Tech-Ed 2008: Quick personal summary

Tech-Ed 2008 Barcelona

It has been a while since my last post, mostly due to work and family (bah – who am I kidding, it was all work…), but I managed to find time to go to Tech-Ed 2008 in Barcelona. And any blogger with any self-respect have to put up at least one blog about this.

Even without the presentations and contents of the conference itself, it was a good trip. On Wednesday, Microsoft Norway had closed down Hard Rock Cafe and had free drinks and food for Norwegian delegates. What was cool about this was that they also hooked in a lot of the speakers and staff of the conference and had them over for drinks at Hard Rock. So my friend and I had a long and prosperous talk (at least it seemed OK but considering the amount of alcohol I had consumed, maybe it wasn’t all that prosperous) with Rockford Lothka (the author of CSLA and and excellent speaker) and his wife Theresa. Rocky, if you read this, I promise to put a little more effort into writing my novel 🙂

Another cool thing about the gathering at Hard Rock was that I met someone who had delivered newspapers to my house when I was a kid, and another guy there had lived next door to me in another city when I was even younger. And I had to come all the way from Norway to meet these guys in Barcelona. It’s a small world after all…

Back to the conference, here is a list of the things I learned at Tech-Ed that I am most likely to pursue either directly in current projects or at least to dig around in by myself:

• The keynote presented Visual Studio 2010. AWSOME!! I can hardly wait until the next CTP to get my hands on it. The WPF based editor and consume first friendly approach was kicking ass! Not to mention the extremely powerful documentation features where you could just point to a solution and you get the interaction diagrams and sequence diagrams, and you could have the diagrams directly as comments in your code! Briliant!!
• I will definitely check out ASP.Net Data Services now that I got a little insight into how to tighten down the security, access plans etc. I must admit that I have kind of dismissed RESTful services as something that only hard-core agile “I-don’t-have-to-use-real-tools-because-I-am-a-coding-guru-and-can-do-what-I-want-or-I-am-not-working-in-real-life-projects” geeks used, but combined with the interceptors and stuff you can do with Data Services it is a really powerful tool. And maybe my PHP customers can finally consume my services 🙂
• Another ASP.Net addition is the Dynamic Data stuff that I really like. Finally, a lagger like me have an easy way to really disconnect my model from my presentation. The presentation showed how to put Dynamic Data extensions and scaffolding into existing ASP.Net web applications as opposed to most of the demos out there that starts from scratch. Really useful stuff.
• I got some valuable input regarding the future of unit testing from Roy Osherove (who also stopped by Hard Rock Cafe), which was valuable. I will be exciting to see what a mix of using a dynamic language such as Boo in unit tests for C# 4.0 with support for dynamic types can do for the ease of test creation.
• I will also definitely try out Silverlight as a potential client for a part of our system. The 2.0 version where you can program C# for almost anything you need to do (you can even call DOM objects or javascript methods direcly from your C# code), makes life bearable even for a non-designer like me.
• Even SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) will be adopted now, boring as it is, using the new Threat Modeling tool as a guide for development. The new version of the modeling tool even integrates with Team Foundation System to make sure that bugs and new features are kept in sync with the model.

I’ll round this up by sharing the single most embarrassing moment of the conference; I was approached by Rune Grothaug in Microsoft Norge and was asked if I wanted to be on TV. I reluctantly agreed, believing that, being approached by a Norwegian in Norwegian, I would be on a Norwegian TV clip. But it turned out that it was an interview that will be used in the promotion of next year’s Tech-Ed, and I had to do the interview in English. And they even had the nerve to ask questions that required more than a nod back…

Anywho, look for me in the promo for next year’s Tech-Ed (which will be in Berlin, by the way).