Richard Thomason: Microsoft TechEd (Tuesday)

The first session today was on Sharepoint. A number of customers and sales staff (and Phil) have commented that we should know more about SP than we do, so I was quite interested to see this presentation. The presenter was a SP MVP who clearly knew enormous amounts about the system, however unfortunately his presentation skills left a lot to be desired. Nevertheless a few things became clear. If you can use the SP facilities that come out of the box, either using the free ones or MOSS - the payfor version with more templates, you can get a result quickly with reasonable effort and little programming, and also you can delegate the responsibility for maintaining an application to non-development staff, in a similar way to using Public Folders in Outlook. So this is pretty powerful. You can also write your own code, however SP is very much a 3rd class citizen in this respect. There is little or no Visual Studio support, and a whole load of configuration needs to be done manually via batch files. All this sounds like a testing and maintenance nightmare, and so unless I can find better information during the rest of the week, my conclusion will be Keep It Very Simple with Sharepoint for the time being, and wait for a better development environment.

The second session was on Windows Workflow, which is fully integrated with Visual Studio, and has lots of powerful features for defining and monitoring workflow in an application. There is a decision to be made with this technology over whether you need it, or whether you just hard code the workflow into your application as you would normally do. The kind of questions to ask are: is the workflow complicated and suject to a lot of change, do I need lots of flexibility, are there lots of different and possibly inter-related workflows, do I need to monitor and audit the state changes. The presentation was not very detailed, but raised the main issues in a structured way, and clearly showed how the technology could be used.

Silverlight 1.1 final half
The afternoon session was to be on Silverlight and Expression, however hardware problems meant that I arrived as the speaker was ending his presentation, about 45 minutes early, so I went to the last half of the Silverlight 1.1 presentation instead. SL is difficult to pin down; it's a competitor to Flash, it can do many things that Javascript currently does, idem Ajax, it could completely replace the client-side object model and become the new programming API, but MS are keen to promote none of these, and are content to let market forces do what they will. Which is not very useful.

AMD64 optimisation
This very useful and practical session focussed on the various ways to optimise your non-managed code for 64 bit land. The story is that processor cores are going to multiply according to Moore's law, and that therefore memory will become the bottleneck. Moral: keep your data structures tight, simple, pre-feteched and in the cache.

Ajax / ASP.NET / Javascript OOP
This session showed how it was possible to take control of Ajax updating, via UpdatePanels, without using UpdatePanels, plus a preview of some advanced forthcoming technology implementing drag / drop functionality using a powerful OO implementation in Javascript.