Improve Your SOA - Designing a secure, reliable and scalable system.

Speaker: Michele Leroux Bustamante

You can read more about her on:

• www.thatindigogirl.com
• www.dasblonde.net

Overall this was a very good pre conference day, with lots of new information and some new angles to problem I've struggled with. She is a good speaker that obviously knows what she's talking about. The demos and her answers to tricky questions strengthens this picture. 

In the first part she surprised me by not giving a general lecture on SOA but instead just quickly went over this part. Then she continued with specifics for implementing SOA with WCF.

Ok, I admit not reading the pre conference workshop abstracts that good. During the first break I looked it up and it clearly says  "This tutorial will show you how to implement architectural pattern common to WCF...".It's nice to be surprised in this way sometimes. For those of us who just reads the titles before choosing, it would perhaps had been more appropriate with a title like: "A deep introduction to WCF" or "How to implement SOA with WCF". Compared to the PDC 2005 pre conference "Pattern & Practices for Designing Service Oriented Applications - In Illustrated Example" by Ron Jacobs, which I attended, kind of sat my expectations this was a much more hands on, technical lecture with lots of code examples - just the way I like it!

Before lunch she looked at

• SOA and WCF
• Design and Deployment Consideration
• Exception Handling
• Large Messages

And after lunch she continued with

• Asynchronous Scenarios
• Transactions
• Security
• Building a Router
• Scalability

For most of the topics she did a theoretical view of why and how, and then discussed details while running examples in VS and I left whit a strong urge to go home and do some experimental programming to get my head around this stuff.

She also mentioned that she did a series of web cast on  WCF. I'll sure look into that when I got the time. And I Ill probably end up buying her book "Learning WCF".

The only, somewhat, negative to say is that she held us for an additional 45 minutes to go through all slides. In my opinion she could have shortened the part on security, not that it's not important but it so large and complex that there wasn't a chance to grasp it all anyway.

Now I'm curious of the content in the post conference workshop that I will attend on Friday: "Advanced WCF" by her colleague Joval Lowy. If this was the easy one how is the advanced going to be?

Executive Keynote - Dynamic IT and the 2008 Launch Wave

Speaker: Steve Guggenheimer

This was exactly as I expected, mostly advertising and talk about things that (eventually) will come. But they surprised me a bit by doing some demos on Windows Sever 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The biggest applause was on intellisense in SQL "Query Analyzer".

Optimizing Performance and Scalability of Distributed .NET Applications

I'm stretch out on the lawn outside the CCIB here in Barcelona with a big smile on my face after listening to Ingo Rammer. Totally brilliant session!

In the choice between this an Keith Brown on Securing ASP.NET Applications I choose Ingo Rammer and I don't regret it the least.  No shadow over Keith, I'll watch his session on the post conference DVD.

Now my toolbox is full of new tools for examine slow .NET applications and a couple of hints to solve them. I'm not exactly a novice in this area... and didn't thought I would learned that much. It is funny to be positively surprised.

He went through:

• Network
• SQL
• Memory

Partly from the angle of developing code and partly on judging and controlling products and parts that you bring in to the project. 

Integrating Membership, Role Management and Profiles in ASP.NET 2.0 Applications

Prosise... again. Brilliant...again.

He went through all the topics in the title with simple, clear and comprehendible examples. It turned out that I, not that surprisingly, over worked the work on the topic in my last project. But it wasn't that bad...

DEMO - Building a Distributed Solution with .NET 3.0

"This is a level 400 session... A few slides, then VS... WCF and WF in action...Tips, trick & pitfalls"

Sometimes, not that often, but sometimes it feels like it's going to fast. This was one of those occasions. This was a guy doing his own extensions to WCF to build a video streaming application. Some day I will sit down with the examples and look through to code and try to understand what went on, I'll guess it'll take me about 10-20 hours... 75 minutes wasn't enough.

Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET

Well... I would say advanced, but a thorough walk through of the data binding in Visual Studio 2005 so I'll give this session an OK.

Delving into Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

This session did a thorough walk through about VSTESD. It wasn't that much new stuff... I've used it for a while. But sometimes it's good to know that there isn't more to know.

Smart Client: Offline Caching and Synchronization with a New ADO.NET Sync Framework

The title sound interesting and the session was a really good one. I look forward to try the CTP that will be released before the end of the year. This framework lets me write an "Occasionally Connected Client" in just a few lines of code... well we'll see about that when the CTP comes.

Connected Systems - Part 6: The Future of the Microsoft Application Server Platform

Time for Laurel and Hardy, sorry Steve and Clemens, again. 

As the title suggest, the talk was about what will be released and when. They couldn't of course give us the exact information, but some initiated guesses how the products will evolve and how existing (server) product will adopt to WF and WCF.

