June 2004 - Posts
Here are my thoughts on the sessions I attended today
KEYNOTE: Quite interesting. The pre-session time where they made us all bang African drums was funny. Never been to a programme like this one. DevWeek was a rather sober affair when i went there in 2003. Anyway, the new announcements regarding the EXPRESS products was good and well recieved. The fact that they had people lined to give demos immediately made it even better. Looks like MS is consolidating at the low end with products like VB Express an area whic people thought they had started losing with .NET. Why even Sun tried to start wooing VB developers into Java with their Studio Creator tool. Fat chance!! They havent a snowballs chance in hell of doing that now. VB 2005 is just plain classy and VS 2005 blows em all away.
TEAM SYSTEM - Kill 'Em All : Perhaps MS should take the album title from METALLICA !! VS Team System is the way to go!! Modelling, bug tracking, unit testing, config management and all that in just one tool. Thats sooo much better than the mish-mash we have now. So what does the Java world have in answer? Eclipse?
Generally though, MS has definitely raised the bar for its partners in VS. Actually methinks Mercury Interactive wont be very happy about the in-built load testing tools in VS now. Sure, they will make supportive noises and say that if you want truly Enterprise Class load testing you have to go to them, which quite possibly is correct, but they will definitely lose a lot of market share. In any case they are damn expensive, so now not everyone has to go to those lengths for performance testing. One good thing to have, and i dont know if its there already, would be to click on the 'Performance Issue' and have some helpful diagnostic messages come out saying exactly what is wrong. I like the graphs in load testing , but they dont tell me anything immediately. Yeah, Im not an experienced tester, but surely MS can help out here!!
THE PROMISE OF WHIDBEY and YUKON : At least i thought thats what the session was all about. It turned out to be a demo of WEB EXPRESS!! Bah.. great tool and all that, but i could have seen it all on the DVD. Pity is that I didnt have any other sessions lined up instead/ Maybe I should have gone for the LABS instead.
BIZTALK by David Chappell: As expected, this was a great session from David. 'Articulate' should be his middle name. Just like his writing, his talks are very clear and very informative and plenty of times, thought provoking. I enjoyed the session. As you might have guessed, it wasnt a deep technical one, but he explained very well how BTS fits into an SO world and raises the bar for its rivals. I didnt realise how EAI and B2B can really be considered subsets of BPM, before this session, but now it makes sense.
BTS HANDS ON LABS: Didnt attend any session after Chappells. Was considering going to the THREAT MODELING talk, but scrapped that in favor of continuing with the BTS HOL as i was just starting the Orchestration exercises. Really good stuff, but too little time to fit it all in. And the fact that the labs close at 19:30pm is even worse. They should keep them open longer. Otherwise we have to sacrifice sessions to attend the labs!! I've just about finished half the labs and hope to get some time tomorrow to complete them. Dont think I'm going to get another training opportunity like this when I get back.
Anyway gotta go now and grab some free T- Shirts!!
Just finished the morning session on BizTalk. Excellent stuff. He is building an application from start to finish and demo'ing all the key concepts along the way.This is especially valuable since all the main sessions will be focussing on specific topics in BTS and drilling down into them. So this session now has saved my bacon considering I didnt watch any of the webcasts in preparation. Up until now we have built a couple of moderate sized orchestrations, done a secure messaging example and worked out mesage correlation.The afternoon promises to be more in detail on transaction handling and all that. Long running transactions and human intervention are key to the project I'm working on so i need to see how those work.
UPDATE - 7:00pm
Okay. So the session did go off really well in the afternoon too inspite of it being the 'graveyard' shift for presenters. Understood the concepts really well, (i hope). Now I'm waiting to complement that with David Chappells talk on BTS in an SO world. Saw the PPT just now and it looked really cool. Just managed to work through a schedule for the next couple of days with lots of HOL planned for tomorrow afternoon to get my head round BTS. Must not forget to talk to the sponsors and vendors to get a look at tool roadmaps. Gotta go and try and read my .NET Developers Journal which has a full edition dedicated to BizTalk
Now I'm really excited. Just a couple of days to go. I fly out on Sunday evening so I can be ready for the BizTalk Pre-Conference Session. I tried my best to set apart some time to watch some webcasts on the topics, but couldnt do it. So now I am going in cold, something I wanted to avoid. Dont know if I can find the time on this weekend to watch at least one or two of them. But I guess the pre-conf will have to do the job since the entire day focusses on it. Will post again later today or tomorrow.
I'm floored! What can I say ? As I mentioned in my previous post, I had sent a mail to Harry Pierson about the possibility of some MSF and MOF docs to accompany ShadowFax and I got a reply within minutes!! Here's what Harry says,
Not sure about P&P's plans around MOF and MSF, but I know that we are doing a bunch of MSF work as part of our newly announced Visual Studio Team System. You can read about VSTS's support for MSF here. Obviously, there's the issue that VSTS won't be released until next year, but does this help somewhat?
That certainly does help. I mean, I was looking for something a bit sooner, but knowing that VSTS will be rejuvenating MSF and MOF is quite interesting and encouraging.
I guess I'll plow through the ShadowFax documents and anything else that comes out relating to FABRIQ and try and stick it in some MSF docs myself. Hey,maybe that would be a good idea!. A community effort to build some sample docs for these projects. Wonder if anyone else was thinking about things like this.
I'm getting quite confused now. I read some comments on the GotDotNet site that seemed to indicate that the ShadowFax material was available for download, but I cant find it anywhere!! Does anyone know?
I just sent a mail to Harry Pierson about the possibility of the PAG group collaborating with the MSF and MOF teams to deliver some sample MSF/MOF documents around ShadowFax. This way we would get some great code, architectural documentation as well as project life cycle docs covering a SOA application. It would be a definite boost for all those struggling to bring their architectural documentation upto scratch.
