a few demos in the keynote as well as completely blown away by Scott Guthrie's "overview" of ASP.NET Whidbey...which was much more than an overview.

For those actually in AZ and who couldn't attend the PDC, the next meeting will include Russ and myself (haven't seen Russ here yet though) discussing the new Whidbey stuff.  I'm going to try to reproduce ScottGu's discussions on the overview, new tips/tricks, and new caching information...things I felt were golden.  Mark your calendars.

To clarify for those that get confused, here is (at least my interpretation of) the codenames defined:

• Longhorn - next generation Windows platform (is there a server version, who knows)
• Avalon - the presentation layer in Longhorn -- really cool vector rendering, taking complete advantage of some great UI advances in both the client and web applications
• Aero - the UI design guidelines for development within an Avalon world.
• Indigo - the communication services layer for Longhorn; basically next generation web services...seems to melt the web services and remoting models together
• Whidbey - technically, the next generation of Visual Studio...however this codename also seems to encompass the framework in general.
• ASP.NET Whidbey - see above...but asp.net is enhanced and contains about 50+ new controls that make life easier (and potentially our jobs as expert developers useless ;-)).  At least we can still code the middle tier...
  BTW: ever want to databind to your business layer? now you can. Other highlights: master pages, skinning, database level caching, super cool productivity enhancements, etc., etc.
• Whitehorse - an infrastructure validation framework...validate your apps will run on a prescribed deployment environment with one step
• OneClick - literally one click deployment...an online/offline mode of deploying and running the latest version applications...essentially with OneClick users install once...updates can be delivered automatically.
• Yukon - next generation SQL Server (and more)
• WinFS - Longhorn “file system“ enhancements

The answer to the "how do i get longhorn/whidbey":
You don't.  Unless (1) you know someone within MS that will give it to you, (2) Russ will bring copies (highly unlikely), (3) you attended the PDC, or (4) MSDN Universal Subscription.

The other answer regarding longhorn: No, the cool Avalon features for Longhorn are *not* included in the PDC bits provided.