Rob Windsor's Weblog

Guess Who's a Star!!!

That's right be-atch-es. Charles Petzold might not be registered in IMDB but guess who is. Rob Windsor* is on the rocket ship to international stardom - as long as Rob Windsor* is not typecast as the "Sad Man". Someone please get Rob Windsor's* agent on the phone.

* The Rob Windsor mentioned above is not necessarily the same Rob Windsor who authored this post. This post not valid in all states. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited.

Jean-Luc David Lays the Smack Down at EDMUG

Who knew that Jean-Luc had the biggest arms in software development?!?

http://graysmatter.codivation.com/JeanLucDavidAndJamesKovacsTheMEGAPOWERSCOLLIDEEDMUGInJuly.aspx

P.S. I have no comment on the second picture in the post but I can say that it will haunt my dreams for years to come.

Installing Windows Vista Beta 2 - Good Experience

Last night and today I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on two laptops. A Dell Lattitude C600 (PIII-667 MHz with 512 Mb RAM) and a Dell Inspiron 5100 (P4-2.40 GHz with 1 Gb RAM) and besides one small issue with a PC Wireless card everything went very smoothly.

The install on the 5100 went very smoothly. Everything, including wireless networking, worked fine when the install was complete.

The C600 is about a five year old machine. After installing Vista I had to download and install the ethernet driver, the modem driver and the audio driver. The XP versions of these drivers were all available on the Dell support site so this was quick and painless. I also had to install drivers for my Linksys WPC11 PC wireless card, this was a little less painless. Basically, I installed the Wireless Configuration software from Linksys, put the PC in the machine and then updated the driver through Device Manager. When I rebooted the configuration manager software caused dome errors but removing this app from the startup programs solved that problem. Now everything is working fine but it's slow, too slow for day-today use. Windows Vista is just a little bit too much for that hardware configuration.

A Guide to Attending TechEd or PDC

Good job dude! Putting out a guide to attending TechEd days after the conference is over. Yes, this was poor planning on my part but there will be other TechEds and PDCs and hopefully this will help people attending those conferences.

1. Arrive Early
The conference centers where TechEd and PDC are held are huge. It really helps to get there before the conference starts to walk around and familiarize yourself with the location. I didn’t have a chance to do this at TechEd so I didn’t even know there was a conference bookstore until the third day. You’ll also want to find a quiet, out-of-the-way spot where you can go and chill or make a phone call. Most of the regular gathering areas have comfortable couches or bean bag chairs but they can be noisy due to the number of people. A final benefit of arriving early is that you can avoid the lines when registering.

2. Plan Ahead Using CommNet
Both conferences provide a Communications Network (CommNet) website which can be accessed via the internet. You can access the TechEd 2006 CommNET site at http://msteched.com. This is a one-stop shop for everything about the conference.

One of the key things this site allows you to do is to plan your schedule. It gives you an up-to-date list of sessions and events and, once you’ve selected what you’re interested in, gives you a personalized schedule. You can add your schedule to your Outlook calendar, export it to Excel or view it as an RSS feed.

Making sure a session is right for you is very important. There’s nothing worse than walking across the conference center just to find the session you picked isn’t what you really wanted and then to realize that your second choice is back where you came from. When choosing sessions be sure to look at more than just the title; the abstract, speaker, track and session level are all important as well. If you’re still not sure you should be able to find the speaker or one of his/her colleagues in the experts area to ensure you’re going to get what you want.

3. Don’t Sweat the Sessions
This does not mean that you shouldn’t go to sessions. It does mean that you shouldn’t feel you have to fill your schedule with sessions. Remember, you can get slide decks and sample code from CommNet, you’re going to get a set of DVDs with all of the recorded sessions after the conference, and many of the conference sessions are already available as webcasts. Leave a slot or two per day to visit the experts area and do some hand-on labs (see below).

