Monday, November 10, 2008 9:47 PM lasseeskildsen

TechEd 2008: Day 1

So the first "real" day of TechEd is over, and here's some of the things that really impressed me today.

The keynote and "Camano"

Jason Zander gave the keynote, where he showed a lot of the new features of Visual Studio 2010. One thing that was really cool was the "Camano" project. Camano is "just" an application which you connect to your team project in TFS. Testers can then use the software to go through test cases and approve or disapprove a test case. If a test case is disapproved, the tester can submit it as a bug to TFS. This is really cool, because Camano includes screen capture, so the steps to reproduce is recorded as a video in .wmv format. Furthermore, the application's state is captured too, so you can actually debug the application in Visual Studio using the exact state as when the bug occured! In addition, if virtual machines are used for testing, it can recreate the entire state of multiple machines as when the bug appeared. Now we devs have to come up with something else than "it works on my computer" :-)

This is just one feature of Camona, it includes a lot more nice features - can't wait to get my hands on it!

Commerce Server "Mojave"

At the welcome reception after today's sessions, I ran in the Ryan Donovan and Scott Cairney. They gave a live demonstration of the upcomming Commerce Server release, code named "Mojave". Long story short, the next release contains a brand new sleek API, a pure non-COM .NET alternative to pipelines and comes with a very nice SharePoint integration. Furthermore, they demoed the new Silverlight based web tools where they showed live editing of products and variants using the Silverlight based tools - can't wait to try it out! The screenshot below (well, not so much screenshot as "shot-of-a-screen-taken-with-my-mobile") shows the new Starter Site running in SharePoint edit mode.

IMAGE_060

The first CTP is available for download, the next CTP is released in a few weeks, and the final release is scheduled for Q1 2009. Looking forward to it!

Apart from the keynote and the reception I attended an architecture session, as well as a IronPython and IronRuby session - nice stuff too!

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Comments

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 4:28 AM by Jen

Helpfull blog...

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 4:49 AM by Gergely Orosz

I can already seem Camano changing the testing process and making end-user tests weighing much more.

One thing that looks really exciting is though storing contexts, especially multiple machine states. That sounds too good to be true as one of the greatest testing problems I've experienced is reproducing errors in an NLBS.

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 2:22 PM by lasseeskildsen

I completely agree on Camano changing the testing process for the better for both us devs, but also for the testers and customers.

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 4:45 AM by Gergely Orosz

I'm not sure it will be an 100% positive change for us, developers... I'm kind of afraid of end users sending a lot more bug reports on early prototypes of a project and expecting those to be tracked more than now. But hey, at least reproduction won't be a problem :) For the product though it will be definitely better.

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Monday, November 17, 2008 12:54 PM by Ben Taylor

Interesting.  No Commerce Server Silverlight tools were demonstrated at the Mojave PDC talk a week earlier.  What tools did they demo?  A new catalog manager, marketing manager etc?  I didn't know they were shipping any new management tools with Mojave.  Just the product editing web parts...  Do you have any more information?

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Monday, November 17, 2008 3:39 PM by lasseeskildsen

The UI they demoed was the product and variant editing through the webparts, using Silverlight. At this point that was all they had. I was told that there will be web based management tools, but the edit UI was all there is now. They told me that the second CTP will be out in a week or two, and it will include the management UI (or at least some of it). I'm sorry I don't have any more info than this.

I can see you have some blog posts on the new API - have you tried the CTP?

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 3:47 AM by Ben Taylor

Thanks for the additional information.  Always good to hear what is being said at these talks.

Yes, I have tried the CTP.  As I'm sure you've seen, the raw API is hugely simplified (once service call) in comparison to the current API.  I think this will enable a lot of scenarios.  However, until I use it in a real world implementation I am not sure what I think about the change.

I am planning to post more about it on my blog when I get the chance.

Have you tried it yet?

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 5:28 AM by lasseeskildsen

Cool - looking forward to the blog posts.

I haven't had the time to try the CTP yet, but when the next CTP is release I will take the time. I have seen the new API, and like you I don't quite know what to think if it. Then again, I'm not too happy about the current API.

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 5:59 AM by Ben Taylor

The current API certainly has some *challenges*.

As a fan of the ideals of DDD, I am concerned that the new API has chosed not to provide a strong ecommerce domain model.  Rather, it has presented a more generic query processing model.  However, until I use it for a real project it will be difficult to estimate the impact.  And it may be that I am just too stuck on my old skool object model ways ;)

Having said that, the generic nature of the API does lend itself (perhaps more easily than the current API) to frameworks sitting on top of it.  However, in the broader CS ecosytem, this may result in a proliferation differing API access methods.

# re: TechEd 2008: Day 1

Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:51 PM by lasseeskildsen

I completely agree that there are some challenges.

I'm a huge fan of DDD and unit testing too, but as you say, the current API lacks the domain model and the testability. However, using the query processing model in the new API, I hope it will be easier to create a more client specific domain model than a "Commerce Server" domain model.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out ;)

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