I'm at TechEd Europe! So far I've just dropped in yesterday for registration and today I've attended the opening keynote along with Rockford Lhotka's Building Occasionally Connected Applications, which was about the Smart Client Offline Application Block.

The keynote was interesting, one of the main things for me was the opening where a blind user demonstrated that Outlook Express is easy to use using enhancements that speak to him and a special braille reading strip, but that navigating websites is horrible: he kept running into loads of navigation text and other things unrelated to what he wanted to do. A good tip from him: always create a link to the actual content at the top of the page!

Furthermore there was the announcement of Express editions of popular development tools like Visual C# and SQLServer, of which the latter will replace MSDE. I'm just wondering whether TechEd is the right place to present products like these though. I mean sure I do software development in my free time and I enjoy it a lot, but those $150 standard editions of Visual C# are good for that. These versions appear to have lots of things built-in such as code snippets that are targeted at home users instead of professional developers that want to program at home. Still, the ideas are cool and I'm sure this will pull in more people to create software.

There was also a demonstration of Visual Studio .NET 2005 which included what looked like a full workflow, where you get a task assigned to you and people can see what everybody is working on. Along with a bunch of integrated software design tools and a tool to map the actual application onto the infrastructure, so you can work together with the admins to get everything in sync. Again looks very nice but I'll have to play with these things myself to get a feel for what's really possible.

What I liked the most though was the integrated testing environment where you can run unit tests and VS would actually detect that there are pieces of your code that aren't covered by the appropriate tests yet. I can really imagine this being very useful as I've run into this myself a number of times: quickly inserting something to workaround an issue that came up or to change some behaviour, passing all unit tests and thinking that everything must work. Until a user runs into a bug and you discover that your tests didn't cover everything. In theory when using TDD, you'd never write a line of code if you don't have a failing test, but in practice it just doesn't work that way, not when you're under pressure anyway.

Now to check for the next session I'm attending!