Teched 2004
blog posts from Teched 2004 in Eilat, Israel (May 4 - May6)
Sql Server 2005: .NET Framework-based Programming in the Database - Hans Verbeek
Hans talked and demonstrated how to use the .NET CLR which is hosted in Yukon and the trade offs between writing code in .NET vs. T-SQL.
Although I'm not a DBA, it was very interesting.
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An overview for Indigo for Developers- Shy Cohen, Indigo Program Manager
Shy gave a peek into Indigo and what it means.
Bottom line: to be best prepared for merging application into Indigo, use .NET Enterprise Services
Architects Panel
The most interesting event I attended. I really hope it was recorded, although it seems it wasn't.
The panel discusses various architectural issues such as: .NET languages, Object Spaces ORM and relational databases, Microsoft and the enterprise market,
Mono, Patterns & Practices and more.
This post was written after the Teched was finished
What's new in .NET 2.0 for The Developer
Generics in the CLR 2.0
- both presented by Juval Lowy. Very interesting peak at the near future. If you don't know what generics are, you better start reading about it, because generics is the feature that will narrow the gap in performance between managed and unmanaged code.
BTW, for those who are asking why the edit and continue feature was not implemented in C#, opposed to VB.NET:
Juval let out a secret. He sits on a board which decides which features to add to the C# language and compiler.
Every attendant gets a number of points, and he can give any number of these points for any feature he believes is important. The features with the most points get implemented. The last time the board took a vote, the edit and continue feature got 0 points, which means it probably won't become implemented in the feature, unless a lot of pressure is applied by developers and clients.
Juval went on to demonstrating the difference between VB.NET and C#:
As opposed to VB.NET where a programmer typically starts coding away, then running and editing on the fly, in C# the developer spends most of the time thinking: maybe we should do it this way ... but then again maybe we should do it that way.
Although this is exaggerated of course, Juval's point was that disabling edit and continue leads to better design.
On the other hand, .NET is all about productivity.
What do you think?
XML with performance in mind
In a very good presentation, Yair Shivak presented the new XML XPath 2.0, which will give the XPath power with the performance of the 1.1 XmlReader
bottom line of presentation was: If you haven't been using XML in your applications yet, it's now the time to learn how, and in CLR 2.0 it will be even easier, and the performance will be much better too.
Scalability
presented by Clemens Vasters, this was an architectural talk about scalability and the different ways to scale an application, with examples from the real world such as how Hotmail, Google, Ebay and Amazon scale.
Here are my impressions of my first day at Teched:
1. The organization is excellent.
2. The food and cocktail party was very tasty.
3. If this was how Steve Balmer talks when he is all jetlagged, I wonder how hw talks after a full night of sleep (monkey dance?)
4. Very funny video of the interview with Bill Gates (mock). Especially the end where BillG receives a linux redhat as a present. (door stopper?
5. Murphy's Teched Law: There are either at least 2 interesting lectures at the same time, or there is no really interesting lecture at all.
The Teched started, and I'm waiting for Steve Balmer's presentation to start.
My original intent was to blog live from my Pocket Pc, however there is a problem with the WI-FI connection for mobile devices. The WIFI was put up by Internet Zahav, and they already acknowledged that there is a problem, but haven't solved it yet. Their tech support wasn't very impressive at all.
I've been to 2 lectures/presentations so far:
What's new in Visual Studio 2005 - Unfortunately, I haven't learned anything new. Maybe I shouldn't participate in the user groups and listen to webcasts :-)
Introductino to programming with the .NET CF- interesting, very nice introductory lecture about programming with the .NET compact framework.