Day One at TechEd Developer 2008 - The Keynote featuring Ballmer Bot

rflaming — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Bill's last TechEd keynote as a Full Timer at Microsoft had a new version of an old friend in the form of Ballmer Bot. The researcher running the robot had it playing Ballmer's well known "developer, developer, developer" line. Got some of the best laughs of the Keynote. Other topics included Presentation, Business Logic, Data, and Services.

The speaker for the Presentation segment of the Keynote was Soma, the Sr VP of Developer Division. Soma highlighted Silverlight 2.0 and the XAML based exchange between designer and developer. There was a demo of a conveyer belt list view paradigm that was interesting to consider. As a user experience, what would the user think if the list view scrolled past you?

The speaker for the Business Logic segment of the Keynote was Brian Harry, Technical Fellow on Visual Studio Team Foundation services. Brian highlighted the architect modeling available in Visual Studio 2008, including the ability to validate a code implementation against the expected architecture model. The future release code named "Oslo" first appeared here in the presentation.

The speaker for the Data segment of the Keynote was Dave Thompson, Technical Fellow on SQL Server 2008. Dave highlighted the scale out elements of SQL as well as new programming types that allowed entity mapping, spacial modeling, and a datatype that changed the trade-offs between files as blobs and real file system entities. Dave also said that SQL server 2008 would be out in a month or two.

Bill covered the Services portion of the Keynote. Bill talked about supporting a spectrum of business models with services: free, ad funded, and commercial. Bill also talked about some companies gradually moving to services and cited instances of overload handling and disaster recovery as two scenarios for gradual integration. "Olso" came up here as being a new, exciting aggregation of models across the application space. Bill finished this segment saying "Olso" CTP would be available at PDC.

The Keynote ended with Tandy Trower, General Manager of Microsoft Robotics Studio 2008, discussing robotics as a new form factor for applications. Bill stayed on stage for this entire discussion. The Ballmer Bot used a Segue like mobility system and had a 8" LCD with Ballmer's face on it. The robot playing Steve's "developer, developer, developer" line was the best part of the keynote for me.

Pre-Conference Day at TechEd Developer 2008

rflaming — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:18:00 GMT

It's a beautiful Pre-Conference morning at Microsoft TechEd Developer 2008 in the Orlando Convention Center. The pre-conference day does not have the same hustle and bustle as the full conference so it's a good day to get your bearings. Today was the day to checkin at kiosk and interactive theater.

In the Technical Learning Center (TLC) on the convention floor, there is a blue section that includes four segments of Microsoft: Architecture (ARC), Developer Tools and Languages (TLA), Web and User Experience (WUX), and Windows and Frameworks (WIN). In the Windows and Frameworks section, there are a set of kiosks where technical experts in an area can converse with customers. Windows Installer and ClickOnce are covered in the Windows Forms kiosk.

At the staff training, Hemchander Sannidhanam and I met up for the first time at the conference. Hem is the principal dev on the Windows Installer 4.5 release. He has an Interactive Theater talk on Windows Installer 4.0 (Vista only) and Windows Installer 4.5 (out of band release to XP SP2 and above) on Friday.

Hem and I met our kiosk mate, Keith Elder, after the staff training. Keith is an Most Valuable Professional (MVP) who also works at Quicken Loans. Keith's expertise included Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Smart Clients in a Service Oriented Architecture, and ClickOnce. Keith also has a blog cast at Deep Fried Bytes.

Among the comments on Keith's deployment experience, he said ClickOnce is great but it needs a few things. The primary ask was the ability to choose a specific location for his application to install to. He has applications that need to poke through the firewall and the ability to poke through a firewall is dependent on the path of the application. That ClickOnce auto-generates and instances the application location in the cache causes ongoing troubles configuring the firewall.

When asked about the need to deploy assemblies into the GAC, Keith said they batched up the IT distributions and they take about a week to propagate through. I'd suggested Keith consider the Windows Installer credential free patching feature which would allow him to distribute updates with his ClickOnce install without waiting for the IT distribution.

Tribal Knowledge in Software Logistics : TechEd

Day One at TechEd Developer 2008 - The Keynote featuring Ballmer Bot

Pre-Conference Day at TechEd Developer 2008