TechEd EMEA 2007

[TechEd EMEA 2007]- Day Two

Igor Milovanovic — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:46:35 GMT

My second day of the conference was a mixture of different topics, from distributed application architecture, over database features to the new C# features.

DAT202 - The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview of SQL Server 2008, Francois Ajenstat

There have been serveral new features presented in this session:

new data types : filestream, datetime2
support für spatial applications (geometry/geography support) with a cool demo using virtual earth
ado.net entity framework (object/relational mapping on top of the ADO.NET Provider model)
Demo of Project "Astoria" - ADO.NET Data Services for the Silverlight Apps.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/default.mspx

WIN202 - Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – Synchronization Framework for Enabling Roaming, Offline, and Collaboration Across Devices, Services & Apps , Philip Vaughn

The goal for the syncing framework is to allow the sync work without the need to define the own protocol. It is a provider based framework, with some already provided storage providers (file system, database). which can be easily extended and the strategies to resume conflicts. The definitely cool thing is the Sync Toy, which is an GUI built on top of the sync framework.

[2] Microsoft Sync Framework

ARC210 - Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion , Pat Helland

The funniest session of the day was the one by Pat Helland about the life beyond distributed transactions (don't use it ;-) Here is the link about the early version of the presentation and the coresponding whitepaper:

[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/16/link-to-life-beyond-distributed-transactions-an-apostate-s-opinion.aspx

TLA312 - Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0 , Luke Hoban

I liked this session very much, which came without almost any power point at all. The presentation was about the new features of the C#3.0 on a LINQ to object scenario, which showed in a very good way the usage of new constructs and syntactic sugar in C# 3.0. And i felt like 10 years younger, seeing lamda expressions in the programming langugage again, for the first time since scheme and lisp ;-)

[TechEd EMEA 2007]- First Session of the Conference - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5

Igor Milovanovic — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:59:24 GMT

My first and only session of the day was TLA201 A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. After that I got unfotunately distracted by some project issues. Daniel Moth made an overview of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5, pointing out some of the key features:

- .NET 3.5 Framework is additive to the current versions of Framework (no changes in CLR)
_ Visual Studio 2008 support the multitargeting, so that the new language features can be integrated into current 2.0/3.0 projects.

[1] Top 10 Things to Know about Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5

[TechEd EMEA 2007]- Keynote summary (VS2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Sync Framework, Popfly Explorer, World of Warcraft Addon Studio...

Igor Milovanovic — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:23:09 GMT

Here is a short summary from the keynote, and a whole lot of new things have been announced

- Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 (available in november)
- Microsoft Sync Framework (CTP available today) for the online/offline synchornization of appplications.
- Software + Service Blueprints
- Microsoft Popfly Explorer Beta
- Open licensing for Visual Studio IDE

We have seen a demo of a Contoso Food ASP.NET Application which demonstrated some of the cool new features from the Visual Studio like syntax highlighting and intelisense for java script, breakpoints in javascript, split view for designer, integration of WPF in WinForms and WinForms in WPF, usage of WF and so on. The demo was cool...but:

....the definetely coolest thing at the presentation was the demonstartion of the visual studio extensibility, with

Addon Studio for World of Warcraft (will be available on codeplex)

which showed the integration of World of Warcraft Addon development environment into Visual Studio 2008. Now that was cool. LUA syntax highlightning, designer support usw. Really very cool. (The gnome warlock used in the demo was funny as well :-) )

Update - Download Links

[1] Microsoft Sync Framework
[2] Software and Service Blueprints
[3] Popfly Explorer