This post is dedicated to Mark DiGiovanni who, although couldn't make it to San Diego this week, I know is with me in spirit while I'm at TechEd. You're my boy, blue!
This morning was Steve Balmer's keynote and just walking into the room was impressive. Thousands of developers in a room listening to Stevie B's sermon on the business of innovation. “Only Pfizer spends more on R&D than Microsoft.“ Steve Balmer reminded me of Jesse Ventura with his confident public speaking style . . . very impressive. The keynote demos by two Microsoft marketing folks were very fast and very rehearsed. They announced WSE 2 is officially available and the Office IBF (Information Bridge Framework) is available as a technical preview; IBF turns Office into a smart client for WSE2 . . . and WSE2 is a good precursor to Indigo, so this is good news for those of us doing web services work. We were also shown a preview of VS Team System that integrates code coverage, unit testing, security and deployment analysis, and even work items and work flow ALL INTO VISUAL STUDIO. It looked very slick! Estimated timeframe is in line with Whidbey, so next year.
After the keynote, I attended the Don Box and Doug Purdy show. They were spreading the gospel according to Service Orientation and it was great: informative and entertaining. This talk had too much good stuff to summarize it hear; nothing ground breaking, but a great summary of where we stand and where we're going with SOA. ASMX is the recommended approach, with Enterprise Services and Remoting stepping in to fill particular needs. Key take away: Web Service Extentions (WSE) gives developers Indigo-like stuff until Indigo is ready for primetime (years from now). I see WSE 2 in many of our futures!
Next, I caught a quick session on Office 2003 and VS.Net. Nothing new, but nice to affirm I've been going in the right direction. For those of you who haven't experimented with it, c# for VS Tools for Office sucks because there are no optional parameters in c# and you end up creating a lot of extra code in c# versus VB.Net. Score one for the VB.Net folks! For example, to save a Word Doc in C# takes like 20 lines of code compared to 1 in VB.Net. That's right. That's why most of the demo code is in VB.Net and, for Office stuff I do, I'm going to lean toward VB.Net as it seems the best tool for the job of extending Office.
I attended a SQL Server Reporting Services presentation that lacked personality and was dry. Reporting Services is still a nice product and recommend you all go out and burn your Crystal Report licenses . . . mine is in the “to be burned” pile.
I took a quick tour through the vendor area (there are hundreds of booths) and got sick of it. I don't really want a bunch of glossy brochures and 30 days of this thing or that . . . I know there are great products in the mix, but it's not a forum that appeals to me. Too much like a car dealership. I did grab some free stuff for Darrell and the gang back home, though, don't worry! I'm keeping the Tequila, though.
In a fit of crunchy granola fanaticism I elected to go outside the conference hall and you know what? San Diego is gorgeous. 65 degrees and sunny, with just enough breeze to let the ocean caress your nasally parts. Very nice. I took a stroll along the water and enjoyed it all. I might have to skip a few hours of the conference and get into a sea kayak or something . . . who knows when I'll get back to San Diego? For all of you planning big conferences, San Diego is terrific because the airport is within walking distance of the downtown and it's all along a beautiful bay. Cute downtown with plenty of shops and eateries.
Meanwhile . . . back at the conference, I attended my final session for the day. Eric Gunnerson, the C# compiler Program Manager, did a terrific talk on C# best practices. Not much new material, but hearing it from “the horses mouth” was worth it; Eric's dry sense of humour made this talk memorable -- anyone who writes the session agenda in c# on his first powerpoint slide is alright by me! Eric discussed the GC, exception handling, string concatenation, threading, and more. The C# team page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/ is a great reference for us to keep in mind!
- Best free beer of the day: I haven't had one yet, but I expect it to be on INETA at the Westin. There's a standing 7 PM bar tab for the INETA crew.
- Number of free garments today: 2 (both from Microsoft). I couldn't stand it any longer in the vendor hall, or else I could've scored many. Perhaps, for Darrell Norton, I'll try again tomorrow.
- Best giveaway of the day: Again, I shunned the vendor exhibits or I could've done really well. <cheesy>I'll have to settle for the brilliant view San Diego gave me on my 30 minutes outside</cheesy>.
- Grant's impression of TechEd as of Day 1: it's enormous and some of the good sessions are too crowded to fit into.
Happy .Netting!
A few details from yesterday I meant to include but forgot.
I said TechEd attendance is 11,000 . . . this is still true, but 3,000 of them are Microsoft staff. “Only“ 8,000 actual attendees.
One of the Indiana whiz kids from the coding slave meet up is Erik Porter at http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter.
MSDN Search, while broken, has some cool features planned including personalization; think about Search storing your zip code in your profile and sharing links to a local user group on the topic you search for. This could be an interesting development.
I have to change my “best free giveaway of the day” to the 750 ml of tequila from MSDN. Seriously. When I blogged last night I neglected to check the MSDN bag from the INETA summit. Hilarious. I'm assuming everyone got the tequila and not just me . . . or maybe that's part of the new MSDN Search personalization initiative . . .
Happy .Netting!