TechEd Tuesday Treatise

Wow! What a day. I needed some time off from going to sessions so I hung out in the architectre TLC area. I got to watch an arcCast be recorded. The topic was about the new service library GAT tools for patterns and practices. It was really intersting to see them talk about these new features. You should check out the kit. They have a CTP now, and will release at the end of July.

The best talk so far, at all of TechEd was the SOA architecture talk by Beat Schwegler. He was a great speaker, very calm but very engaging. His slide deck was definitely outside what the content owners have been forcing us speakers to follow. I think that is cool. I have been toying with swapping to a serperate deck at the last minute. We shall see. I do want good scores, but I also want to be asked to come back next year.

One of his points was that services should be designed around the What of business, not the how. Developers tend to immediately think of how, when an architect should always focus on the why, what is the business needs, not the features needed. Great concept, and something that I have always thought was important for an architect.

I did get to have breakfast with someone from teh IIS7 team. I need to go back to their kiosk to get her name. You could see the passion for IIS7 just seeping out of her pores. She really believed in the power of the product. I had said that I wasn't going to any of the sessions because I saw them all at PDC. She said that everything from teh PDC was 'old news', and that I should check them out. I decided to take her up on the offer, and sat in on that talk about tracing at the http module level from iis with the new FREB toolset. Neat stuff. You can have it trace in a very restrictive level. Instead of killing performance by tracing every site and every action. They have allowed you to really nail it down tightly, to perhaps only 404.2 errors on a specific page or site. Each failure report is in it's own xml file, so they are easy to break up and use.

The big news of the day, and I am glad that I can finally blog about this, is the annoucement of Visual Team Studio for Database Professionals. This is like team dev, but for db developers. They seperate the data from teh schema, and track the schema just like source code. This isn't just scripts, and so on, this is the true schema. You can refactor, write tests, and construct automated builds. The great part is that you can it populate sample data into the schema, which helps you test all permuations of a possible field based on it's requirements and restrictions. I grabbed several dvd's of the CTP. It should be RTM by the end of the year I believe.

I think this is great innovation from Microsoft. Our DBAs have been stuck with crappy tools, with no improvements for ten years. The tools have bceome nicer, but have never really offered a true enhancement to the deature set.

And now for the daily slog (swag log).

1. Awesome Vista backpack
2. Oreily tshirt for buying books
3. more copies of vista and a application compatibility toollkit
4. several pens
5. more source force 'action figures'
6. a nice metal keychain flashlight
7. awesome patterns and practices dvd
8. dvd for VSTO
9. 4 dvd's for VSTS Database Developer


-bhp

Comments

Charles said…
Which track are you on?

Are you seeing anything good on Winform development (i.e. Microsoft's bastard technology)?
Brian H. Prince said…
I didn't go to any sessions on winforms or WPF. I stuck to CSD/architecture and IIS7. I am reading a book on WPF, and any standards web developer will be able to pick it up easily, maybe easier than a winforms developer.

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