Stefan Barrett

Tomorrow am returning home, to Tokyo. Atlanta has been fun, but it does seem like city where you need a car or seriously figure out the metro. Next years TechEd is in Orlando, I like the convention centre, but it seems to in the middle of nowhere. In Tokyo, I live close to middle of city, with plenty to do everywhere. It's funny, when I was living in England, my passport lasted 10 years, but in 4 years in Japan I've filled up the passport with all the trips, exploring Asia. Actually happy going home, but still suffering from the jet lag from coming over - now I have a week of jet lag back home. Got to explore the TechEd in Tokyo, but suspect I wil still be coming to the US, regardless of how boring I sometimes find the cities - the important thing is the convention itself, through Last years conference in New Orleans was fun.

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Next years TechEd will be in Orlando, with registration starting around 24th. Planning on going, but do wonder how it will go. This year have not gone to as many 400 level events, nor has there been as many 'famous' speakers. Perhaps they are holding off till PDC - got to make this years one, missed last year due to being too busy. The content has been good, with some talk of VS vNext - which I want now. One of the main focuses seems to be on simplifying the developer experience. They will have a search box to find commands in the VS - ha ha. One really good thing; the project files are compatible between VS2010 and vNext Have seen a new product VS LightSwitch (currently beta2), must learn more - not because I really want to use it, but can think of several People who could use this.

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So many people have iPhones or iPads this year - in fact, i'm writing this blog on one. The fact that MS also released the tag reader on iTunes shows that they have realised this, explaining why WP7 Is being pushed so strongly at this years TechEd. Every year I bring my laptop to TechEd, but this year have not needed to use it - have been able to do everything on the iPad, which is so much lighter than a laptop or the tablets they gave away a couple of years ago. I wonder how many years it will be until MS recommends that everubody comes with a tablet to get full use out of such conventions.

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Keynote was interesting as usual - and as usual they overran. It did feel a bit rushed, particularly the section on office, where it took took too long to figure out what the speaker was talking about. Nothing really big announced, but the 100,000,000 rows in excel, or 2,000,000,000 rows in VS was interesting.

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Big room, with space for lots of people, but not the biggest teched keynote room they've had. Breakfast was ok, among the better ones they've served up. They are really pushing the myTech*Ed, formally CommNet - I wonder if they've finally got it right. Taken them long enough. At least it worked on day 1 :)

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Looks interesting. Wp7 is based on SL3, bits of SL4 and a bit other. Mango to be based on SL4, later this year.

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First day - silverlight. What can we do

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Left LA yesterday (or was it the day before  - you cross the internation date-line on way back), and was not the most impressed about either UA (who I flew with) or the airport itself.

Arrived about 3 hour early, and went to self service check in - they are obviously saving money by automating as much as possible (yes cheaper flights are nice, but..). Check in started pretty ok, the machines were pretty easy to use, but then the process sloweded. Because of my nationality and destination, an 'agent' had to check the passport. After waiting a little while one of the people who where handling queries, luggage, etc. (est. 1 person per 10 machines, they were busy) came over and informed me that 'agent' would have to check passport (they were just normal mortals) and there was currently no agents around.... By the time 2 'agents' showed up about half a hour later, possible as much as half of the machines had people waiting..

After waiting about 40 minutes, an 'agent' looked at my passport, gave me a ticket and I headed off to passport check.. Only to discover that I had been given the wrong ticket, one for another person who's surname started with the same 3 characters.... Life.. Luckly it only took a couple of minutes to get a replacement ticket - jumped the queue and went straight to the 'agent' who had issued the original.

Went back to passport check/x-ray/etc. only to find a longer queue.. In LA, like some other places in the world, you have to take your shoes off so they can be x-rayed seperatly - and there's not much space to take them off, or put them back on again - everything is as cramped as possible.  And, of course, the x-ray machine broke down just before I went through so we had to wait another 5 minutes while they got it rebooted (not sure of OS). Once through all of that, I discovered that all the delays were not really a problem, since there was very little to do while waiting for flight home - I guess I'm a bit to used to being in international airports which tend to have more shops and restuants as opposed to airports servicing mainly locals.

Ahhh well, it's just another 7 weeks, or so, until I fly again - it's Christmas time again

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Well, that was a fun week but it's nice to be home through got to go into work tomorrow. Might have changed teams while I was away .

It's interesting comparing LA with Tokyo -Toyko has more people and may be bigger, but LA is more spread out. You can walk a lot further in LA without seeing anything than you can in Tokyo.

LA does have a metro but it does not cover much of the city, so assuming you have no car, you switch to metro busses. Part of the problem is how spread out LA is - I don't think I've ever got on a underground train, which for part of its journey travelled above ground; part of the time as a normal train and part of the time as a tram travelling the city streets.

The bus network does seem to cover most of the city, but was a lot more confusing for a tourist  than most undergrounds are.

Compared with Tokyo which has a hugh Metro and JR [main line train system] network. This makes it easy to get around central Tokyo (which is like the entire LA area, but compressed). One point LA's favour was that it was a bit cheaper to buy a daily travel pass ($5, approx 500 yen) through it looked like extra payments might be required in some cases.
Tokyo does have a bus network as well, but never tried it - partly because have never needed to, and partly due to the language. All the metro stations I've seen have signs in English (as well as Japanese of course) - including the station names.

