Tuesday: Jam Sessions

The conference shuttles were travelling from 8.30pm to 1am between the hotels and the City Walk next to Universal Studios. The jam sessions were taking place at the Groove, booked by Microsoft for the occasion. The Universal Studio City Walk is a funny sort of place. It looks like Aya Napa without the sex and the drunken Brits. Some sort of polished, clean but still over-the-top nightlife area. There is a lot of music in the streets but no broken bottles, no fights, and nobody vomiting. Women don't shout, flock or swear as they do in the UK. People wait in line for drinks at the bar (as for the till at Tesco's) ! Do you believe that? And of course everywhere is non smoking. The live band (Tech Ed attendees) was brilliant. At one point Carl Franklin joined at the guitar. A few videos I took with the mobile phone: Jam Session1.mp4 Jam Session2.mp4 Jam Session3.mp4

Tuesday: TLC about Types of Objects

Attended my first Interactive Theater session. ARC18-TLC - Making Sense Out of all the Types of Objects Tuesday, June 5 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM, Blue Theater 9 Speaker(s): Rockford Lhotka Not too sure about the format. There is too much distracting noise coming from around the booth, you can't hear people when they ask questions... The booths should be closed and sound-proofed so that the thing works... Rockford said a few things that made me click, among which:

"Software re-use is not a goal but a side-effect of refactoring. The consequence of re-use is tight coupling, and you don't want that."

hee hee...

Tuesday: Linq and ASP.NET

Saw one breakout session about Linq and two about ASP.NET.

DEV324 - The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework
Tuesday, June 5 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM, N320 A
Speaker(s): Luca Bolognese

Luca delivered a lively talk where he demonstrated the elegance of writing queries in LINQ. From C# you can now write code that looks very similar to a SQL query where the 'FROM table' is an object implementing IEnumerable and the resultset goes into a variable.

It works with SQL Server for the moment and could work with Oracle whenever Oracle releases a provider for it.

If LINQ worked with Oracle, this could be a nice way to code business rules in C# instead of PL/SQL stored procedures (IDE support for PL/SQL is very crude) or nHibernate (I'm afraid of ORM complexity from a debugging perspective).

Luca's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/

WEB305 - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET "Orcas" and Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" (Part 1 of 2)
Tuesday, June 5 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S230 E
Speaker(s): Scott Guthrie


Attended both sessions by Scott. What I'll remember:

• Visual Studio 2008 will support multi-targeting. That means when you create a project you can say whether you want to use .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5.
• The HTML designer in Visual Studio is getting serious (same engine as Expression), although not as powerful as Dreamweaver, it's getting there: fast source switching, split design/code views...
• CSS support: you select an HTML element and see what CSS rules apply to it or select a CSS rule and see all HTML elements it applies to. You can also change the CSS properties in one window and immediately see the results in the other window.
• LINQ: when running a link query the VS debugger shows the SQL query that was generated by LINQ. It also shows the data retured by the query. Very cool, lots of clapping in the audience when Scott demonstrated that.
• VS2008 supports Javascript debugging (breakpoints, step by step) as well as intellisense. Again the audience loved it.

Tech Ed Shopping List

My shopping list:

• Get my Office T-shirt scanned (TLC green area)
• Decide whether or not to buy the HP Tx1000z
• Have a look at the demos for each 3rd party .NET controls libraries: VS components round-up. 12pm to 1.45pm N310A on Wednesday.
• Watch a demo of Visual Studio 2008
• Go through the hands-on labs I selected.
• Fill out the evals.

Tools and SDKs I must check out before I die

Before I forget:

• Devexpress (refactoring tools)
• Infragistics
• Telerik (cool controls)
• BT's Web21C SDK: set up calls between phones with very little code.
• Visual Studio Extensibility Toolkit

Monday: Brain Freeze

The batteries on my laptop are about to run out. So are mine. Got up at 6am, saw the keynote (featuring Christopher Lloyd), listened to Ron Jacobs talk about Model View Presenter, did a hands-on lab about Cardspace, listened to Kate Gregory talk about C++/CLI. Kate Gregory's blog: http://www.gregcons.com/kateblog/ Exhausted. The jet lag plus the lack of sleep are taking their toll. Need to sleep. Not sure I'll go to the jam sessions tonight... I wanted to see a TLC about Team System for Small Agile Teams but I turned out on time (as opposed to 30 minutes in advance) and the theater was already packed. So I completed my Cardspace Hands-on Lab instead.

Sunday: Party with Palermo

Just came back from the party hosted by Jeffrey Palermo at the Glo Lounge on International Drive. Good atmosphere and free beer. Jeffrey set up a game where you had to look up people's badge to find a pattern matching yours and win stuff (London's FOWA did a similar kind of thing). Always a good way to get people to move around and talk to each other, although alcohol also played a role. I discussed for a while with Tatsumi from Sweden. Later we talked about Web Apps, Spring, Java and the price of cigarettes with Mark Pollack from Interface21. Mark is giving a session this week about Sprint.NET (ARC402 - Understanding Spring.NET - 7/6/2007 16:30). Got a chance to say hello to Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. From all the podcasts I listen to, it is definitely theirs I enjoy the most so it was fun to meet them in real life. Also bumped into Michelle Leroux Bustamante who talked several times on .NET rocks. I'm sure I have seen many more people I've either heard on a podcast or read about in a blog but I didn't know their faces... Very enjoyable party! Tomorrow, got to get up early to catch the keynote at 8.30am. I have the feeling this week is going to be a very good week!

Sunday: registration

It's Sunday, only pre-conferences and registrations today. The South Concourse of the Orange County Convention Center is relatively quiet. People come to register, get a badge, a sticker for Thursday's party and a bag full of info. Some sit down on the carpet to chat. There are security agents moving around with Segways...

Landed in Orlando

I landed at Orlando airport at 15.30. It took a while to queue at the immigration, wait for the luggage at the carousel (they call it carousel here), queue for the customs, give back the luggage (?), change terminals, wait again for the luggage at another carousel. I took a Mears shuttle from the airport to the hotel (it's cheaper than the taxis but it takes longer). I shared the minibus with a cheerful and talkative Microsoft employee, Ken Jones, who will be speaking on Monday at Tech Ed. Ken works with Microsoft Press, where he helps technical authors build the business case and content for their books. This is the session he will give on Monday:

LNC01 - How to Get Published: What it Takes to Become a Technical Author on Microsoft Technologies Monday, June 4 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, N220 A Speaker(s): Martin DelRe, Linda Engelman, Ken Jones Microsoft Press publishes a large variety of technical books for IT Professionals, Developers, and the home audience. And we’re always looking for good authors! If you’ve ever thought of turning your subject matter expertise and hard-earned knowledge into a book, this could be a great start! In this panel discussion, learn how to write a proposal, what we look for in deciding whether to publish your book, and how you can help sell your book once it’s on the market.

I'm staying at the Holiday Inn, between Universal Boulevard and International Drive. Big room with safe, large TV, desk and free broadband internet. International Drive has plenty of places to eat and I'll investigate that tonight.

Just finished packing

It's 18C here, 27C in Orlando. I'm flying on Saturday, resting on Sunday. The action starts on Monday.