Henry Carter: Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 (Tuesday)

Much better today. This mornings session on SharePoint was an honest appraisal of a solution which I had heard mixed reviews of. The discussion showed much of the power of the existing framework but acknowledged that there was much work needed to make sharepoint a slick development platform, it seemed to be a very capable system from a users point of view however deployment issues seemed to rain supreme. I think I will leave it till the angry face has been placated.

The second session on LINQ to SQL was the best so far. A really well presented and awesomely interesting presentation given by a true fanatic which was really good to see. The content was great with lots of code demos giving a real insight into the power of the LINQ framework. Definitely need to GIV in that.

During lunch Neil Tim and I watched the presentation on “Why Software Sucks” which was a humorous look at HCI and made some really valid points about the user experience and will certainly make me think twice about my users in the future.
First after lunch was an introduction to Open XML which is a standard which I have always hoped would live up to the hype. It seems that it has and there were some very informative demos in here to show the structure of ‘docx ‘ file types and the xml (as well as xml standards) which form their structure. The discussion was informative and there is the promise of more practical examples to come later in the week which will be good to see.

Next up was an under the covers look at C#, how excited was I!!!!!!! The whole thing was exciting, packed auditorium, Truly awesome presenter in Luke Hoban and a really exciting subject matter. This is the stuff I am actually going to be using from day one of VS2008 usage. He covered the stuff we all knew he was going to be covering, like Lambda expressions and anonymous types but in a really good way. Basically he used these new features among the many others to derive a solution for LINQ, itself a new feature of the language. He brought us through a world of factorisation and syntax optimisation to the point where most languages would have been happy then described why the c# team decided to take the language that little bit further to make LINQ a reality. Truly the best discussion and presentation I have seen, properly excited about getting in and trying this now.

Who could follow that? AJAX steps up to the plate and hits the ball out of the park and into the neighbouring state!!!!! Rarely have I walked out of a session thinking how much of what I have just seen I could have used in a practical environment in the last 6 months. Everything was relevant, everything was neat and cool and all the other Americanisms I have been picking up over the last few days, including a very Bostonian ‘wicked’. Basically AJAX rocks harder than Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica could ever, even if they both teamed up with Iron Maiden. The session was based on the page life cycle from the javascript point of view, and a lot of emphasis wa splaced on the ability of a savvy Javascript developer being able to extend and utilise the Microsoft AJAX framework without a whole lot of hassle, something which I have been trying to avoid since my first forays into AJAX development. Really enjoyable and a perfect end to a pretty damn good day.