Jelle Druyts

In the third and final keynote, Bob Muglia talked about the server side of things in the roadmap that matters for developers. This was a much shorter session, but covered some interesting topics such as management, Monad, WinFX, Active Directory, ...

Some interesting notes from the keynote:

Management

• WS-Management, which I've also seen in action at TechEd, has been defined as a unification of remote management of hardware, operating systems and application. It even enables remote management of WMI services cross-platform.
• MMC 3.0 has been announced to host managed components, so you can finally write MMC Snap-Ins in .NET!

Monad

As you might already know, Monad is the codename of a new object-based command line language.

• It has been created in .NET.
• It works with thin commandlets.
• In integrates the command line, COM and .NET

Active Directory

Active Directory has been around for a few years providing identity management and single sign-on across the enterprise. Now with Federation Services it will extend this single sign-on principle to work between different enterprises.

Longhorn Server

The server edition of Windows Vista should be ready in 2007. Of course, there are a lot of interesting enhancements and new features but a few highlights were pointed out:

• Terminal Services will be accessible through firewalls, and it will support USB device redirection. Nice!
• TxF is the codename for the Transactional Filesystem, which adds transaction support to an NTFS filesystem. This means you can finally have atomic changes to filesets (which can be very handy for certain Source Control scenarios and, why not, Transactional FTP?)
• IIS 7, but this actually deserves a point of its own

IIS 7

One of the most common problems with IIS to date has been the centralized and opaque nature of the IIS Metabase (which holds all the configuration data for the IIS server). It required an administrator to update the settings, and you were in serious problems if the metabase ever got corrupted. So it was very exciting to hear that the metabase is now officially dead. All configuration is now persisted in XML configuration files, and this even trickles down to the web.config files of the individual websites. Take for example the task of adding a default document to be served for a website, which can now be defined in its own web.config as such:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <defaultDocument>
      <files>
        <add value="MyHomePage.aspx" />
      </files>
    </defaultDocument>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Furthermore, IIS7 is completely modular, so you can remove modules that you don't use (e.g. CGI) and rewrite modules that you're not happy with (e.g. the DirectoryListingModule) - and all of this on an individual website basis and without restarting the server or IIS! This is very powerful and opens up a lot of interesting scenarios.

So that concludes the last keynote, I'm off to some more in-depth sessions!