Santosh Benjamin

Express, Team System and more BizTalk

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!!