Forays in Finance

So I attended the Launch event today at Chinook Center. It was good to see a lot of familiar faces and get a chance to hang out with fellow geeks :o). It’s amazing that I have been in Calgary for only about six months and have already made some strong friendships.
The Launch event itself was a 6 out of 10. I attended the developer track and had a chance to see John Bristowe and Joel Semeniuk in action. They are both excellent speakers and provided a good overview of WCF, WPF, WF, Office 2007, Vista gadgets, and SharePoint 2007 webparts. My favorites by far are the Vista Gadgets and Office 2007 Open XML file format.

Yes, for the time being we must make do with the lousy HTML/Javascript combo for gadget creation, I still think that we will see some ingenious apps come out as Vista gadgets. For a current list of Gadgets available visit Gadgets. There’s a couple of other cool gadgets that they previewed including one from The Weather Network which could be out early next year, and another one from Workopolis that displays new job postings.

The second favorite is the open xml file format that office 2007 uses. Thank good for MS finally moving away from proprietary file formats. I still have nightmares about  a previous project in which I had to extract information out of Word documents and man was it ugly. The new file formats make it really easy to programmatically create office documents as well as extract information out. If you are interested in delving deeper into how the new .docx file works, rename it to .zip and then open it. You will see all the individual files inside including the xml file containing document content.