The Trek to TechEd North America, Part 1

The Journey has begun, Sean Kearney and I are off to New Orleans for TechEd North America 2010.  Starting the evening off in Good Humor, on the way to my first Coffee stop at Starbucks on Clair and Gordon in Guelph, Ontario, there was a young man streaking down the main arterial road. After my quick stop in Starbucks, I again witnessed the streaking gentlemen try to enter the Shoppers Drug Mart.

The Quest for the Holy Grail Crazy Sean

First stop on the tour was the Milton GO station to pick up Sean from his tour from Oshawa. It was a Dark and Stormy Saturday night, we settled into my pickup truck looked at each other, and screamed at the top of our lungs “WE’RE GOING TO TECHED!”  Our Quest continued to the QEW to Buffalo.  We make it down to the border, we allocated for a 2 hour wait at the border, assuming some traffic at the border.  Our actual border time was approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds, landing us at the airport with 4 hours before our flight.

Early AM at the Airport

Instead of paying for the Boingo, Sean plugs in his AirCard and configures it to allow multiple connections. Out of my backpack I pull out one of the two CAT5 Cables I keep on hand for such an occasion and connect between our two laptops creating a Pseudo-LAN [We are the Borg]. 

Waiting patiently for our flight, we crack open our first (of 2 Red Bulls each) and chow down on some Corn nuts.  We’re pumped and ready to get on our flight, and just about to head up to cross security post. Look forward to more updates on our trek to New Orleans!

Clouds as far as the eye can see

I’m writing to you from my hotel room in Regina, Saskatchewan where this week I attended and Presented at the first ever PrairieDevCon. Saskatchewan, normally overlooked for Technology Events showed their support with nearly 100 attendees, featuring 50 sessions over two days, by 25 industry experts.

I contributed to this incredible event with 2 sessions both pertaining to the Microsoft Cloud. First up was Taking it to the Cloud, which pulled in a crowd of 10-15 attendees. To take a look at the code that was presented, it was released as an open source project on CodePlex called Azure Email Queuer [a Refactored Visual Basic Version is also available]. My Second session entitled Making your data Rain from the Clouds attracted between 7-12 attendees. Both Code Samples demonstrated are also available on CodePlex. Download ASP.NET SQL Azure Connection, or Ruby SQL Azure Connection to see how to leverage WCF Web Services that expose data using the OData Protocol.

A Special Thanks to Telerik for their sponsorship and support. Without them this trip wouldn’t have been possible.  Take a look at their leading set of Controls for Microsoft Technologies, as well as their new set of Productivity tools including JustCode and TeamPulse.

What’s Next?

Next week, to finish off my 3 week conference tour, I’ll be in New Orleans for TechEd North America. I’m looking forward to learning more Advanced Topics on Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and get my feet wet with Windows  Phone 7. Besides the ability to learn advanced topics, I’ll also be trying to meet some of my Programming Idols that will be in attendance. I look forward to meeting with Craig Shoemaker from Infragistics, Steve Marx from Microsoft, Shawn Wildermuth of AgiliTrain.

 

If you see me at the event, Please feel free to come introduce yourself. I look forward to making many new friends at the event.

I will also attempt to do some Live Blogging of some of the sessions so be sure to keep checking back for some interesting news from New Orleans.

Windows Mobile 7 at Make Web Not War

I’m sitting in on the Windows Mobile 7 Session featuring Joey Devilla and Paul Leberge.

Joey has just demonstrated that the emulator is completely compatible with 4-point touch so that you can begin creating Windows Phone 7 Series 7 Applications without having the hardware.  This emulator and the full IDE is available on the Windows Phone Developer Portal, FREE-AS-IN-BEER.

The Windows Phone has been completely rehashed in order to focus on the users needs with a smart design and Integrated Experiences. The Windows Phone is looking to be the most well rounded phone to hit the market place right now.  The ’Metro’ User Interface was influenced by street signage which is something that is familiar to anyone that leaves their house. With Silverlight driving the User Experience, users are guaranteed to have a smooth, slick, and rich experience while interacting with their phone.

The Internet Explorer version for Windows Phone is currently a little bit different from what is currently running on Windows 7. The reasoning behind this is to get the phone to the marketplace and scale up the features of the browser to bring both desktop and mobile versions inline for future releases. For more information on this keep an eye on the IE Mobile Blog. This just in, Flash and Silverlight is slotted to be supported in browser on the Mobile 7 Phone.

There are will be only two supported form factors 800x480 & 480x320. All Windows Phones will need 4 point touch, a set RAM requirement, and a consistent Processor/GPU. This will keep things running smooth and take a lot of issues that developers run into out of the build cycle.

Make Web Not War – Keynote

I’m sitting in the front row of #WebNotWar, an Open Source Development Conference based on the Windows Platform. This is truly my first ever live blog, that I will be posting at the end of this session, so I hope enjoy the content.

“The Web and Website Development is still a child, we’re still in the dark of what the web will provide, however our flashlight is getting bigger”. We’re starting to experiment with new technologies and methodologies that weren’t available back in the 90s when the web was born and we were known as “Web Masters”.

No matter which language you use to develop, what your backend infrastructure is, what we make for the web is not for us, it’s for our users. The end user doesn’t understand what Ruby, Python, or AJAX is for all they know, they are fancy Minerals, a Snake, or what they use to clean the bathroom sink. What we as Developers need to do is worry about what the user needs, or wants without needing to worry about what is running in the background.

