TechEd 2004 Delhi, India
The event itself was great, got to look at a lot of cool
technology coming out of Redmond. Here is a day by day
summary.
Day 1
We started out with a keynote address that was basically
Microsoft's vision for the next 5 years. The slides that
we saw in the keynote were to be standard in all sessions.
Strangely there was not much talk about Longhorn, but more
about Whidbey and SQL Server 2005.
The first session was about Visual Studio Team System,
the whitehorse designers totally blew me away, If it is
implemented as well as it is visualized this could be a
killer. The class designer with complete round trip
engineering support was cool. Debug Visualizers are a
great addition. Also the project properties can now be
used to configure a lot more stuff like security and
deployment via ClickOnce (more on that later).
The next session was on the new features in the CLR by
Tarun Anand.
The SQL-CLR integration is a great new feature. I will be
exploring that in the coming days and hopefully should be
able to post some info on that. Other than that Tarun also
talked about generics.
The SQL-CLR integration is a great new feature. I will be
exploring that in the coming days and hopefully should be
able to post some info on that. Other than that Tarun also
talked about generics.
Next up we had a session in which the new WSE 2.0
features were discussed, there is some really good stuff
coming out of redmond in this field. I was especially
impressed with WS-Transactions, if that gets implemented
it's going to be absolutely great.
For the next session, i switched from the developer track
and attened the DBA track on SQL-CLR integration. Mahesh
Prakriya was such a wonderful speaker and gave some very
good insights into why some things are implemented in a
paticular way inside SQL-CLR. One intresting thing to note
is that currently to host the CLR in your app, you need to
implement 4 COM interfaces, in CLR 2.0 there are about 50
interfaces available to runtime hosts to minutely control
the behaviour of the CLR!
Day 2 The day started out with a
session on BizTalk server 2004. BizTalk is one helluva
good product and i am looking forward to working on it.
Next up was Tarun again with ClickOnce, which is
basically an attempt to give smart clients the ability to
automatically update themselves. Well there is nothing
radically new in the implementation, i will be writing
more about this technology in a different post. But one
thing that struck me was the inability to do incremental
updates, which IMHO is a very serious disadvantage. Also
some initial inspections showed that the app was getting
installed not in 'Program Files' but in 'Documents and
Settings' Folder.
Next Deepak Gulati (Developer Evangelist, Microsoft
India) gave a nice talk on mobile app development with VS
2005. The unified control architecture for mobile controls
is a good idea and will help in reducing development
headaches across various mobile platforms. The demos for
this session were among the best at TechEd 2004,
illustrating the concept and ease of the technology very
well. Hats off to Deepak.
The last session fo the Day was ASP.Net data controls by
Vinod Unny, the new controls that ship with ASP.Net 2.0
are so cool. Easy to use, easy to configure, consistent
architecture. This is what makes it such a joy to develop
with MS technologies. Unfortunately VS.Net simply refused
to work and we were unable to see some of the demos,
nonetheless a great session.
Day 3
Day 3 was the hands - on lab, i had registered for the
VSTS lab and got to work for 3 hours on the new VS 2005
class designers and whitehorse. I must say the product was
surprsingly stable for a Beta 1, although some bugs were
encountered.
In general my feeling about TechEd was that it was too
much marketing. I mean this is supposed to be meant for
developers, not for managers who have to sell this
technology to their bosses. My eyes start to glaze over
after going through 3-4 ppt slides, have more demos
please, code speaks volumes more than a ppt can. If anyone
from MS is reading this, please have more demos, don't
show us abstract ppt's show us concrete code.
Well we got SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, VS.Net 2005 Beta 1
and ISA 2004 Beta 2, RC1. I have already installed whidbey
on my Virtual PC 2004, looking forward to exploring the
new technologies. Also i was unable to install SQL Server
on my VPC, the error message indicated that SQL Server and
VPS were not compatible, so i installed SQL Server Express
edition instead.