Just some notes from the Plenary Session that I thought I'd share...

Jim McKinney

Service packs will start including additional functionality as a means to ship updates prior to major releases. Mainly focused on ArcGIS Server

Scott Moorehouse - ESRI Architecture

Mainly a review of the overall ArcGIS software architecture - pretty high level stuff. The section on "new" stuff

- mentioned top priority for bugs and documentation.

-planned overhauls to the ArcGIS Desktop UI ("ribbons" - not stated specifically, but I'd guess this is really a WPF / AXML update to the UI) 

- overhaul code components: geodatabase, mapping, graphics

- and the usual "we will improve ArcGIS Online"

Currently two development tracks

- 9.3 Service packs will add functionality - specifically mentioned

• more OGC support
• PostgreSQL support
• More work in the Web ADF
• "google maps"-like Javascript API based on MS AJAX
• Vista support for Desktop

- 10.x focus on core changes

• 64bit support
• multi-threading support for multi-core chips (specifically geoprocessing and display)
• additional coarse grained objects
• updated graphics engines
• performance improvements in Geoprocessing framework
• open API for the file geodatabase
• Adding metadata catalog into the geodatabase (searchable, tagable)

Conceptual architecture will remain the same, mainly a modernization of the codebase.

Dave Wraizen - ArcGIS Server

Promoted the ArcGIS Server Team blog. Rumor has it that there will be more teams blogging shortly.

Also talked about their "big idea" pattern: Author, Serve & Use

The demo was pretty standard - author a map in ArcMap & GP Model, publish them into server, create a default web app, and then customize the app in Visual Studio to add some MapTips (on point features).

Task Framework touted as a good extension point - not sure I agree, but would be good if you just want to add simple functions into the out-of-the-box type of system. However, I'm thinking that for larger, more custom applications, the task framework is likely a little to coarse grained.

Enterprise Integration Demo

This was the SOA/ESB drag & drop BPEL love fest. I'm sorry, but I'm not really convinced that the resulting "agility" of this architecure is worth the expense , complexity and performance penalty (serialized/deserialize all over the place). If you have an enterprise big enough to support the cost, I'm guessing that most of your business processes are relatively static at the coarse grained level. What's more likely to change are smaller variations, which will usually require a low level change in the code. Conceptually interesting, but I'm just not "feeling" it yet.

Mobile Demo

Drag & Drop development demo with the Mobile ADF - quite cool. Personally, I think the Mobile ADF is pretty under rated, and hopefully we'll see more people using this in place of MapObjects type applications.

ArcGIS Explorer Demo

Exposure of Tasks - loading an excel spreadsheets of addresses on the client side. the E2API is lean, but powerful. Can use a standard user control and parent that into the Task Center arae in the Explorer Interface. Tasks are spawned into separate threads in the Explorer. They hide the threading for you. They have also created an automated task installer - you basically specify a download location in an Xml file.

Running out of battery power, I'll post more on the technical sessions later.