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: TechEd Australia 2006 - CON307 - WCF Manageability.zip (876.99 kb)
I have finally put my posts together for my TechEd experience for this year. These are the main posts if your interested:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…