So I suddenly stopped blogging on friday 
It was only partly my fault, the breaks weren’t long enough and they decided to shutdown everything so fast that there wasn’t enough time. See below.
Well anyway I went to visit:
Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development
Rob Miles, you just wish you where more like the man (insider joke), talked about the XNA framework, a game development framework targeted at programming games for the XBOX (but can also be used for developing pc games). The session was very funny and as a demo he had a wonderfull little cheese, bread and tomato game. He’s a professor at the University of Hull teaching students about game development. I wish we had professors like him.
Anyhow the XNA framework is free for all, after talking to him at the Ask the Experts stand, I found out that is should be possible to distribute the games created with the XNA framework for using on the PC, without the need of an XBOX.
By the way he was also at our Microsoft Student Partners meeting on thursday evening and has a photo on his blog. (I don’t have any fotos, but Mathias, Flickr, chaves do – I’m in there somewhere too…)
After lunch I went to: DEMO: IIS 7.0: The New .NET Extensibility Interfaces
Way cool… Remember the times where you had to go back to unmanaged c++ when you wanted to write ISAPI filters for IIS? Well good news for all, with IIS7 you can directly include ISAPI filters into the pipeline. You can also change the IIS metadata with XML which can be changed through the web.config.
Appcmd is the universal utility for IIS7 and can also be used to set metadata values from the command lne. (it changes the web.config.) And you can change it programatically much easier than before. I remember changing IIS metadata settings a few years back and believe me it was like going through the jungle with a swissknife to cut down the leaves.
There was a lot of info given by Thomas Deml, too much to blog but all very cool. See www.iis.net
So for the last session we started in “Getting the best out of WPF and WinForms 2″. We left after 15min, just wasn’t what we had expected, and neither were any of the other sessions so we did session hopping.
The real downside to the day was that at exactly 16:30 they threw us out of the building!!! come on, why so fast? You hardly had time to fill out the conference feedback form and then you were kindly but distinctly asked to leave. What on earth were they doing the rest of the evening?? The IT-pro starts on monday. and they could have let us stay another hour or so… but oh well they didn’t 
So it all ended on a bit of a sour tone…, but…
TechEd-Developers 2006 was great. Lot’s of information, great sessions and superb networking opportunities. Lunch was ok, and there could have been a bigger selection of snacks, but the drink-fridges were always full, so no problems there. The internet worked most of the time and had an acceptable bandwith and was available everywhere in the building. I’m looking forward to TechEd 2007!
Tags: TechEd-Developers
