About .NET and Other Amenities

I'm back, finally from the TechEd 2007 I attended last week in Barcelona. This was my first time on an international conference and I have to be honest saying that the first few days I'm very disoriented because of the new environment, and because of the english speaking that I'm not really trained for.

So, during the conference this problems has become less important and I had a really wonderful staying, plenty of new informations, personal contacts and parties in the Barcelona nights. I've attended both my tecnology specific sessions and different technology sessions and I found that is is better to dedicate this days to deeply know arguments that during the normal working time it is non possible to study. The best sessione I attended at all was dedicated to Astoria Project (by Pablo Castro) and CardSpace (by vittorio Bertocci). Both this sessions are plenty of code-examples and gave me some useful information about the incoming ADO.NET Data Service and the claim-based autentication. The work the guys of this teams done is very wonderful.

The Astoria project enable our projects to share data across the network in a way similar to navigate a website. So if you are developing a bike catalog (as the samples shown...) you may access data in this way:

http://localhost/bikes.svc/Categories - give you the entire categories listing

http://localhost/bikes.svc/Categories!5  - give you the categories with 5 as primary key

http://localhost/bikes.svc/Categories!5/Products - give access to the products in the category wth 5 as primary key

This semantic enable to access resources easily also from javascript because Astoria outputs directly in JSON as well as XML. The Astoria services, created extending a WebDataService<T> abstract class are entirely based on Windows Commuication Foundation.

On the other side CardSpace, delivered with the Framework 3.0, in the incoming framework 3.5 will become very usable and easy to implement. Into the ASP.NET toolbox where will be a new Login WebControl supporting the CardSpace autentication that enable ASP.NET application to be integrated with claim based autentication in a breeze. Vittorio, an Italian working in the USA ad evangelist developer, has explained this argument in a very clear way using many examples like MembershipAPI integration with CardSpace. I promise to deeply study the argument when I've some time free...

There was many other sessions I attended; I was at the first session by Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters and I'm very satisfied seeing them in a real cabaret-session that has introduced a very clear explanation about SOA from the Microsoft point of view. I've see also sessione on VSTS, Scrum, Virtual Earth and so on...

At the end of the conference I have to thanks all the people I know and that will be patient speaking in quiet-mode to enable me to understand them speaking. Now i'm on the way to became and english-enabled person so the next year this will be a more simple appointment.