Richard Thomason: Microsoft TechEd (Friday)

Avoid pitfalls when hosting Windows Workflow with ASP.NET applications
This session demonstrated some ofthe issues to avoid, such as threading problems and avoiding long-running Execute methods during the rednering of a web page. The best solution for non-trivial applications is to write a separate module that does all the Worklow stuff, and then expose an interface via a web service. There is a neat control that allows you to show the current state of the workflow (same as in the designer) as a jpg, however this may not be all that useful for end user applications; it does raise the issue of what exactly is the best way to show the state of a workflow to an end user.

Keynote
Etonyek speech
The closing presentation to the entire conference was by Pat Helland - industry guru and evidently replacement for Jim Gray (senior Microsoft R&D guru who went missing at sea in January this year.

The first half of his excellent presentation was a repeat of the one given by the AMD processor guy: more processors, more flash, less disks, no tape. For the second half, he tried to determine what the software consequences would be of that, and showed a vision video made by billg which showed a construction worker moving from home to car to work, with his workstate and profile travelling seamlessly through a variety of applications and devices.

His message was that future applications would be much more parallelised, with ways of recovering from differing decisions taken on different branches. Basically, you have no idea how much money is in your account, however you do have access to a variety of guesses at any one time. This is how a great deal of computing will happen in the future. He contrasted this approach with one where you must have the right result at all times, eg flying the plane by wire, launching the shuttle etc, but said that most of the computing space will be in the former space.