4. Use the Experts
Each conference has an area which is manned by Microsoft employees and industry experts who volunteer their time. If you have a question about a product or technology, that’s the place to go to find your answer. For example, at any given time there were two or three members of the VB team in the Blue area of the Technical Learning Center (TLC). If you had a VB question why not take it right to the source? If for some reason they couldn’t help you they’d definitely know someone at the conference who could. I’m sure it was the same for the other products and technologies.

From what I saw and heard from my colleagues who were experts at the TLC, the area was underutilized. It’s a shame because it’s probably the most valuable resource at any conference. You’re never going to find the same kind of combined product knowledge freely available for your taking in any other setting.

5. Do some Hands-On Labs
This conference highlighted a ton of technology that’s currently available in a Beta or Community Technology Preview (CTP) format. For you to use this stuff you normally have to find a machine that you don’t mind repaving or create a virtual machine instance of hardware powerful enough so it’s usable. With the Hands-On Labs all of the setup is done for you; you just go in, pick the lab you want and start rockin’. They are a great way to enhance the learning experience you get at a session or that you’ve had before the conference.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 5 and 6

Day 5
Like most days, this one started mid (ok, late) morning. Lunch was consumed with a discussion about a “goose” being in the “oven”. I still have no idea of what that was all about and, in the end, I’m not sure I want to know.

The afternoon was filled with sessions. One that I found particularly interesting was given by Jon Rauschenberger from Clarity Consulting. Clarity is building a framework that will allow VB.NET developers to easily build windows forms that will interoperate with VB 6.0. Clarity plans to make this product available for free to the VB developer market when it is complete. Many of the people I associate with professionally have been in the .NET world long enough that we lose sight of the fact that there is still a lot of VB 6.0 development happening out there.

When the conference day ended I took the shuttle over to the hotel to drop off my backpack and change for the attendee party at Fenway Park. From what I heard the people who took the shuttles directly to the party got a full police escort which included road and intersection closures. I assume the police figured getting thousands of people from the conference center to Fenway was going to be such a traffic nightmare that is was better to get it over a quickly as possible.

The attendee party itself was fantastic. As a baseball fan, just getting to go to Fenway Park is a treat but having the run of the park was incredible. I was so busy walking around and seeing the sights that I missed most of the focal part of the evening, a concert by the band Train. I did catch their last couple songs plus the encore which were excellent. My Flickr account has a few photos of the event but I uploaded a bunch more to my MSN space, they can be found at http://shrinkster.com/fz8.

Day 6
The last day of a big conference like this is always kind of a bummer, you continually have a sense that it’s just about over.

I took in a couple sessions, one on building “good looking” user interfaces with WPF and one on using REST, RSS and POX with WCF. The best part of the latter talk was that the speaker, Clemens Vasters, showed off newtellivision, an application he’d built using the technologies discussed in the talk plus Media Center.

“newtellivision is a framework and application for accessing live streaming television remotely. The use-case I had in mind building this is quite simple and is closely related to my current (and the new) job and the perspective of moving to the U.S. some time later this year: I want access to my local, German TV channels whenever I am traveling and I also want access to those channels when I've moved to Seattle. That's most important for two types of programs: sports and news. I care a lot more about Bundesliga football than for Major League baseball.”

I also sat in on Paul Ballard’s BOF entitled “Can AJAX/Atlas Do This? Comparing AJAX and Smart Client User Experiences”. I’ve spoken out on my feelings on this topic before and I was vocal about it at the BOF as well. The primary argument against smart clients still seems to be deployment. Not the deployment of the smart client applications themselves but the deployment of the .NET Framework. Many people there indicated that process to get the approval to install a new version of the framework and then to actually do the deployment can take several months. At least I see a steady growth in awareness that smart clients are a viable choice again and a push from developers to get to be able to use them in the enterprise.

Like all days, the last day of the conference ended with a couple pints. This time at Cheers, or at least that bar that is below the sign that the TV show made famous.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 3 and 4

Day 2
I forgot one notable event on Day 2. That was the live recording of .NET Rocks! which was held over lunch. Carl and Richard interviewed Gert Drapers and Cameron Skinner on the newly announced Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (formerly known as “Data Dude”). I don’t work in this area but from the discussions at the recording as well as at the VSTS party that evening it seems that the product is a good start but it may have some maturing to do.

