August 2006 - Posts
LOL. Dave says his piece. I vote that Dave organises next years party!
I have posted a download of the session Chris and I did at TechEd this year. The download contains the solutions for the demos, my demo notes and the PowerPoint presentation deck.
Download CON307 WCF Manageability.
Back in April, I posted to the Product Feedback Center regarding a bug I found in the htmltextwriter. Finally there is an official response to the submission.
Unfortunately, this bug falls into the red bits category, and so we are not able to address it in Orcas due to the potential for it to introduce compatibility issues.
Bummer. And it was such a simple fix.
I came across this post as I was catching up on my feeds after TechEd. I haven't read the post in detail, but it looks like a lot of applications will suffer some changes in the near future when the DHTML edit control is removed from the next OS.
Well, we have reached the end of TechEd. The last session I went to was Advanced Windows Presentation Foundation: Integrating With Your Windows Forms Applications & The Web by Arik Cohen. This was a really fascinating session as Arik presented the possibilities for WPF in windows applications and in the browser. I think the thing I liked most about this is that you can create your WPF application with the rich user experience, but host it in the browser which will also constrain the application to the security context of the browser. I think this will be a great selling point as it provides a rich user experience while maintaining the benefits of Internet based applications.
I asked Arik the question about what the implications are for WPF applications being used through a Remote Desktop session. My reasoning for the question is that remote desktop sessions normally pass bitmap images between the machines, but for WPF that renders in DirectX and often has animations, this isn't going to come across very well as a series of bitmaps, especially over a slow connection. Arik said that they are making changes to remote desktop so that WPF will send instructions rather than bitmaps so it will be the connecting client that will process the rendering and behaviours rather than send bitmaps. Very cool!
After the last session was the Locknote address. This was a great presentation with an awesome soundtrack and video. I emailed Frank asking if the music or video was going to be released. He said that they are looking into it, but the music was actually Technologic by Daft Punk (the video of the original is freaky BTW). They had a guy from the Microsoft Research Center in China (I don't remember his name) to present a lot of the locknote content. It was really amazing to see what they are able to do with photo and video restoration, alterations etc. The results were absolutely astounding.
So that is TechEd Australia 2006 over. Here are a few more photos.
Franks TechEd stats from the locknote address.
My pass.
Can anyone find my name in their photos of these banners? I don't think it is in this one.
I was quite surprised that most people were up and awake after the night before. I do know of a couple of people who partied hard at the nightclub, then went on from there. They didn't quite make the first session, but managed to get there for the second session of the day.
My first session for the day was ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks by Scott Guthrie. I had previously seen the PowerPoint deck and the code for this presentation from previous times Scott has presented it throughout the year. Even though I was reasonably familiar with the content, it was really good to listen to Scott as he discussed each of the items in the session. He was able to add a lot of information and background to the slides. He also answered a lot of really good questions from the audience.
Session #2 was Visual C#: Future Directions and Tips and Tricks that Dan Green presented. He was given the session without a whole lot of notice. I think he did a really good job and presented an amazing amount of really awesome IDE and 3rd part tools and features. The only issue I had from the session was that many of the items Dan presented were around the IDE and the framework rather than being C# specific. While this was still really good, I wanted to get deeper into more C# specific tips and tricks. I would like to get access to his presentation deck though.
The last session for the morning was A Developer's Overview of Windows Presentation Foundation by Arik Cohen. Of all the cool stuff that is coming out with NetFX, WPF is the one I am most passionate about. I love what user interfaces can be, but am usually left disappointed by implementations that developers have come up with. The idea that there can be a tighter working relationship between designers and developers is a situation that I am very much looking forward to. This first WPF session from Arik was a great overview of the benefits of WPF and what you can achieve with WPF.
One of the things that I don't like about Win32 UI development is that controls are almost always child windows (unless a developer has done the long hard work of rendering everything themselves). This means that the UI is restricted from using cool effects like alpha blending a controls rendering and achieving per-pixel alpha blending of the window. In Win32, there simply is no way of getting per-pixel alpha-blending on a parent window if it contains child controls that are windowed controls. I asked Arik if per-pixel alpha-blending was fully supported in WPF and he said that it is because all rendering of a WPF form is done using DirectX. We can finally enter the awesome alpha blended UI world, but people please, use your new powers for good, not evil!
