Fear and Loathing

Just a quick update on the SharePoint Forums project. I’ve moved the next release (v1.1.0.0) out to July 1st. It’s just too close to TechEd and I wasn’t able to actually get any work done while I was there (no surprise). The monthly iterations will continue, but they’ll start on the first of the month. This just gives me a little time to get things going. Also the roadmap is being planned out for the August and beyond releases which will include new functionality and support Office 2007 installations.

Also when you’re reporting issues, can you please provide some information about your setup. It’s important to know if you’re on a SharePoint Portal Server install, or just a Windows SharePoint Services setup (or a Small Business Server setup) and if you’ve installed ASP.NET 2.0 on WSS or something crazy like that. It’ll help track down problems much faster for me.

Thanks!

It’s actually pretty fun. James and I were on our way back from TechEd yesterday and decided to start a small community project we’ve been talking about for awhile (and didn’t find any time through the week to work on). After a quick 20 minute discussion about some of the goals we wanted to accomplish, we cracked open the laptop on the plane and James wrote the first few tests.

He then handed me the laptop to implement the domain.

Ahh, TDD at it’s best. Just some tests someone wrote with ideas around how they want to implement the system and your task to do it. This went on, back and forth, for a couple of hours on the first plane and resulted in a few discussions, a bunch of tests, and some good fun.

We hopped onto the plane from Minneapolis to Calgary and started up again, this time I wrote the tests and he implemented the domain. Of course, as you get further into TDD the tests start to get harder because you get past the glamour of the first few tests (adding items to collections, checking properties) and dig into the real heart of the problem.

It’s a great excercise because about halfway through we tossed out a couple of classes we pre-supposed we would need. The great thing is, the tests still passed even after removing the classes. Using .NET 2.0 and Generics we got rid of an entire class and just used a combination of SortedLists and the Dictionary class, which made things simpler. I still think there’s simplification that can happen, but we had to bow to the great airline people and close the laptop for the day.

The end result? A few hours of coding, 4 or 5 domain objects, 100% coverage, and 22 tests. All green baby.

Programming can be fun, even at 30,000 feet in the air with no wireless.

Holy crap I’ve been blogging quite a bit while I was here. It’s amazing how much gobbly-gook you can spit out and time you can waste at these things. Here’s a wrapup of my posts for the week:

• TechEd 2006 - Day 0 - If I was a passport, where would I be?
• TechEd 2006 - Day 0 - Fire in the hole!
• TechEd 2006 - Day 1 - Let the bacteria begin!
• TechEd 2006 - Day 1 - It's alive!
• TechEd 2006 - Day 1 - First Schwag!
• TechEd 2006 - Day 42 - Death, where is thy sting?
• TechEd 2006 - Day 2 - Learn, Lather, Rinse, Repeat
• TechEd 2006 - Day 2 - Too much lobster, not enough cabs
• TechEd 2006 - Day 3 - Scott Cate, Hardware Pimp
• TechEd 2006 - Day 3 - Zappa does Zappa and change is good
• TechEd 2006 - Day 4 - Long day, not much accomplished
• TechEd 2006 - Day 5 - Rainy day in Boston
• TechEd 2006 - Day 5 - Take me out to the ballgame
• TechEd 2006 - Day 6 - Boston Walkabout
• TechEd 2006 - Day 6 - Additional Content
• TechEd 2006 - Day 6 - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

And here’s my blogging partner and hotel roomie James and his entries:

• TechEd 2006 - Day 0: Hi-ho, Hi-ho, It's Off to TechEd We Go
• TechEd 2006 - Day 1: Keynote - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• TechEd 2006 - Day 2: The Browser That Ate My Day
• TechEd 2006 - Days 3-6: Did You Get the Name of That Bus?

Hope you enjoyed TechEd as much as we did. We’re off to the airport shortly (well, James is still sleeping and there’s a shower with my name on it waiting) where we’ll have a grand time playing Marco Polo finding free hotspots and making fun of Bostonians.

If you didn’t get a chance to be here yourself, I hope you lived vicariously through me since that’s what my purpose on this planet is, being a geek channel.