Javascript is the most widely implemented programming language on the web, and is the most interoperable language. When people realized how widely used Javascript had become it made people venture out to build frameworks to abstract the common tasks required in most web applications. This sort of thinking has lead to the birth of jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, YUI, and mootools.

“There really is no way to win, you just need to make it hurt less.”

That’s a Wrap! Visual Studio 2010 At The Movies

Today I ventured down to the Scotia Theatre in downtown Toronto to witness another phenomenal “screening” of ObjectSharp’s “At the Movies”  event which today featured many of the enhancements to Visual Studio 2010, and .NET 4.  If I were a movie critic [which thankfully I am not], I wouldn’t have a clue what was going on. Luckily, I’m a Developer and give this presentation a rating of 5 ASP.NET AJAX Stars out of 5.  This was not my first “At the Movies” event and by far won’t be my last, they just keep getting better!

Heading up the day of the SOLD OUT Show was a fantastic performance by Bruce Johnson with a High Level overview of the advancements in the .NET Realm.  He covered the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) [with a cool extension to Visual Studio itself], Parallel Programming [with key points at enhancements in threading] with a Stellar example of “Work Stealing”, Code Contracting in .NET 4.0; and the integration of Azure and SQL Azure into Visual Studio.

 

After the break Paul Laberge of Microsoft Canada stunned the crowd with the awesome features of Expression Blend including the spectacular Prototyping tool Sketch Flow. The release of Silverlight 4 is one of the most influential since Silverlight 2 when the .NET Language was integrated into the Plug-in. Silverlight 4 now allows for Rich media usage like Web Cam & Microphone access, Native Multicasting, online and offline content protection; Rich User Experiences with support for  Right-Click Context menus, Copy and Paste, and Google Chrome Integration. Furthermore, Silverlight 4 has entered into the World of Advanced Business Applications with new Printing Support, advanced Data binding support, a large library of Forms Controls, and  Internationalization (Language Targeting).

Paul also did a demo to show how to utilize both Visual Studio 2010 & Expression Blend to separate the Developer and Designer Roles. “XAML is a Language that both your Developers and Designers can speak”, Paul explained, XAML creates a common ground so everyone is on the same page. Separating the Concerns in your project can allow a team to avoid software that ends up as depicted below.

Just before Lunch Angie Lim hit the stage to let Developers know that there are many ways in which Microsoft is trying to help.  There are various “Spark” programs that give the tools businesses or developers need in order to be successful. Guelph Coffee and Code has a great post that explains each Spark Program, or you can ask for more in depth information from Angie.

After the Lobby cleared from the Lunch break, The crowd were wooed by the presentation styling of Barry Gervin and David Lloyd.  Barry took the audience into a magical adventure, with an overview of the new Code Reporting, and Visualization features of Visual Studio 2010. These features offer Developers an easy visual representation of how the application functions, which could increase the speed of a learning curve when getting acquainted or re-acquainted with a legacy project.

David took to the stage to in full force covering the Bigger and Better Team Foundation Server.  His demonstration featured an “advanced” calculator, focusing on unit testing, build automation, and Gated Check-ins. David reached out for his QA Specialist Debra Forsyth to run through a QA Cycle on his Calculator.

Debra ran through her test cycles by demoing the new Test & Lab Manager.  Test Manager gives much more power to the QA teams, allowing them to Record test cases to gain a library of Automated tests.  Debra made developers sweat when showing that there are no more “could not reproduce” excuses. Test Centre allows Quality Assurance testing to take screen shots, and even videos of each step of the testing process. With the advanced Testing Framework, and Lab management features of Visual Studio 2010 don’t be surprised to find many developers like this when you arrive at work in the morning:

To put the over 400 developers that attended the At the Movies session at ease, ObjectSharp broke out the Snacks and Energy Drinks. During the break the ObjectSharp staff went around engaging the crowd in personal chats. Barry Gervin came around to the group that I was in, here’s a picture of the chat also involving Sasha Krsmanovic from Telerik.

Next up Rob Windsor displays his passion for Sharepoint 2010 in front of the twitching crowd. Rob covers how Sharepoint has evolved, explaining the Architecture change in the massive Sharing and Collaboration Web Application. Rob then stepped into how the Development process has been nicely integrated into the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. Sharepoint 2010 has expanded even further allowing for consumption of List data in Console or WPF applications using WCF Data Services. I must apologize to Rob as I missed a good portion of his presentation, due to loosing track of time during the break.

Motoring through to the end of the day, Colin Bowern takes to the stage with an Electrifying presentation filled with Shocking imagery, Lightening fast code generation using Snippets. Colin outlined the new clean code that is generated in ASP.NET 4.0, contrasting the old method of Table based coding behavior and new List based html that “The rest of the development world has bee doing for sometime.”  His example of the power of ASP.NET Routing, which began as a feature of MVC, can quickly and easily provide Search Friendly URLS to any existing Website without an abundance of code. He also showed the adoption of the jQuery library in Visual Studio 2010, and a quick example of the advance HTML Templates that can be used without any server code.  Colin finished up by demonstrating some of the ASP.NET MVC framework and how the use of the framework gives a developer much more control over the html output.

As everyone [The smart ones that stuck around] awaited the prizes at the end of the day, that were provided by Microsoft Canada, Telerik, and Object Sharp.  This gives you an idea of the size of the crowd that this free event pulls in. Make sure to keep your eyes open for next years event announcement!