MSDN Briefing and SIAB in Brasov

Yesterday I've posted about day one in the article TechNet Briefing Brasov. Today was the second day from the Microsoft Days here in Brasov. This day was focusing on developers, so lots of code was shown. I will not reproduce it here, but I will go a little bit through the ideas there.
Basically it focused on .NET framework version 3.0. It should be called 2.1 or 2.5, but for marketing reasons at Microsoft it is called 3.0. Why? because we have this simple equation:
.NET 3.0 = .NET 2.0 (CLR 2.0) + WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) + WS (Windows Workflow Foundation) + WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) + InfoCard.
So as you can see 3.0 is just 2.0 on steroids.
In short, WCF is a powerful communication layer which can use SOAP, web services, TCP/IP, .NET Remoting etc. to communicate between 2 endpoints (client and server usually). However, the big news is that you can change the underlying communication provider and hoster just by changing the config file. Neat, isn't it? It can also self-host the services, deploy over IIS etc. So, Microsoft took the best (or let's say major) standards and put them all together under one roof.
WS is an engine to work with and execute workflows. It supports both sequential and state-based workflows.
WPF is actually the known XAML.
InfoCard is something similar to the Microsoft Passport, but much, much evolved and quite different. The idea is that it is much more secured and easy to use, and it does not require (though it can use) a centralized provider like the Passport does.

Another discussion was about the new Office file formats, which are basically a ZIP archive containing XML files and any binary-format objects that are embedded (like pictures). It is also very extensible and pragmatically you have the sky as the limit.

Also some examples of how to develop Vista-friendly applications were shown, but I cannot reproduce the demos here.

The second part of the day focused on the same subjects but from an architect level...