Henry Carter: Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 (Friday)

First session was on the WCSF and building rich internet applications which was really interesting and while a lot of it I have seen and used previously, there were some really good extras which are now available and I think I will be using very shortly. In particular the ClientScriptCallExtender which will allow javascript to identify the client id of server controls without posting back, something which I have wanted to do many times and have always ended up with inelegant solutions. In all a good talk with a useful what’s coming next discussion at the end which identified some pretty nice VS integration features.

The next session I attended was discussion of an implementation of the service bus using Biztalk which is something I am really interested in but have no real understanding of what the implementation actually looks like so this was something I was really looking forward to it. The implementation was good to see and there was a lot of discussion around the new ways for implementing dynamic ports which is something apparently that has always been available but rarely used. Another fun point of this talk was that the ESB best practice guidelines had been released by the patterns and practices team this morning and so they were able to discuss these with us too. The demonstration broke however which was annoying but this led to a brief synopsis of how hard it is to actually set up initially and that the practice guidelines have a load of pre requisites which at the moment have to be guessed by the installing technician, hopefully this will change as discussion on codeplex continues and step by step guides emerge. Overall really interesting and definitely a technology I think we should spend some time looking in to for future projects.

They say always save the best to last and that is absolutely what transpired, Roy Osherove talking about deep reflection OMG!!!!

He gave us a brief overview of basic reflection which we have all seen before, then dived into some seriously cool stuff looking at generating code using reflection. Basically building methods and types generically, but not only that building generic methods using generic types generically! After my eyes had ceased to be crossed from that he gave us a 3 minute introduction to reading IL and then we were off on a magical mystery tour into building IL from inside a .NET the fast pace of the session was fantastic as we were able to cover a huge amount, including the different ways you can build IL inside your system as well as the performance benefits some methods have over others. He also touched on the security implications of exposing methods which use reflection and how the new methods in reflection 2.0 give you the ability to protect your code and therefore your system from the “EvilPlugin”. The icing on the cake of this session was however the trademark song which he performed as a finale. A rendition of “I don’t want to talk about it” by Rod Stewart with the lyrics changed to fit an experience of bad use of reflection. Very geeky but exactly the sort of thing that got him the only standing ovation I have seen this week. Great way to end the conference.