Richard Thomason: Microsoft TechEd (Monday)

Mondday started with a whimper, as I discovered while buying the first day's Metro ticket that all my cash had been stolen! Barcelona lives up to its reputation. Fortunately however the wallet and all cards were still there, rather oddly, and we couldn't decide if a couple of Greek guys on the Ramblas were were in fact fantastic pickpockets, or whether I had dumbly left my wallet in the hotel room which had been serviced while we had breakfast. Time to forget about it and move on. Note to self however: get a waistband money belt and stop using a wallet.

The keynote session was delivered by the head of product development division, S. Soma Somasegar, a mature Microsoft manager with the normal company approach to developing software that works (see books by Steve McConnell) and a refreshing attitude to communication: get transparency in the development process at all levels, including with the early adopter community, listen to your customers, use the software that you sell (they use Visual Studio for all their development work), and create a community environment that involves the users participating in the creation of the online knowledge pool. Unusually for a keynote speech, this kept my attention for most of the presentation, and I was left with a feeling of confidence and optimism about current and future Microsoft products.

During the keynote presentations, and a subsequent tour of Visual Studio 2008, I was impressed by the thought and effort that had gone into the user interface - fabulous and useful Intellisense and other UI enhancements, which did make me wonder of someone had taken a very close look at Eclipse (the rival open source development environment). I found out that Popfly is an online tool that allows you to create your own website - "user experience" as they like to call it, and that Silverlight is a technology that simplifies the creation of graphics in a web page. There are some big debugging advances, including a Javascript debugger, and much better Web debugging overall. In VS 2008, you can customise the user interface for your own purposes, and the product manager showed a demo of a VS customisation for World of Warcraft, integrating their extnesion toolkit into Visual Studio.

Finally Luca Bolognese delivered a clear and articulate (although very Italian) introduction to LINQ, which is a successor to ODBC, and improves on it substantially . LINQ syntax is understood by C# and VB and can manipulate objects in a simple and powerful way. In addition to Web services, it would make sense to write a simple data provider for Equinox at some point.