Tristan Smith: Day Zero

November 10th 2008 is to be my first ever taste of the Tech Ed experience and I must say, I am *really* excited at the opportunity.

I’ve been to developer days (www.developerday.co.uk) held at Microsoft for the past few years and found them to be immensely useful, delving into areas of development you might be unlikely to come across in your day-to-day and finding out what future techniques and technologies are in the pipeline. It keeps you on the crest of the wave, able to see what is going to bring real value and what’s just sugar coating.

I imagine Tech Ed will be similar to this, though on a much grander scale, packed with industry leading speakers and experts who’re building the technologies we’ll be developing with in the future.

The developer track at Tech Ed consists of 481 sessions spread out over the 5 days, planning which sessions to attend is the first challenge.

The Tech Ed website has a schedule planner you can use to map out the sessions you want to attend. Within 5 minutes of using it, I found I would have to split myself 5 ways in order to see all the talks I wanted to.

Of the plethora of available sessions to attend, I’m most excited to find out more about (in no particular order):

Silverlight

I’ve been working with Silverlight since version 1.1 and found it to be a really well considered offering in the RIA (Rich Internet Application) space. It not only allows you to create a much more interactive user experience but also allows you to port your existing .NET development experience straight into this new space.

I will most certainly be attending a number of the sessions on offer for Silverlight. There are sessions on Silverlight Mobile, Accessibility, User Experience and Developer-Designer workflow to name but a few.

Visual Studio 10

The next version of Visual Studio looks like it will be offering a number of useful development features from additional code generation to software modelling tools, improved testing capabilities and better features for Team Foundation Server (Source control). I will be interested to find out how Microsoft will be improving the development environment we all use at Compsoft.

.NET Framework 4.0

It will be interesting to see what’s on the roadmap for the next version of .NET.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft’s cloud computing platform features heavily in the sessions on offer as does writing applications that live in and work with data from the cloud. I will definitely be attending a few of these sessions.

Project Velocity – Distributed Caching Framework

Caching in all its forms can give significant application speed improvements. Velocity looks like Microsoft’s response to the call for making application scalability easier to implement.

Though somewhat biased, I believe Compsoft’s developers are quite unique in their passion for the software they develop and in making sure they’re using the best techniques to build the highest quality software possible. We are constantly improving our methods and techniques above and beyond the 9-5 and it is this passion combined with events such as Tech Ed that help give us that edge, and make us one of the UK’s forefront bespoke development houses.