Today PDC (Pakistan Developers Conference) 2006 launched at Pearl Continental Hotel, Karachi and Awari Towers, Lahore simulatenously. Lunch ceremony was boring as always, except Rafal. He talked this time about how online Authentication will significantly change and how an average user is going to interact with online services without the need for providing todays authentication (id and password), all courtesy of CardSpace which was formerly known as (Info Card). I attended all Stephen Forte's sessions today on Security, Web Development and SQL Server. I really like the SQL Query Governer, that he and Richard demonstrated together. Query Governer is a small but quite useful tool that developers or database admins can use to run a query on the server on the basis of server load. If the server is on a very high load, then the governer wont let the query to execute. The algorithm they used to determine the load on the server was very basic, but can't be enhanced for various situations. I didn't attend the Q/A session at the end, decided to leave early to finish off some of my pending work at home. Stay tuned for more on day 2. Cheers!

Well I was just about to hit bed, decided to sleep early tonight. Gotta wake up early to attend PDC. And just as I thought I could finally leave for bed, I came across this shocking news. WinFS may not be a part of Vista as said by the team behind this amazing technology. This is what Quentin Clark has to say about it.

Is WinFS dead?
Yes and No. Yes, we are not going to ship WinFS as a separate, monolithic software component. But the answer is also No - the vision remains alive and we are moving the technology forward. A lot of the technology really was database stuff – and we’re putting that into SQL and ADO. But some of the technology, especially the end user value points, are not ready, and we’re going to continue to work on that in incubation. Some or all of these technologies may be used by other Microsoft products going forward.

Looks like I already lost my sleep for tonight. You can read more here. See you at PDC.

Today, after a long time has been a good day for me. I ate lunch which I usually skip, I slept for a full five hours, I finally got my XML script running on a test app, I resolved Atlas issues over another project and to top it off, I got a free beta test hosting account featuring Longhorn Server Beta 2 and IIS 7.0 by MaximumASP. I can't wait to see their web based UI for connecting with IIS 7 in the backend. They have an amazing interface for IIS 6.0 over their regular hosting which provides us with pretty much everything we need to set our applications using IIS over the web.

Location of my new site is http://zeeshan.maximumaspbeta.com/ which currently showcase some demo content. I'll be putting up some cool Atlas Mashups as well as some other sample applications at my new hosting in weeks to come and will be testing this new account to see how much stable IIS and Longhorn are, commercially. Will keep you posted, cheers!