I like the MSF templates, but there are a lot of sections and categories of information which sound fascinating, but I havent a clue on what exactly to put in there. It would be nice to see some distinct Conceptual, Logical and Physical architecture diagrams dealing with real life case studies. The only one I've managed to use properly is the DEVELOPMENT PLAN which gave me quite a lot to mull over and plan for in my previous project.
Is anyone else building up their schedule at the TechEd Attendee website? I find the Session Voting tool rather difficult to use. Its one huge page that just goes on and on and on!! Its so easy to get lost in the list of sessions and the dates /times. Whats your experience of it?
Its nice that MS is giving us the chance to push our favorite sessions to the top, but I suspect that in the end, if we have a common set of favorites distributed among Architecture, Development, Data Management, Developer Tools etc, those sessions will end up running all in parallel because they were at the top of their respective piles!!
Then I thought I would focus on the Hands-On Labs I tried printing out the list of labs and got a 30 page document as a result. That doesnt include Messaging and Operations!!
The last conference I went for was DevWeek 2003 and that being much smaller, they just sent us the agenda and the session list and times and all we had to do was choose what to go for, which in itself was difficult. How do you choose between Jeff Prosise, Aaron Skonnard, Niels Berglund and Ingo Rammer?
Anyway, I gotta try and work through that huge list of sessions. I am sure of 1 at this point. The FABRIQ SOA app is definitely top of my list. I attended one of the Technical Roadshows and Aravindra Sehmi (unless I've mixed him up with someone else) was one of the facilitators for the technical breakout session and had some excellent pointers with regard to SOA tenets. If that is anything to go by, the FABRIQ session willl be a full-house.
Speaking of SOA, wonder what happened to ShadowFax. Does anyone know?
Diplomacy ain't my strong point, it would seem. Looks like I ruffled a few feathers with my post on the accessibility issue. Actually I'm honored to have Scott Mitchell himself comment on the post. I believe its a golden rule never to delete blog entries or feedback even if you are highly embarassed, so I'll leave them on to remind myself to be careful next time. However, I have edited the content slightly so I dont get flamed!
On the lines of my reply to Scott, I think that ASP.NET is an awesome leap in technology and v2.0 promises to be even better and the fact that everything is so extensible is like the icing on the cake. Now if only we can persuade more people to take advantage of these features and build even better sites instead of hurriedly chucking a few controls together on a page.
How about an extension to FxCop that runs through custom controls/generated code? Or is it just easier to point an online accessibility compliance checker at the site? The FxCop route may be better in terms of prevention rather than cure.
Now maybe I should talk about MCMS 2002 next? Or would that get me thrown out of the site? :-)
I just came across this article by Scott Mitchell on the ASPNET Developer Centre (MSDN).
The blurb says "Take advantage of inheritance in the .NET Framework to extend ASP.NET classes to make them generate ASP.NET code that is fully accessible to people with disabilities"
Sounds good, but I'm still working through it so I will reserve my comments till I get the whole picture. In the meanwhile I've asked our resident accessibility and web design guru to examine it for use in my current project
I'm happy to see this, and I'd like to wait and watch to see how many people take good advice and exploit the features in the technology to author accessible sites.
Of course, if the claim were that acessibility was baked into the product, (and no one is claiming this) then I would be extremely doubtful and for a good reason. MS doesnt have a good name when it comes to standards compliance. Look at the rubbish they implement in Office HTML (not the round-tripping stuff, thats there for a good reason) and of course FrontPage. Here's a great article about their lack of support for standards in-spite of the noises emanating from Redmond that would seem to suggest otherwise.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that they seem to be moving in the right direction and I'm sure they have the talent in their teams to do more and faster. How far will it go?
In case you havent already seen this Webcast Series link on MSDN, go check it out. MS has assembled a series of webcast links, part of their massive library of webcasts, with material specific to TechEd 2004 so we can get upto speed. I think its a very good contribution from MS and well worth it. I'm a big fan of the webcasts they provide and watch them whenever I get the chance. Was planning to set up a Webcast Watch on a Tech site earlier, but I might still manage to do that with this blog.
Anyway, head there and have a look. I'm certainly going to check out the BizTalk stuff. The way I see it, there's no point in attending the Introductory sessions on BTS, P&P etc. All that stuff is easy to learn on videos and whitepapers. The meatier bits would be the level 300 sessions, hands on labs, chalk and talks etc so I can save valuable seminar time by targeting them.
Hope you find the videos worth your while too. Do write back and let me know which ones you watched and what you thought about them.
I'm really excited. My first .NET blog!! I have one on my guitar website, obviously dealing with guitar related stuff but this marks my entry into the Software blogs world and the fact that I'm going to get this started with TechEd 2004 related posts makes it even more exciting for me.
So, what should I write here? Perhaps I should introduce myself. Here goes.
I'm a Technical Architect working with netdecisions, based in London, U.K. I have been working in ND for the past 5+ years and overall I've been in s/w development for nearly 8 years (started in September 96). Started my career with Ramco Systems in Chennai, India and moved to London in April 1999. I started out working with Visual C++ 1.52c (and actually did some development with the Windows SDK on Windows 3.1) and SQL Server 6.0. When I came to the U.K I focussed more on databases as there was no C++ related work and performed the role of Database Architect.
Over the past couple of years I've been moving up into a wider architectural role. But I won't bore you with the details now. Maybe later (;-)). Right now I'm all set for TechEd Europe 2004 and God willing, it should be a great time.
However, between now and then I'll keep posting the stuff I'm doing to get prepared for Tech Ed.
Hope to build up some good contacts here at DotNetJunkies among the bloggers, blog readers and any Tech Ed attendees from this site.
Cheers.