.NET Hidden Treasures

After, again, sitting through a session without code I choose this one.

I regret not going to David Chappell on comparing C# with Java. But this is how it is on conferences, sometimes better than your expectations and sometimes below. This was the first below this week...

But as a comfort my colleague visited an even worse session that ended prematurely because most of the audience left the room.

Unit Testing Best Practices With Visual Studio Team System

Quite funny to listen to a guy who is not an XP/TDD extremist talk about unit tests. One could say that Mark Seeman had a more relaxed position about what to test and how, than most of the other I've heard on the topic. It was interesting but I disagreed with him a few times.

It was a good session but a little bit too shallow.

Test Driven Development: Myths and Misconceptions

The day started off with a, for me, new type of session – a white board discussion or a chalk talk. It was an informal discussion in a smaller forum. This particular WBD was lead by my new idol Roy Osherove on the topic TDD: Myths and Misconceptions.

It started with an open question about which topics to discuss and after having a collection of about 10 we started to talk and sometime discussion turned far away from the original topic.

This was a very fruitful session and unfortunately the 75 minutes ended way to fast.

Connected Systems - Part 3: Data and Transaction Management

Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters did a well rehearsed dialogue (for some reason Plato's dialogues comes to mind...). This dialog was certainly not without humor and they made their points. Luckily I had found, and put on, my architect hat, the one with a propeller on top, because the level was abstract and philosophical. Not a single code example and it wasn't even given that all was about relational databases...

The theme was that data is different and is accessed in different ways depending on different scenarios, but all boils down to a number of patterns of use.

Demo Extravaganza: Adopting ClickOnce for Real World Applications

Demo Extravaganza! Demo Extravaganza! Demo Extravaganza!

This form of lecture appealed to me more than any other form here, including the White Board Discussion". It could be correlated with the previous session not showing any code at all...

There was a great number of examples with opportunities to ask direct questions and some digression by the lecturer. All this in a mid sized group (100), bigger than WBD but smaller and hence more "question friendly" than the regular sessions.

Sometimes the information comes to late... I could have used the information in this session a month ago... :(

But on the other hand, I know it now and if (when) I'm in another ClickOnce project I can show off some tricks... :)

Extending ASP.NET 2.0 with Custom Providers

One of my "old" idols, Jeff Prosise... kept his place up there!

Again, one of those sessions. I want to rewrite a big part of what I've done in this area the last year. Not because it's particularly bad, but because now I know how it is supposed to be.

The information in this session is mort certainly a candidate for a lunch session back home.

C# 3.0: Future Directions in Language Innovation

A rerun... I couldn't resist going to this one despite the fact that I saw it last year at PDC.

And I was lucky, it had happened quite a lot on the subject. Anders Hejlsberg showed LINQ (again) but the underlying techniques, and the changed to the language as well.

This is a session that makes you think and when I left the room I felt like another person than when I went in, all in a positive way.

Keynote

Interesting demos by Eric Lee and Anders Hejlsberg, some sales talk from Eric Rudder and Simon Bank.

Eric Lees's demo was about SharePoint 2007 and AJAX showing the benefit of using these products and how to program them. I felt I knew what AJAX is and how it works but know it's the time to get into details.

On the other hand, I think I'll leave SharePoint for a while. Not because it's not interesting, but rather because a colleague of mine who also is here in Barcelona will look at it, start working with it when we're home and eventually will lead an internal lecture about it.

Hejlsberg, brilliant as usual, showed off Linq. I thought I knew it since visiting PDC last year, but quite a lot has happen to it. I aim for some Linq sessions this week and some playing with in when home - very interesting.

Well, its time for the first break out. It'll be...

Developing Rich Web Applications with ASP.NET AJAX

Five quick minutes with PPT's then all demos...wow!

If we haven't looked at this it's about time. ASP.NET AJAX will be released before the end of the year and if we're aiming on developing web sites in the future we must learn how this works.

It feels like I could be a web developer for real now. All of a sudden can I do what I want without writing tons of untyped, non debuggable, javascript code. 

I look forward to our internal lunch lecture next week on this topic when our java folks will present where they are.

ASP.NET: Developer and Designer AJAX Bliss with Visual Studio and Expression

I thought it would bee more AJAX regarding the title, but the emphasis was on collaboration between designers and developers. Interesting way of working and it is in the direction of what we discussed on our latest internal conference. Just imagine our Art Directors working with Expression and not in Photoshop.

ASP.NET AJAX Tips and Tricks

All demos... I'm in heaven!

This was a session full of examples what you can do with AJAX and how you would do it. More substance to what I've been watching most of the day and I am more convinced that it's time to learn this technology.

Summary of this day

I was overwhelmed that I didn't knew as much AJAX as I thought I did.