LINQ-Related Sessions at MIX 07

Four of the 122 sessions of Microsoft's MIX 07 conference, which runs from April 30 to May 2 at Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel, have LINQ-related content. Here's are the details from the Sessions page:

Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 1 of 2) Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 2 of 2) Speakers: Jamie Cool - Microsoft, Nick Kramer - Microsoft Audience: Developer

This session demonstrates building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and managed code. We'll cover how to use Visual Studio to create applications, how to create UI using XAML markup and code, how to build a custom control, how to retrieve data from a Web service, how to manipulate data with XML and LINQ, and how to use the available programming languages in Silverlight.

Note: Microsoft appears to have redefined RIA from rich Internet application (the common usage) to rich interactive application.

Deep Dive on Data Driven Experiences Speakers: Aaron Dunnington - Microsoft, Tim Scudder - Microsoft Audience: Developer

Update 4/28/2007 from Channel9 Buzzcast #13: In this episode, Aaron Dunnington, Program Manager on the Data Programmability XML Team talks about harnessing the power of the semantic web using Microsoft XML technology stack.

Come learn how technologies like Silverlight, Language INtegrated Query (LINQ), and SQL Server 2005 can help developers build impactful, dynamic applications that reach the broadest possible audience.

Comment: OK folks, what is this session really about? SQL Server, XML, or SQLXML?

Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications Speaker: Anders Hejlsberg - Microsoft Audience: Developer

Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Microsoft Visual C# and LINQ, will explain how LINQ (Language Integrated Query) unifies these programming models and dramatically improves the experience of creating data intensive Web applications. Anders promises to have few slides and lots of live code demos!

Note: Anders appears to have expanded his title of Chief Architect for Microsoft Visual C# to include LINQ. This might explain the dearth of LINQ sample code in Visual Basic.

Update 4/28/2007: This session should shed some light on the forthcoming LINQDataSource for ASP.NET. Beth Massi says, "Be sure not to miss Anders typing the 'Dim' keyword!"

Bonus Session: Pablo Castro promises to put a Web spin on the Entity Framework, which might include a side trip for LINQ to Entities. Will Pablo disclose more details about CloudDB or Blue/Cloud, a.k.a. Pacifica? Don't miss:

Accessing Data Services in the Cloud Speaker: Pablo Castro - Microsoft Audiences: Designer, Developer

Come learn about new Microsoft technologies that enable you to make your data available over the Web through a simple REST interface and using open formats such as plain XML, JSON or even RDF. We also discuss the underlying entity framework that makes it easy to model, publish, and program against your data over the Web.

Office Pool: How many years ago was Pablo's mug shot for DevTeach taken?

Update 4/29/2007: Pablo's presentation should be even more interesting considering that Microsoft announced last night that Orcas has dropped "the underlying entity framework."

Andrew Conrad, one of the members of the original ObjectSpaces team, says he's been working on the following project for the last year:

Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET Speakers: Samuel Druker Polita Paulus - Microsoft, Shyam Pather - Microsoft Audience: Developer

Update 4/28/2007 New description: ASP.NET dynamic data controls are part of a powerful, rich new framework that lets you create data driven ASP.NET applications extremely easily. ASP.NET dynamic data controls do this by automatically discovering the schema at runtime, deriving behavior from the database and finally creating an ASP.NET page. Anything that can be inferred from the schema works with almost no user effort. If needed, the page can be further customized either by using static languages such as Microsoft Visual C# or Visual Basic .NET, or dynamic languages such as IronPython, Visual Basic, Jscript, etc. In this talk, we show you how to build rich, database driven Web applications from scratch, such as TaskList along with other demos. [Emphasis added.]

Come learn about how new technologies from Microsoft bring together the concepts of dynamic languages and ADO.NET and allow you to quickly develop data driven web pages using ASP.NET dynamic data controls, scalable to even the most complex databases.

Notice that "dynamic ... Visual Basic" in the preceding description is plain VB, not VB .NET. Polita is the developer of Blinq, so there might be a LINQ hook in the session.

Andrew says:

More information to come in the new few weeks, but all I can say at this point is that the experience has been very dynamic. And if you can’t make it to Mix07, we should have some screen casts and white papers available some time in the next several weeks. [Emphasis Andrew's,]

Technorati tags: LINQ, Entity Framework, MIX 07, MIX07, MIX '07, CloudDB

Update 4/18/2007: Minor edits and major additions. Update 4/24/2007: Read Mary Jo Foley's ‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? article about the "Live development platform" that Soma Somasegar plans to divulge at MIX 07.