Brent Rector’s session was not what I had hoped it would be. I thought I was going to learn about the APIs, but the session was about some of the SDK tools. The session seemed pretty random; here are some of the interesting bits:

• The XSD tool will help you build an XML schema from a .NET class or an existing XML document, and it will build a .NET class from an XML schema.
• The SGEN tool will build XML serializer code so that it doesn’t have to happen via reflection at runtime.
• The Fusion Log Viewer can be used to see where your .NET assemblies are coming from, but the tool is ugly and finicky.
• The new Windows shell (code-named Monad) looks very cool, but I wonder if I’ll ever take the time to learn it. If you spend a lot of time writing batch files and one-off scripts, you should really appreciate its power.
• Perforator is a tool that can help diagnose WPF (Avalon) performance (frame rates, etc.).