I loved the demos that Arik showed. I had seen the Healthcare demo at the end of last year, but all the demos were a great demonstration of what can be easily achieved with WPF. My favourite was the treeview that was rendered as a 3D disc with items around the edge. It was a great way of displaying relationship information but not allowing the UI to be too cluttered as parent nodes in the hierarchy were shrunk and the current node was enlarged.
I think that there are people (managers of project budgets especially) who will think that WPF and all the cool stuff that goes with it (animations etc) is a waste of time, money and development resources. I really liked how Arik indirectly addressed this issue. He was talking about the animations used in the Healthcare application and the treeview control in the other demo (a CRM application?). He was saying that the animation is important because it gives visual feedback to the user:
- that they have done something;
- indicating what the affect of the action is;
- in a way that can mean something to the them.
The example of the third point was in the Healthcare demo when a different patient was selected. The UI folded over horizontally to display the selected patient. This is an action that is familiar to doctors who would traditionally have a clipboard of patient information and they would fold over the pages to look at subsequent pages.
The other thing I like is that it will be very easy to achieve these new features and the designers will have the tools to do most, if not all, of that work.
As much as I am looking forward to a world of sweet UI's, I am concerned that we are simply giving developers another method of creating really poor UI designs. Most projects I have seen have had poor UI's simply because UI designers were not used. Unfortunately, I don't think people appreciate how important a good UI is to the success of an application and the users ability to use it. I hope this changes.
The first session I went to this afternoon was ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7 (Part 2) by Scott Guthrie. Like Part 1 before lunch, I really enjoyed this session even though I didn't learn anything new.
The second session I went to was Visual Basic: Tips, Tricks and Futures by Bill McCarthy and Geoff Appleby. Bill and Geoff presented some interesting tips and tricks for VB.Net and the IDE (with several of plugs for Bill's projects :) ). I did get a chuckle out of their project working when it was supposed to break and breaking when it was supposed to work. I guess I got off light with only one demo glitch with my session. Hehe, bad luck boys :P.
The last session of the day for me was Developing Data-Driven Web Applications with .NET Language Integrated Query with Scott again. I have heard a lot about LINQ and its derivatives but haven't actually seen it in action. LINQ is some seriously cool stuff. This was obviously a subject that Scott was excited by and enjoyed presenting. I'm looking forward to playing with this in the coming months.
I did have one question in this session that I didn't get to ask. Scott mentioned that LINQ does delayed execution so that the query is called at the last moment. I was wondering what happens if you then reuse that query. Does it execute again, or is the result cached?
After the sessions were finished for the day, there was the party at the Home nightclub. I was there for a couple of hours, but like Geoff, I'm just not into the nightclub scene.
After my session was finished, I went over to see Payam do his Windows Communication Foundation: Building Secure Services session. I was a little late to this one, but it was a great overview of what you can do with WCF and security.
Given that I haven't had a lot to do with certificates etc, that part of the session was interesting. It's good so see that in WCF there are a lot of security options available. I like the fact that you can encrypt parts of a message rather than taking the hammer approach and encrypting everything.
I think it was good that Payam make a clear distinction between scenarios where you want either no security, want to ensure that the message hasn't been tampered with or where you don't want someone to read part or all of a message. I suspect that most people put message tampering and encryption into the same box but they really are different levels of security.
After the WCF session, I went to ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7 (Part 1) by Scott Guthrie. Scott was a great speaker with good stage presence and interactions with the audience. Being a seasoned speaker, I think he handled questions throughout the session really well. He answered a lot of questions during the session (and more afterwards) but he didn't let the questions change the direction of the session.
Because I have spent most of my time developing ASP.Net and the last 18 months or so with VS2005, I didn't learn anything new from the session, but I still really enjoyed it.
After Scott's session, I asked why System.Web.Caching is under System.Web namespace and whether it relies on some of the ASP.Net framework code. There is a lot of cool stuff with the caching support with the cache dependencies and cache expiration that would be really useful outside ASP.Net. He said that it was tied to ASP.Net in some small ways. From memory, he said that they were planning on releasing caching support outside ASP.Net, but there is also caching support today in the Caching Application Block in the Enterprise Library.
Given that Scott used a lot of his break times to answer questions, he didn't have much time before he was supposed to start Part 2 of his session. I was fortunate to have a one-on-one lunch with him before he had to head off for his next session. It was fantastic to chat with Scott about his work at Microsoft. He was interested to hear about .Net adoption in Australia as well. It was a good chat over good food.
