TechEd Musings

I spent the last week at TechEd Orlando and blogged about much of it on the internal company blog site. I thought I'd take a minute to post some thoughts for the Mono community as well.

It seems like "platform services" like Windows Sharepoint Services and Active Directory present a unique challenge when we're talking about Mono enabling cross platform solutions. They seem challenging to me because they're not just about writing more library code, you've got copyrighted UI images, underlying database engines, directory services, etc..

At TechEd, I definitely got the impression that developing ASP.NET solutions on top of Windows Sharepoint Services would become increasingly common and of course, be encouraged by MS. You get the seem impression about ADFS, which enables federated claims-based applications.

Does this mean more and more ASP.Net applications will become unportable, or will the community rise to the challenge of building out these type of server "platform services"? I'm wondering.

On another note, it was neat to see how MS is building on the .Net 3.5 System.ServiceModel.Web stuff and the ADO.Net Entity Framework, to build out Project Astoria, which is a REST based framework for data access for Ajax/Silverlight type clients. I'm sure hoping that the WCF mono bits around System.ServiceModel.Web that enable this don't prove hard to implement.