Neil Bostrom: Tech Ed 2008 - Day 1

Key Note Speech

Started the day out with the key note speech. This is Microsoft's catch to sell the event to us and get all the developers on board. The speech went into a few key areas that everyone should be getting goo'ey over.

First was Visual Studio 2010, the presenter was particularly adventurous by running a pre-alpha Visual Studio on a pre-alpha Windows 7. It seemed to work well enough, only one crash during the talk. Showed some of the interesting features coming relating to Visualising your assemblies and classes. They've sexed up Visual Studio, by re-writing the editor to have WPF embedded, meaning that nice code highlighting can happen, you can have embedded images inside your comments and so much more.

Next major section he covered was a fully intergrated testing center. Showing nice features like video recording while testing that is attached to the bugs that are stored in Team System. Another sexy feature is that the testing centre will store all the debugging symbols of the application has its running so developers can replay the test in Visual Studio stepping through each line.

He also went on about some new C++ features but I phased out at that point. Richard perked up.

Lap Around the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Enhancements for Web Developers

4 new major items came out with SP1, Entity framework, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Routing and ASP.NET Dynamic Data. A quick overview of the entity framework was covered which was good to see the differences from LINQ to SQL. Looking forward to digging in much deeper on this topic to see how much pain we will suffer moving to it. ADO.NET Data services interested me greatly for silverlight. As silverlight can only talk to the server via web services, this seems like a perfect solution to builting a flexable data access layer for a silverlight application. ASP.NET routing is something we have already used for a couple of applications at Compsoft and are already building common code to implement. The last item was Dynamic Data which is a quick scaffolding framework for ASP.NET. This might have some use for admin screens in our applications but other than that, it didn't interest me that much.

Live Platform: Deep Dive on Microsoft Virtual Earth

I've never really seen much on Virtual Earth so I thought I would go outside my comfort zones and check this session out. First we covered the basics of Virtual Earth's web control. This is just a javascript include, making it an nice platform independent control. The part of the talk that interested me the most was the web service support now coming to Virtual Earth. This now allows you to generate map images server side to be rendered where ever you can imagine. Other nice features implemented on the web service was routing and searching. The service included nice complex searching for finding lat and longs from building names, streets or almost anything. Mark Brown showed some nice demos glueing all the features together. Interesting features that was covered as well were SQL 2008 spacial data type. Mark also showed nice code on how to query it and return spacial data.