Day 3
Day 3 started late (mostly because Day 2 ended late), I didn’t get to the conference center until just before noon. I skipped lunch so I could spend some time doing Hands-On Labs. I think these are the hidden gems of conferences like TechEd or PDC, particularly when it comes to future technologies. Everything was already setup for me to try out WinFx, LINQ, VSTS for Database Professionals, SharePoint 2007, Office 12, and so on. These are particularly good as a follow-up to a breakout session.

In between the two sessions I caught in the afternoon (including Beat Schwegler’s excellent talk on “Architecting Applications for a Service-Oriented World”) I managed to torment D’Arcy Lussier a little bit. You see, D’Arcy has been a little bitter about missing TechEd so I thought I’d add fuel to the fire by emailing him some shots of the biggest attraction at the conference, the magic snack tables. While he was impressed with the “high carb, high sugar, high fat chocolate bar goodness”, he was not so impressed by the “freaking bucket of fruit”. Some people do eat healthy and even perform this odd ritual called exercise at some place called the gym.

I spent the evening catching up on email and blog reading until about 9:00pm when the RubyCLR Bird’s of a Feather (BOF) session (run by John Lam and Scott Hanselman) started. The way they hosted the event - with Scott taking on the TV talk show host role and John acting as in the guest - worked exceptionally well. The discussion helped me grok more of who John see’s as the initial target market for this product and how it can build some initial momentum.

After the BOF a bunch of the ObjectSharpees headed out for some beer and pool. We dragged along Mario Cardinal and Guy Barette as well as a few other people we met on the shuttle to the hotel. I had a long conversation with Mario about architecture and what he’s doing with the Visual Studio Talk Show (sort of the French .NET Rocks!). In my opinion, conversations and networking opportunities like these are really what makes the conference valuable.

Day 4
Day 4 was mostly about networking. I hung around the blue area in the Technical Learning Center (TLC) and walked the expo hall. I did catch an excellent session on application security given by Jesper Johansson in the afternoon.

The evening was spent in Faneuil Hall. It began with some nice Prime Rib at Durgin Park (established before you were born) and finished with the .NET Influencer’s party at Ned Devine’s Irish Pub. Note to Jean-Luc: next time leave the laptop at home.

Tags: [TechEd06]

VB or C#? ASMX or WCF? WinForms or WPF? Ruby or Iron Python??????

Questions, questions, questions. I know the new technology I'm seeing here at TechEd is going to lead to a bunch of questions in the form of: Should I use X or Y?

We have some leagcy questions:

• Should I use VB or C#?
• Should I use Business Objects or DataSets?
• Should I build Windows apps or Web sites?

With the emerging technologies shown here at TechEd these questions get more complex and new questions emerge:

• Should I use VB, C#, Iron Python or RubyCLR?
• Should I build Windows apps, Web sites or Office/SharePoint apps?
• Should I use ASMX Web Services or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)?
• Should I use Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)?
• Are mobile devices and the .NET Compact Framework ready for enterprise applications?
• Where does Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) fit in?
• and so on...

I've been overwhelmed trying to keep up with the new developer technology I've been seeing and I wanted to prepare you for the same.

Tags: [TechEd06]

TechEd Days 1 and 2

Day 1
My trek to TechEd started early, I left for the airport at 4:00am on Sunday for my flight to Boston. Fellow ObjectSharpees Barry and Dave were also on the flight, I guess they don't value sleep either. The good news was that I had plenty of time to get to my hotel, check my bags, and head on over to the MVP event that started at 10:00. 

The MVP event was very well attended. I think they said that there were 200 or 300 MVPs registered. I was only able to stay for Sean O’Driscoll’s “keynote” talk and a bit of lunch but it was good to catch up with some people that I only see at events like this.

