Monday, July 11, 2005 - Posts
This year's TechEd 2005 edition in Amsterdam was great. I enjoyed it very much.
I've seen a lot of good speakers, great content and some cool demos. The content track owners did a great job by covering almost the whole Microsoft platform in a 4-day conference. Add to this the three free delegate product giveaways - Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition; Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition - the HOLs, the VOIP infrastructure, the networking opportunities and the community lounge, ... As I've been focusing on VSTS and TFS during the whole week I noticed the VSTS interest and coverage was huge. I've attended some very informative sessions and was able to get some information straight from the product teams in Redmond. This is why you should attend TechEd!
Thanks to Gerd De Bruycker - Microsoft EMEA Events Manager - and his team for organizing this great conference. See you all next year!
PS: You might have noticed that my blog layout is gone. This is due to the .TEXT to Community Server migration of DotNetJunkies. I'll try to fix this later this week.
The last day of TechEd started early with Jurgen Postelmans' session on Developing SQL Server 2005 OLAP Applications with ADO MD.NET. After introducing the Analysis Services API's and XMLA Jurgen showed some of the ADO MD .NET features.
Session 2 of the day was delivered by Ashwin Karuhatty and Brian Randall. Both covered VSTS Enterprise-Class Source Control system in depth. Korby blogged the session live to the web. Check out Korby's summary.
During the Q & A afterwards Brian mentioned that he's writing a book on TFS. It should be available three months after the VSTS launch and will be based on the GA version. Looking forward to it!
An interesting take-away for those of you developing custom policies for TFS: custom policies have to be deployed on the client! So if you want to benefit from this extensibility feature you should use one of the Visual Studio Team System clients.
The third session of the day was hosted by two excellent speakers: Kimberly L. Tripp and Rafal Lukawiecki. Together they covered SQL Server 2005 Security for Database Developers. The session was as expected: great entertainment, in-depth SQL Server knowledge and advanced Cryptography and Security techniques.
After a quick lunch I went for the panel discussion on Software Factories. Steve Cook, Eric Lee, Ted Neward, Maarten Mullender, Gareth Jones and Imran Ali did a nice job explaining why this strategic initiative will make it faster, easier and cheaper to build software.
The last session of TechEd 2005 had a fairly complex title: "Retry, Abort, Cancel? Appropriate Handling of Transaction Failures in Connected Systems Application Code" and was delivered by Clemens Vasters. As I've seen Clemens at previous TechEd's, DevDays etc. he delivered what we could expect. Nothing really new but Clemens is a good speaker and very knowledgeable on distributed transactions and connected systems.
Day 4 at TechEd 2005 Europe started with some meetings and community work in the morning. I was able to meet Damir Tomicic - recently named president of INETA - and had an interesting conversation on how to grow user groups and support community work. This guy knows what he's talking about!
After lunch I went to Eric Lee's session on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Advanced Project Management and Reporting in Visual Studio 2005 Team System. In this session Eric went through the MS Excel and MS Project integration in VSTS and explained how project metrics are gathered, stored and reported through TFS. The most interesting part of the presentation was on how to extend the TFS database with MS Project data. This way a highly customized report can easily be created. Furthermore Eric showed the Team Foundation Extensibility Kit and how it could enable partners and customers to benefit from extending the Team System functionality.
In the afternoon we had the closing keynote with David Vaskevitch on the future of software. The rest of the afternoon I decided to do some mail catch-up and went for a hands-on lab on how to create your own Domain-Specific Language.
Thursday evening's TechEd Party was great. Studio 7 hosted two bands, the Scissor Sisters and NU2 which played till 11 pm. We had some great fun!
As the night was still young, a lot of Belgians continued partying at "De Melkweg".
I started my third day at TechEd 2005 Europe with a session on Visual Studio Tools for Office: Building Office Solutions Using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005. Though the title is pretty confusing - there's no such thing as Office 2005 - Ken Getz did an excellent job explaining why .NET developers who are building Office 2003 solutions in Visual Studio 2003 should have a look at Visual Studio 2005 and VSTO. In this session, Ken showed how data binding, the new Document Actions Pane and Smart Tags are integrated into the Office solutions. A great session showing the huge potential of building Office 2003 solutions from within Visual Studio 2005 through VSTO. If you're looking for some studying material, make sure to check this Smart Client elearning content.
Before lunch I attended Roy Osherove's Chalk-&-Talk session on Testing, Testing. Roy used both a whiteboard and his slide-deck to answer the attendee's questions. Unit testing and its best practices, testable code, refactoring and the larger principles of agile development were all very well covered by Roy. Looking at the number of people with questions on unit testing and with the upcoming release of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers, I think all attendees will benefit from Roy's session shortly.
Next I attended Patrick Tisseghem's session on "Developing Site Definitions and Templates for Windows SharePoint Services". Not a lot of slides but a lot of CAML showing from beginning to the end on how to create a new site definition. Impressive but not something that you want to do without some coaching and pre-studying. ;-)
After lunch I attended Betsy Aoki's talk on the Microsoft's Blogging Engine - Construction and Delivery. In her first talk at TechEd Betsy talked about what's behind http://blogs.msdn.com and http://blogs.technet.com and how Microsoft.com uses smart components to get dynamic blog data onto the Microsoft.com web site. If you want to know more on blogging by Microsoft Employees, than check out these podcasts (1 & 2) of Betsy's talks at TechEd 2005.
The last session of the day I attended was the one of my colleagues Alain Leroy and Mario Szpuszta who tried to demystify the Smart Client. Alain and Mario took a deep dive into the architectural principles of the smart clients. In the demos Mario showed the new updater application block. With this block you can configure your application by using an XML configuration file which defines - on a per user base - which modules to load. Nice work guys! Check also out Mario's blog post on the presentation.
At night we had some drinks, discussions and fun at the Belux Country drink in "De Rode Hoed" in Amsterdam. Hopefully everyone enjoyed it!