There's some great stuff in this road map presented by Brad Abrams and Jeffrey Richter.  It's clear that Microsoft have been doing more work on the patterns, speed improvements (the team must love being able to tune a V1.1). The session was an overview of the trolley load of goodies that come with the Whidbey release of the CLR. Brad Abrams mentioned his goal of making sure that the framework uses consistent design patterns. An example of this is the WinFX poster that shows how all of the technologies relate.

How .NET is being adopted

• 60% of the fortune 100 have .NET
• 70M machines have .NET Framework
• NET has had about 100% growth a month this year, recently growing to 300% growth per month

Brad mentioned that blogs and .NET user groups are helping to contribute to the success of the .NET framework (along with over 400 books).

Trustworthy Computing
Trustworthy Commitment is big deal for Microsoft. A few years ago security was just a feature of the product, with a single feature team. Microsoft now understand that security is a horizontal foundation that is thought about in each spec and code review. It's all part of the Trustworthy computing model. Some visible impacts: 1000's of hours of review, external parties have come in to audit the security code. The goals is to help developers build secure apps on top of the platform. This is where the Prescriptive Architectural Guidance comes from.

Base Innovations
These are the most important parts of the system:

• It works seamlessly on 64-bit support. Writing managed code is an investment that will pay off in future.
• Performance. Making the runtime faster to start up. Also raw throughput on ASP.NET - fastest response time possible (optimising the environment and code paths)
• Edit and Continue is here.
• 70's innovation - coloured consoles. This could open up a whole new field for games developers.

Generics
Added new IL instructions and changed metadata tables to get support for Generics, so VB can share it as well. It's also in C++ (why this is better than templates I'll have to look up). Generics have also been added to the common language runtime, which means that all the 3rd party languages can adopt generics (e.g. Eiffel).

Data Access
ADO.NET has no model changes. This is so incredible that it's worth repeating: Microsoft have not invented a new way of doing architecture in the Whidby version of the Framework. (this is extrordinary given the changes that have happened in the past - where did they shift the ADO guys too - surely they would have been itching to do some improvements), the focus is advanced features and performance.
System.XML is core to the platform. There are some performance improvements (from 50 - 100+% for different areas especially XSLT). Also support for Xquery for better support.

ObjectSpaces
ObjectSpaces. Treat rows and columns as an object graph. Based on an xml file that defines the mapping between the relational and the object representation. It basically creates an domain/business object wrapper around the database.  Having to remember the ordinals for rows in a columns is annoying. However, with ObjectSpaces the first things is to set up a connection

ObjectSpace os = new ObjectSpace(myConnections, myMappings);
foreach((customer c in os.GetObjectSet<Customer>( "city = Seatle")){
Console.WriteLine(c.name);
}

Data Acces - System.Data.SqlServer
The integration with Yukon looks like it uses the attributes, such as :
[SqlTrigger("EmailReview"), "Reviews", "FOR INSERT")].

The example Jeff showed how easy it is to write a stored procedure that sends and email when a new review is posted to a database. This used to be a horror in previous version of SQL Server. Just knowing that extended stored procs wont bring the machine down in a bunch of flames is big deal. This could seriously impact consulting revenues!

ASP.NET 2.0
A major release for ASP.NET. The team went away and looked at common code and controls that teams did. The goal was to reduce the plumbing code by 70%. This has been achieved with page framework, 40 new controls

Casini - the old Personal Web Service is back. This times its 100% managed code. It picks a random port each time it's run to protect from someone trying to hack into it (don't they trust developers to lock down their machine )

Where did all the code go?

Building Blocks
They build a range of "Building Block" APIS
Membership control (username/password, resetting the password)
RoleManager (control access based on role)
Personalisation (customize the layout of the site. You can define a class (e.g profile containing name and zip code) that is associated with the logged in user).
SiteNavigation - tracking how the users move between pages
SiteCounters - useful for sites that are paid based on behaviour such as view
Management - IT department get a page or email if there's something going wrong on the site.

The provide an abstract Provide Model Design Pattern that controls the storage of the data behind these controls. Very, very nice.

Page Framework Features
MasterPages - eack. Sounds like some of the FrontPage guys escaped and let loose the nasty FrontPage themes into the ASP.NET page
Themes/Skins - separate the UI from the logic so that it's easy to skin without changing code (like the themes in DasBlog)
AdaptiveUI - all of the controls will render to small handheld devices

Control Buckets (over 40 new controls)
Leverage the previous features to do tings like Security, Data, Navigation, Web Parts. These controls know how to talk to the underlying controls. One example was the bread crumbs links at the top of page.

Innovations on the Web
ASMX performance is being improved through making sure the server side requests per seconds is much better. Secondly there's a smaller working set required on the client to call a web services. They've also notice that web service calls must be asynchronous (the button shouldn't stick down while the web service is working). You need to use a thread pool. This is a little complicated for some developers with the IAsyncResult pattern, so that now this is much easier - this should be the main stream way to call webservices. It ends up just looking like an event.

.NET Remoting - authenticated and encrypted channels. I wonder whether this is WS-Security compliant? It doesn't have to be since remoting is about two .NET machines rather than interops.

System.Net - this has better 'network awareness'. For example Outlook 11 detects the type of network and adjust the experience based on that. FTP protocol support has also been added.

Client Tier with Windows Forms - System.Windows.Forms
Lots of developers wanted to move to Windows Forms, however deployment of client applications is still too difficult. .NET started to make it easier (each assembly has it's own metadata). Whidbey is concluding this story : click-once. It should be as easy to deploy a forms project to clients as it is to deploy a web server. 

XP Theme support has been added. Finally you can look like Office (why is this always a couple of months after the Office release?).  Apparently the Office team will be here this week showing how to make the Outlook interface in 100% managed code.

Longhorn Related

Windows Forms app will work great on Longhorn.  There will be a two-way interop with Avalon.  You can use Avalon markup and mentions win form controls, or you can use win forms on Avalon.