Can the success of a conference be measured by the quality and quantity of coffee? Perhaps not, but it certainly helps.
Firstly, it has to sit up and bark. This was my after-session coffee.
Having 5 of these carts around the exhibition hall was a good move,
but sometimes it was a painful wait though.
Chris and I got to the presentation room early in the morning so we could setup and make sure everything was sorted. We then went out to have a relaxed breakfast at a cafe on Darling Harbour before the session started at 8:30.
I really enjoyed the experience of presenting and just had a blast. There were 135 people registered for the session, but it is hard to know exactly how many came through the door, but we had a full room with some people having to stand. Ashman (Ashley), the technical guy for the room, was really helpful and all the gear in the room as well as the VPC server worked perfectly.
I only got hit with the demo gods once. From memory, I think something wasn't being written to the trace/message logs in one of the demos, but that was fairly minor. From a technical point of view, all the other demos went well albeit a little rushed.
The presentation was well planned and on the whole I think it went well. There were a few presentation style issues that Chris and I had, but that is all stuff that is good for the experience and things that we can learn from.
It was unfortunate that we didn't get many evaluation forms filled out for the session. Of those that did submit their evaluations, the comments were very helpful for feedback. If you went to the session and want to provide any more feedback, please contact me, I would love to hear what you thought of the session (good and bad). I was able to have a really good chat to Dave (who organised the Connected Systems track) straight after the session and he was really happy with how it went.
This afternoon I was going to go to a WF session, but I bailed so that I could spend some time on my session, making sure that the demos were going to behave themselves.
Oh, forgot to mention. I got to meet Berno this morning which was really good.
In the evening, Chris and I were a little late to 'Ask the experts' because we were able to get access to the room we will give our session in. It was helpful to be able to see the room and check that the VPC works from the main VPC server using my laptop as the client. The Connected Systems area of 'Ask the experts' was a little quiet which is unfortunate, but other areas seemed to get a lot of people asking questions.
I had a early start this morning, leaving Canberra at 4:30am in the vain hope of making it to the keynote address at TechEd in Sydney this year. My perfect plan was foiled by traffic on the M5 making me get to the conference at 9:30 rather than the intended 8:30.
After checking in, I headed over to my first two sessions. Introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation: Introduction, both of which were presented by Payam Shodjai. These were fantastic sessions and gave a great overview (including several code demos) of these up and coming releases.
Intro to .Net 3.0 (now called NetFX3) covered CardSpace, WCF, WF and WPF. This session gave great coverage of NetFX for all types of people (managers, developers etc). CardSpace I am finding really interesting because it should (over time), change the way we authenticate with many web sites which will provide a much more secure and user friendly internet. The explanation of WCF and its demos was a good opportunity for me to see how other presenters are showing off WCF. My WCF session will cover some of the same points, but my implementation is quite different. The thing that really hit home for me was the easy way to create a WF application with its designer and how you can step though a debug session in the designer. Very cool! Lastly, but certainly not least is WPF which I am excited about. I hope that WPF will bring about a UI revolution to the desktop application like browser rendering has done with internet applications.
Intro to WCF was an extended version of Intro to .Net 3.0 which went into a lot more detail and explanation. I am looking forward to Payam's WCF security session tomorrow.
I would post some photos, but I don't have any. I keep forgetting to bring my camera in. Maybe later...
I'll be driving up to Sydney first thing tomorrow morning. I will hopefully get there for the keynote address.
If you are going to be at TechEd this year, come over and have a chat. I'll be in the WCF corner for the "ask the experts" bash tomorrow night.
I should look reasonably similar to this:
As someone who has sat in on a lot of presentations, I know that there is always this little bit of awkwardness when hardware runs on the slow side. The presenter is waiting for the demo/presentation machine to catch up and the audience is waiting for the presenter. I guess it is only a seasoned presenter who can easily fill those empty few seconds that come around unannounced.
It has been a little hard to know how our session is going to go for time because although the hardware running my demo VPC is good, it is definitely not a grunt machine and we have a lot to get through. Because of this, Jeff's post about the Microsoft's VPC server farm is really good news. Less slow downs means more time for information to be smoothly presented. This paddock of muscle servers should make for both a happy audience and happy presenter.
Can't wait to play!
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