Oh yeah, the Bacteria Farm is growing. We planted the seeds with our MacGuyver hotel room techniques on July 11 when we got in, and left the bacteria to gestate for the week, checking on it from time to time. Here’s what it looked like last night:

Okay, it’s hard to see but basically we had some nice growth out of petri dish #3 and #5. This was bacteria scientifically gathered from the base of the toilet (who says hotel room bathroom floors are clean enough to eat off of) and the window sill outside our room (lots of dirt there). There was no growth from my shoe (even after a day of walking around TechEd, way to go convention cleaners!), the sink drain, or from inside my mouth. The empty petri dish from the bacteria inside my mouth is a little disturbing. I mean, am I still alive? With all that saliva and left over twinkie bits, you think something would grow from there. Oh well, live and learn.

The growth is now soupy goo so we’re going to dump it into the wonderful Boston water system. If anyone in Boston gets sick over the next few days after drinking water or taking a shower, feel free to blame me. Not an entirely controlled experiment but it beats the heck out of watching paint peel on those lonely TechEd days.

Now that TechEd is over it’s time to reflect. To look at the good, and the bad, and of course the ugliness that we experienced. Here’s my take on the week.

The Good

• Lenox hotel. Nice service, great rooms, excellent price. They even leave 2 Lindt chocolates on your bed when they turn them down each day for you. Hint to those traveling as couples, order the room with the double bed (even though you’re going to shag in one) so you get double chocolate intake.
• Mini-parties with various people, too long into the night but still a great time.
• Being an Office Booth Babe and chatting it up with so many people.
• Meeting up with the product teams and various uber-smart people at Microsoft and elsewhere.
• Walgreens open 24 hours when you got the munchies.
• Twinkies, Häagen-Dazs, and Cocoa-puffs at the conference. About the only good food there.
• Free soft drinks ala Micrsoft campus style. It was nice always having a diet-coke or something after talking for dozens of hours.
• Team System for Database Professionals. This is going to kick-butt and take names. I’m glad they’re adding this much needed product to the lineup.
• Speaking to a million people about SharePoint 2007 goodness and watching their eyes light up with the cool new features that they’re going to love.
• Zappa does Zappa. Brilliant.
• Fresh lobster.
• Feeling a Sony Vaio UX50 (thanks Scott!)

The Bad

• $6.50 toll just to drive from the airpot to downtown.
• Cab drivers that don’t take plastic. That’s just plain odd from where I come from.
• Not enough Häagen-Dazs. The bins quickly ran out and there was no real schedule of when they got filled.
• Walking 30 miles throughout the convention centre.
• Working the Office Technical Learning Center booth at 9AM after getting to bed at 3AM from the party.
• Crap swag. Nothing really that great from what I could find (but then maybe I’m not looking in the right place).

The Ugly

• The bus company we were using (Peter Pan, what the hell kind of name is that for a bus line?) went on strike mid-week so most of us were waiting for buses or hopping in cabs.
• Cab drivers that don’t know where anything is. I talked to a few people and they all felt the same way so I’m not alone on this.
• Bus drivers that took a different route to or from the conference center and the hotels every single time.
• Meals. While I haven’t been to hundreds of conferences, this was the worst food ever.
• Wireless-ness access everywhere. At one point they ran out of IPs but for the most part, coverage sucked so I plugged in when I was on the floor.
• Crazy ass tunnels everywhere, makes me feel like the mole-man.

In addition, it was great seeing everyone. Shout outs to some old peeps (April, Lawrence, Fitz, Susan, Scott, Mark, AC, Bob, Spence, Todd, Bill, Carl, Richard, Julie) and some new ones I met or finally came face to face with (Jim, Korby, Chad, John, Jeffrey, Michelle, Heather, Amanda, Shane and Shane, Woody, Arpan, Bill, and Julia). Sorry if I missed anyone as there are so many names and my brain hurts.

Good times.

For you Office guys who got the Office DVDs at TechEd, there’s some additional content you might be interested in. Over at the IT Content for 2007 site here you can grab:

• Planning and Deployment Guides
• Operations Guides
• Known Issue Documents
• The Office Online Beta Control

Check it out as it supplements the swag you got in your TechEd bags.

It was quiet as things wrapped up here at TechEd in Boston.

