Neil Bostrom: Microsoft TechEd (Monday)

First job once we turned up is to get registered and pick up our Microsoft swag. The usual gifts awaited us, hat, bag, t-shirt, pens, pads, cds & pap. Next up in our grueling schedule was lunch. Moving into the main food hall we had some average at best food. While we ate, we all swatted up on what seminars were on in the afternoon. After an hour or so, we headed to our first session.

Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET "Orcas" and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ( Part 1 of 2)
Omar Khan started by chatting about the new features in Visual Studio 2008. Covering the new HTML Designer (which is shared with the expression family) that has been rebuilt from the ground up. Also going into depth about the targetting, which also Visual Studio to develop code against a fixed version of the framework. This allows you to develop 2.0 applications using VS 2008. Omar then moved on to LINQ, giving a quick overview of the visual designer built into visual studio. He also covered the basics of the language features of LINQ, showing some nice demos on pulling records from the database.

Agile Development with Team System
I went to one of Roy Osherove last year covering agile development. He always does fantastic sessions so I was extremely excited about this session as we recently implemented Team System at Compsoft. As expected the session was very informative and fun. Roy is very honest during his sessions, he doesn't try to sell Microsoft. Just tells it as it is. He first covered the basics of agile development. Showing good diagrams on how sprint and scrum work together. He then moved on to Team System, showing the new features coming in TFS 2008. Thanking all that is holy that they finally rebuilt the build service to make it useable by customers. They have also improved the Team System interface within Visual Studio, fixing some nasty bugs. Nice little point he wrapped up with was about using FinalBuilder to outsource any complex operations in the Team Builds. I was recently struggling with a similar issue on a copy process for the publish of our builds in the office. FinalBuilder has a very simple interface with over 700 tasks to controls almost anything.