I left lunch about 12:45 to head down to Fenway Park to catch the Red Sox and Rangers game. This was a great baseball experience, that park has so much atmosphere and history. Even with its quirks (small seats and the poles that always seem to obscure your view) it's a great place to watch a ball game. An added bonus was a really tight game that was culminated by a three-run, walk-off homer by Red Sox DH, David Ortiz.

When I left the game I headed back to the conference center for the keynote but I was so tired (I’d only had an hours sleep the night before) that I left after 30 minutes to go crash at the hotel. I was there long enough to see one of the guest appearances by Mary Lynn Rajskub who plays Chloe O’Brien on the TV show 24.

Day 2
Day 2 started with a disappointing session. Well, the session was fine - it was just poorly titled. I thought it was related to SOA but it was actually on developing effective user interfaces with AJAX. This is an all too common issue with conferences, people make a decision on what session to see solely based on the title not the abstract. It mostly my fault for being lazy, my only excuse that it was early in the morning.

I finished the official conference day watching my colleague, John Lam, doing his talk on the RubyCLR. John is an amazing speaker and although I’ve heard this material and seen similar demos before, I thoroughly enjoyed the talk.

Sandwiched in between the “AJAX Incident” and the Ruby talk I caught a session and did some stuff in the Technical Learning Center (TLC) on SharePoint (the 2007 version looks like it is going to totally kick ass) and Office. There’s already lots of hype around SharePoint but I think it’s nothing compared to what we’re going to see next year. I also had a really good discussion about abstractions and whether they help or hurt developers with Bruce Johnson and members of the WCF team.

Dave, Barry and I left the conference center and headed over to the VSTS Influencers Event. Most of the time there was spent talking with members of the Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals (formerly known as “Data Dude”) Team. Interesting stuff but mostly out of the area I live in.

The day ended going for another beer or two (did I really need more beer?) with Dave around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. It’s a cool place to walk around, it sort of reminds me of Sparks Street mall in Ottawa.  Most of the pubs (and there were lots of pubs) weren’t that busy but I’m sure it’s amazing on a Friday night in the summer.

Tags: [TechEd06]

Even more on the .NET Framework 3.0

There's a good discussion on Brad Abrams blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2006/06/11/627128.aspx

More on the .NET Framework 3.0

Jason Zander (General Manager, .NET Framework) answers some questions about the decision to rename the WinFx to the .NET Framework 3.0.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2006/06/09/624629.aspx

WinFx now the .NET Framework 3.0

Soma (S. Somasegar: Corporate Vice President, Developer Division) announced today that WinFx will be renamed to the .NET Framework 3.0. I think this is going to cause quite a bit of confusion initially because people will percieve this as being a whole new version of .NET instead of what it really is, an add-on to the existing BCL.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx

Rob Windsor at Tech-Ed in Boston Next Week!

It seems that everyone who's someone is posting their Agenda for next week so I'm going to follow suit. You'll see I'm double booked Monday night and I have been known to change my intended schedule on a whim (particularly when drinks are involved) so I make no guarantees that I'll actually be at any of these events.

Sunday, 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM: MVP Engagement Tour: I'll only be at this event in the morning. I have other plans for the afternoon (see below).

Sunday, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM: Fenway Park: I'll be watching the Red Sox play the Rangers in Section 23 Row 15. Drop by and say Hi (oh, and bring me a Sam Adams will ya?)

Monday, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM: Exhibit Hall Reception: I'm double booked with the Mega User Group meeting (see below). Booth Babes and free drinks will be likely tip the scale in this direction.

Monday, 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM: New England Mega User Group Meeting: Wide-ranging discussion with a panel of nationally-recognized experts on Microsoft development technologies.

Wednesday, 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM: Microsoft Influencer Appreciation Party

Thursday, 6:30 PM - 13:00 PM: Attendee Party - Train Concert at Fenway Park: Fenway two times in four days. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the lead signer's wife, Amber.

Otherwise I'll be wandering the exhibit hall, doing hands-on labs, catching WinFx sessions, or hanging out in near proximity to the magic snack tables and power for my laptop.

Tags: [TechEd06]