Since I came to the city, I was taken aback from the rich architecture and history in the town so as I made my way back to the hotel this afternoon, I took a small walkabout the city.

There’s a feature called the Freedom Trail, a 2 1/4 mile line (mostly brick, but painted in a few spots) that takes you through most of the key historical landmarks of the city (various graveyards, churches, Paul Reveres house, etc.) so it was a good walk.

I see dead people.

You can check out my entire Boston set here from the week which is mostly focused on the sights of the city. 64 pics and 6 hours of walking today, includes various street performers, architecture, small children, old historic buildings, new shiny buildings, boston common, and dead people. Not bad for a way to wind down a technical event.

Back later with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from TechEd.

It’s hard. It’s hard to blog the same day that something happens when you’re at TechEd.

Here it’s a flurry of activity, an influx of information, an ongoing flash of gizmos and gadgets. In short, technical sensory overload. Yesterday was one of the bigger days. A double shift in the TLC area and my Birds of a Feather (BOF) session sandwiched in between, with a topping of the all-night party thrown in at the end, mixed in with various newsbits like BillG and Mr. Ozzie. That’s a lot of TechEd. Hence why my Thursday post is being written from the TLC Friday morning. Such is life.

Bill, good luck with all that stuff. You and Melinda do good work. Ray, listen to the soldiers. They know good stuff when they see it and don’t take any guff (even from that Balmer guy). Sorry I missed your keynote but let’s do coffee.

It’s all good, although my BOF was a little disappointing. Here I had a good set of new features for developers to discuss, I thought it would be a lively discussion about all the new event handlers, web part filtering, cross site queries, ASP.NET 2.0, providers, and … oh the list goes on. Instead it was a lively discussion but one that sort of drifted into licensing, deployment, and usability land. Oh well, all in all I think it was fun and I felt people got some good conversation and value out of it (which was the point). Thanks for everyone for coming out!

I did manage to catch Scott Hanselman and Keith Pleas on Enterprise Frameworks. It was a good talk and I really enjoyed the banter real-world Scott and mythical-theory-land Keith did. They played off each other well, with theory slides from Keith all airy-fairy and bright and Scott’s “In Reality” slides ala Lessig style white text on black background. I always enjoyed seeing some of Scott’s development kung-fu (and his kung-fu is good) and how they use a 0.0.0.0 release tag for local dev builds (all done through NAnt). He’s a smart dude and you learn a lot from him. Slick stuff.

As the day wound down, I shuffled off to the hotel to de-geekify for the nights festivities. As usual with MS events of this magnitude, they “rented” Fenway park and opened it up for all the TechEd peeps. Some concession stands were closed (I really would have liked a Philly cheese steak sandwich) but otherwise all the food and beer was free, and there was lots of fun stuff going on.

For those that dig the music, Train performed on stage to few hundred (or at least it seemed that way) and it was all good. Myself and Fitz scattered out of there early (after wolfing down the required hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, peanuts, and assorted ballpark “food”) on to hook up with some friends, which (of course) ended sometime around 3 or so in the morning. Or dozens of martinis. I can’t remember which.

Yeah, needless to say there’s very little sleep that you get at events like this.

It’s a rainy day this morning as we hop onto the bus and head out for the daily grind. Today is my Birds of a Feather (BOF) session at 1 PM (or it might be 1:30 PM, depending on what schedule you look at) so if you’re interested be sure to drop by room 203. It’s on SharePoint development and what you need to know to get ready for 2007. All in all, it should be a blast.

I’m also in the Technical Learning Center (TLC) for Office from 9 AM – 12 PM and 3 PM – 6 PM. I’m going to try to catch Scott Hanselman’s session on building frameworks this morning at 8. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to catch many sessions this week. After having lunch with Scott and John Lam, I was really intrigued by Ruby and .NET and wanted to see more. I did manage to sit in on part of the Atlas BOF yesterday which was interesting so I’m downloading the CTP today and going to try out some SharePoint 2007 stuff and Atlas at the conference. We’ll see how awake Scott is this morning for his session, I know I’m at least 3 coffees behind and it’s only 9 AM.

For whatever reason, I have yet to travel the same route on any bus, to or from the conference, at any time of the day. It’s all very confusing.