.net and other interesting dev stuff in PA : DevDays 2004

Tech Ed 2004: WSE 2.0 session at 2pm on Wednesday

sspotts — Thu, 27 May 2004 00:58:00 GMT

Bummer. Packed house, no room. I guess more people were interested in this than expected. Same thing happened with the PAG (Prescriptive Architectural Guidance) session this morning.

So I jumped to the SQL Server 2004 Deployment session. Pretty full, but at least there was room. The unified installer looks interesting.

Big changes in instance management. Not managed with setup program, but with SQL Computer Manager. Installation is much more granular, and does include notification services and reporting services. Granular reporting about what's getting installed, including pre-requisites. Patch management is also pretty cool, even allowing uninstalls. All this is more focused on the IT Pro, and while I love SQL Server, I do wish I was able to check out that WSE session :).

Tech Ed 2004: BizTalk 2004 for the Visual Basic and C# Developer

sspotts — Wed, 26 May 2004 02:29:00 GMT

Scott Woodgate, Lead Product Manager for BTS 2004, presented this one. Scott Woodgates blog Started with an overview of SOA first, which was a good idea for developers to understand prior to working with BizTalk Server 2004. Went into a "what is BizTalk Server 2004" talk, explaining why in this case development of stateful objects is not evil. Most of BTS 2004 written in C# - 1.8M lines oc code, largest .NET Framework code-base shipping today. Orchestration compiles to MSIL, deploys as assembley, deployed and versioned in the GAC because the server is a windows service (series of). Key technologies include pub/sub messaging, orchestration, business rules, single sign-on, business activity monitoring, human workflow services, business activity services. Demo showed bulding a schema, promoting fields, mapping and a functoid. They went into the pipeline editor, then BizTalk Editor and an overview of send/receive ports, filters, adapters. Cool part of demo showing Health and Activity Tracking, stepping through an orchestration to follow the path of a message. Then we got to see how the newly released WSE Adapter works with BTS 2004.

Dev Days 2004 in Philadelphia

sspotts — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 04:00:00 GMT

Developer Days 2004 is really coming together, and we have a stellar lineup of speakers in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Convention Center on March 2, 2004.

I'll be presenting the opening keynote, and Terry Weiss, our 3-year veteran MSDN Regional Director, will be presenting the closing keynote. There are also tracks for Smart Client development and Secure web development. Actually, a huge part of both tracks is security.

Besides Terry and I, we also have the following talents presenting:

Mike Snell, brilliantStorm, MSDN RD
Mark Scott, RDA Corporation, MSDN RD
Mitch Ruebush, Online Consulting, MSDN RD
Bill Wolff, Business Agility, PhillyDotNet User Group President and MVP
Dan Clark, Intellimark, MVP
Jason Beres, Infragistics, MVP
Stephen Mohr, Omicron, Noted author and speaker and XML guru
Geoffrey Snowman, Microsoft, Developer Community Champion

Some blogs and sites from our speakers:

Terry Weiss - http://weblogs.asp.net/TWeiss/
Mike Snell - http://www.brilliantstorm.com
Bill Wolff - http://www.phillydotnet.org
Jason Beres - http://geekswithblogs.net/jberes/
Geoffrey Snowman - http://weblogs.asp.net/gsnowman

Take note - there's new support for DevDays blogging - Dev Days 2004 now has a dedicated blogging site! Whenever you see the “PDC Blogger Guy“ below, you're seeing the best in Dev Days related blogging.