Another difference was not so good; in the week I was there I observed a car crash (bad enough that some liquid was pouring out the front of one of the cars) and saw two people fighting. I also got asked for money a number of times (through to be fair that's happened in every US city I've been to, and used to happen in London as well) and once somebody tried to buy something from me - didn't try to clarify.

Ahh well.. Went to a pizza place in downtown LA where they had some quite acceptable pizzas - apart from the toppings they had a honey wheat dough that produced a very nice base.

Visited Long Beach and walked along the beach for a couple of hours - quite nice.

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Back home after a conference which flew by.

The main bits I'm going to be playing with, will be the .NET 4.0 - I wonder how long it will be before we can get our hands on it.

One of the main selling points for me, was the new dynamic keyword, which a number of presenters got a laugh from describing as "... statically declaring as dynamic". This will make talking to office (from C#) a lot easier but the potential for abuse is quite high. Basically it allows you to write something like:

dynamic something = someObject.someChildObject;
something.Func();

Where the someChildObject property on someObject actually returns a object. At run time, and not compile time, Func gets resolved.

This would allow somebody to write something like:

dynamic func(dynamic a, dynamic b)
{
        return a.Func(b);
}

You can pass anything into this function, as long as 'a' has a function which takes 'b' and returns something.

 

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PDC seems to be all about

• .NET 4.0 and beyond
• How to make use of all the cores in our machines
• How to make use of the cloud
• Windows 7
• Touch screens

The added features in .NET 4.0 I could use now - so it's sort of useful that they've given us a VPC with VS2010 on it. That's enough to play with, but personally I would have prefered to get a image so I could install it on a existing system.

Recycling seems to be much more important this year - which is good. Bit of warning regarding the bag would have been nice.

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When I went to TechEd, I though I would do a bit of blogging every day, but I had forgotten just how busy you can get here. There's just so much to see. While you do get the DVD's containing all the sessions (except Chalk-Talk ones), it takes at least 8 weeks and nothing beats being there.

Have got a copy of Visual Studio for Database professionals, which will be installed as soon as possible. While I'm not sure about using in production environment yet (if nothing else, it's not the finished version), the assistance it can give in development and testing means its worth looking at now.

Micorsoft needs to tidy up it's marketing regarding WCF, WPF, Link, WF, etc. when it coming to what versions it will be released in (first time I've heard of .Net 3.5). It seems that .Net 3.0 will come out with Vista, but actually .Net 3.0 is more .Net 2.0 + WCF, WPF, WF. So you still use Visual Studio 2005 to work it. Then in 2007 we get Orcas/Visual Studio 2007 with .Net 3.5 which includes Linq. But at the end of the day, apart from bug fixes, we are still talking about .Net 2.0 with extras.

Microsoft seems to have a small problem in classifying the level of some of the sessions, typically rating them slight higher than they warrent.

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No major announcements in this TechEd, through there are new products such Visual Studio for Database. Went to a number of sessions today ; First one was about business reporting which was interesting through not sure if it end user extensible enough for the system I'm currently working on, but I guess that's one of the advantages of TechEd, is that I can grap somebody and ask them.

The next session covered the architecture version of visual studio. Nothing really new, but it was the first time I had seen it all in one go, with such a coherent explaination.

The next one covered wcf and how you don't need to use it with soap. In otherwords, you can use in cases where performance is important and you don't want to through all of the soap xml around.

Then a session covering dlink which didn't really cover anything new.

The last session covered new features in VC++ 2005. Most of it is common with the other visual studio languages. It was a interesting presentation particularly the focus on keystrokes. The most interesting feature was what you could do in the in the find window. E.g. To shell out, put in >shell cmd

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The TechEd bus driver, driving back to the hotel this evening, had a problem getting to the hotel (lots of 1 way roads plus some instructions about what roads he could driver on), so saw a bit of Boston. It looks like quite a facinating place, and on Saturday, before I go home, I've got to go out and a good look at the place.

I had a wander around yesterday, and found a interesting food court which I shall have to return to. The only problem I have at TechEd, is that I usually snack so much doing the day that come the evening, I'm not hungry. There's just to much interesting food, through I wish they had something other than orange and cranberry to drink (non-fizzy). Ever since my first TechEd in 2004, I don't drink that much fizzy drinks.

Ahhh well.. The only think I've seen so far which worries me a little bit about the conference center is the number of toilets. Perhaps they are hidden away, but there does not seem to be that many of them. Shall be interesting tomorrow when everybody else is around.

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Well, that's the precon over. Went to a session about using WSE 3.0/ASMX now, which had some interesting points in it. If you use the WSE 3.0 way of definition services, they move across to WCF very easily. In fact there was very little coding change, and that was mostly in the address part of the service.

Basically what you should do, is to to define your contract through a interface:

[WebServiceBinding(....)]
public interface ICommunicate
{
      [WebMethod]
      void DoSomething();
}

That way you almost don't need attributes on the class itself, and you can remove the contract into a seperate dll.

Funny enough, this is exactly how WCF does things.

The main eye openner for me, was that while they can't be represented in the schema, you can still use generic objects on the server side which simply translate into arrays on the wire and client side.

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