Tech Ed 2007: list of Hands-On Sessions

You can't select the Hands-On Sessions on the Tech Ed on-line shedule, so I'll make a note of those I'd like to try out here:

• SOA17-HOL - Understanding Microsoft Windows CardSpace in the DinnerNow End-to-End Scenario
• SOA20-HOL - Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Introductory Lab
• SOA21-HOL - WCF Contracts and Bindings
• SOA23-HOL - Microsoft Windows CardSpace Introductory Lab
• SOA24-HOL - Where is your applications identity?
• DEV09-HOL - Building Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Applications Using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
• DEV10-HOL - Creating a Great Looking Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Button with Microsoft Expression Blend and Expression Design
• BIN03-HOL - Performing OLAP Analysis with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005
• DAT03-HOL - Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Service-Oriented Database Architecture

Tech Ed 2007 - Usefull Links

I'm preparing my schedule and gathering some info about Tech Ed...

• Tech Ed 2007 blogs:

http://techedbloggers.net/Default.aspx

http://virtualteched.com/pages/blogs.aspx

• Tips for the newbie (like myself)

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007/newbietips.mspx

http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2007/05/19/TechmiddotEd-for-novices.aspx

• Tech Ed Connect (networking)

http://teched2007.leveragesoftware.com/

• Party with Palermo

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeffrey.palermo/archive/2007/05/04/party-with-palermo-tech-ed-2007-edition-official-announcement.aspx

• Networking and Parties

http://techedbloggers.net/TechEd2007/Extras/Networking_and_Parties.category

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007/attendeeparty.mspx

• The speakers

https://www.msteched.com/public/featuredspeakers.aspx

• Online Sessions

http://www.virtualteched.com/Pages/OnlineSessions/OnlineSessions.aspx

• The speakers I intend to listen to

Kate Gregory

Stephen Forte

Will Stott

Scott Guthrie

Luca Bolognese

Tim Stevens

Amanda Silver

What I listened to this week... #17

• ARCast.net - Training - Architect as Advocate
• Hanselminutes: Squeezing the most out of Continuous Integration - with Jay Flowers
• .NET Rocks: The ORM Smackdown! Very interesting conversation about Object Relational Mapping vs Stored Procedures.
• Hanselminutes Podcast 65 - Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson

Books I currently flip through #4

• How Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Works
• Practical .NET for Financial Markets
• Extended STL, Volume 1: Collections and Iterators
• C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

What I listened to this week... #16

• .NET Rocks: Brad Abrams Announces Silverlight
• MIX07 Buzzcast #19 - Aaron Marcus - Culture, Design, Business and Technology
• MIX07 Buzzcast #16 - Marc Canter - Digital Identity Panel
• Hanselminutes: Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on Silverlight
• Hanselminutes: Chris Sells and Scott Look Back (Part 1 of 2)
• Hanselminutes: Chris Sells and Scott Look Forward (Part 2 of 2)
• .NET Rocks: Barkol, Gallo, and Vavilalla on ASP.NET AJAX
• .NET Rocks: Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design

Books I currently flip through #3

• Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
• Windows® Presentation Foundation Unleashed
• Unit Test Frameworks
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
• Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition
• Hibernate: A J2EE™ Developer's Guide
• C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

What I listened to this week... #15

• .NET Rocks: Michele Leroux Bustamante on WCF
• .NET Rocks: Kate Gregory on Managed C++, Vista Security, and more
• .NET Rocks: Jack Greenfield on Software Factories
• ARCast.net - More Service Oriented Infrastructure with Mark Baciak (Part 1)

CeBIT 2007

I spent 2 days at the CeBIT in Hanover, Germany on March 15,16, which was an opportunity to refresh my rusty German. This expo was fun! Big names had huge booths: IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Microsoft, Samsung, O2, T-Com... If you ever think of going to CeBIT: Book in advance: I reserved my hotel only 10 days before the event and everything was taken. I wanted a room in the city center and I had to go for a hotel located outside Hanover, in a small village called Bilm. Very pleasant hotel but I had to get a taxi every time I wanted to move to town or to the fair. A guy from Alcatel-Lucent I talked to during the flight back to London told me his company had already booked the hotel for next year. Stay for a while: I stayed only for 2 days. This is clearly not enough. That thing is huge, you just can't see everything. Staying the whole week is probably a good idea. Don't go with your girlfriend: the booth babes are just plain hot. Hanover has about 500000 inhabitants with 300000 more during the CeBIT which is the most important time of the year for hotels and taxi drivers.The fair grounds (Messegelaende) cover one square kilometer. It's quite a generic show, with 20 large halls hosting business processes, communications, digital equipments and finance as shown on the plan below.

They show all sorts of things: waterproof tills, Michelin men, and hot chicks. Hall 23 hosted the PC cases and system coolers. Imagine a huge warehouse with just that: cases and fans. The guy below built a CPU cooling system using fridge parts. It's not very good looking but he managed to push a 2.9Ghz to 5Ghz. Because I need to buy myself a small laptop, I had a look at the latest notebooks. 2 models caught my attention: the Lifebook P1610 from Fujitsu Siemens and the Samsung Q1 Ultra. They both support UMTS, WIFI and have a touch screen. The Q1 looks better and uses HSDPA. However I'm not too sure about the side keys (which I tried). Nothing replaces a normal keyboard... The Fujitsu does have a normal keyboard but offers only UMTS, not HSDPA. I was told the Q1 would cost about €1500, the Fujitsu €2000. The Fujitsu is available now, the Q1 Ultra I played with at the Samsung booth was only a prototype: it should be available by the middle of this year. They even had a nostalgy zone. I learned to program with this: an Atari 1040STF. On Friday afternoon the gaming zone was packed with German teenagers, jumping to grab the freebies thrown at them by speakers on stage. EA Games had a big show and was giving away graphic cards. I spent a lot of time at the Microsoft booth, listening to short presentations about WPF/E, .NET 3.0, Sharepoint and IIS7. The T-Com area was huge. I believe I spotted Nicole Simon -the German blogger- at the O2 booth. All pictures I took at Cebit are here. I'm thinking of coming back next year and staying longer.

From CeBIT

It's 17.43 I'm in Hanover, Germany. I've been walking through this huge expo for the past 2 days. My feet hurt. Never seen anything so big. 1 square kilometer, only gadgets. I think I found the laptop I want to buy: will be either Fujitsu Livebook or Samsung Q1. Photos and sounds coming soon. For the moment, all I have is this small pic of three Freenet ladies:

What I listened to this week... #14

• Channel9: Making Windows Vista Reliable: Introduction to Windows Reliability with Mario Garzia
• Channel9: Windows Vista Diagnostics: Moving closer to a self-healing OS
• Microsoft10: Vista and Thirteen23 show you what WPF can do!
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.04.17 Reducing Code in the UI
• Polymorphic Podcast: Unit Testing and Test Driven Development
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.08.22 Architecting for Extensibility - Interview with Miguel Castro (Part 1)
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.09.13 Architecting for Extensibility - Interview with Miguel Castro (Part 2)
• Hanselminutes: Hiring and Interviewing Engineers