Kevin (one of our senior developers) has returned from TechEd. The first demo he did was showing how ClickOnce works. He spent the afternoon getting our current .Net 1.1 application running in .Net 2.0 Beta 2, then configured ClickOnce and showed it working. It just worked. I love the client based roll-back support and forced upgrades features. So while I was thinking this is great, I was also thinking its about time. This is what people need to smite the ASP.Net everywhere mentality. Now deploying real apps via HTTP will be as easy as “configure and click” for the developer, and easier for customers to use.
The other topic Kevin was quite keen about was SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This should make life easier for us, or if not easier to do, allow us to step up to a new level of service (product stability and administratively) better than we are presently doing it. I’ve found this seven part series on SSIS (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) that I’m working my way through. Seems like a nice system.
Kevin’s got some other topics he wants to investigate to see if they will add real value to our development process. So I look forward to more reading and demo’s in the next few weeks.