Henry Carter: Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 (Wednesday)

What a start! Location aware database design and spatial data types. Having only heard of these things previously it was awesome to get shown the details and the true power of these types and their associated methods and functions by the guys who really have made it happen. The scope of the solution offered is immense and there was also a really fascinating discussion of the problems faced in indexing this spatial data. Including an in depth look at how they have gone about fixing this issue. Excellent talk, awesome technology.

Next up was a handy lab on tips and tricks for the C# IDE looking at new features for 2008 as well as little known features that have been in VS for the last few years. He started out making a promise that if anyone didn’t feel that they had learned anything that would make them more efficient in the talk then he would talk to them one on one till he could show them something that they felt was of use. To be honest if there was anyone who didn’t take 20 things away from that talk then they are spending way to much time reading the IDE manuals before getting down and coding. The session was full of really useful suggestions, keystroke combinations and development tips, as well as information on new features to VS 2005. I will take so much away from that session which will directly affect my productivity it’s scary.

Next for me was a session focussing on the server communication options in Silverlight and Microsoft AJAX. This was a very good presentation on a topic which I have been wondering about since my first session on Silver light on Monday. We saw how to connect not only to traditional webservice (asmx) endpoints using javascript and the Silverlight / AJAX libraries but also how to integrate with code-behind files as well as the MCF, looking into the depths of JSON too was a really interesting experience. These two technologies are definitely the way forward in so many ways and I’m really looking forward to playing with them and exploring how we can use them within Compsoft real soon.

My penultimate session was a ‘deep dive’, their phrase not mine ;-), into Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s offering to the online mapping genre. I have previously used Google maps extensively and was keen to see just how good VE was in comparison. To my absolute astonishment I came out thinking who the hell would use Google when you could use that!!!! Although the programming interface seems to be very similar and there is huge scope for doing more with the VE system

Last up was the most astonishing session I have been to, Building intelligent applications using data mining. This is a concept which I have previously only heard of and certainly never seen in any concrete or real world situations however this talk brought the concept of an application which can learn through data mining techniques to the forefront of my mind and I actually think that from what I’ve seen this could be something that gets out of the research academies and into applications very soon. Certainly I can see the benefit in learning much more about the tools which SQL server and .NET have for implementing models. I really didn’t know what to expect when I went into this lecture but I certainly wasn’t disappointed.