TechEd-Dev07: The abrupt end…

 

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

TechEd-Dev07: Day 4/1: Windows Vista for Managed Developers: Beyond .NET 3.0

 

Starting off the session by commiting to C# and calling C++ Coders Masuchists certainly points with me Session was held by Daniel Moth.

He covered topics much better than the session “Targeting Key Native Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from Managed Code” which was interesting but could have been shortened to 15 minutes telling us that the Windows SDK sample is available and show what it does.

Ok, first off: yes, once again we will be using a lot of PInvoke to get the neat stuff. But what’s different to the other session is that this one is not wrapped yet. (So I actually have to know how to use it.)

Glass: the new see-through windows in Vista. Uses PInvoke to dwmapi.dll and two methods: DwmIsCompositionEnabled (Is Glass enabled at all?) and DwmExtendFramIntoClientArea (enable the glass). Pretty simple if you ask me, you need a few hacks (for example you have to paint the glass area of the form black to change alpha channel to 0 and you have to have special handling for form moving.) There are even tricks to create glass windows in the middle of the form. As a side note in WPF you still have to PInvoke to get glass, even though the controls are dropped more easily on the glass area.

Task Dialog: “Messagebox on Steroids” Have you ever wanted to extend the messagebox with your own controls. Well now you can. These are wrapped in the Windows SDK (Vista Bridge).

Power Aware: You can react to power state changes in your app.

WinQual: You all know when apps crash you get the possibility to send error reports. You can use this in your own applications and do all sorts of neat stuff (like a recovery method that is called if your app is hanging, or restarting automatically including passing a string parameter to the restarted app.) WinQual is free, so you should be able to use it for your own applications as a central error reporting tool. Haven’t checked that yet. (You need a credit card to register, but a lot of the services are free, and you need a VeriSign certificate.)

The last bit was on Gadgets, but since I’ve had some experience with that I decided to leave and get my battery charged *G* A big minus point (from my perspective) is that there are now power strips in the sessions.

BTW: See the blog for the source.

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Speaker Idol

 

So I just happened to see the finals of the Speaker’s Idol contest at Tech-Ed. I haven’t seen any of the first rounds, but saw two of the final speakers. The idea behind Speaker Idol, is that anyone can do a 5 minute presentation on a topic of their choice. And to a well-known similar sounding show on television in each round only one can continue to the next. So there were three people left in the end.

One of them was talking of new features in ASP.net which was a bit too much content for 5 minutes and he did overflow on his time. Bert who was the last presenter actually had no slides and just coded a Cmdlet (for Powershell) from scratch. I hadn’t done one myself so it was all new and very interesting. The presentation itself was very interactive and in the end his won the contest. Now he will be back at Tech-Ed as a Speaker next year. (The other finalists all got a ticket to Tech-Ed 2007 but only as a delegate.)

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 3/3: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in the Real World: Zürich Airport Monitoring System

 

This was an interesting session even though I had seen the application before. Basically they created a live view of the airports + planes for Zurich Airport based on a SOA backend with WPF.

In the session he showed us all required elements for building an app such as the Zurich app. It was an interesting 101 on WPF, Interactive Designer an VS. Very nice indeed.

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 3/1: Using the .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework with Relational Data

 

I’m still sitting in the session but before I forget some of the stuff I decided to start blogging anyway, while still trying to concentrate

Linq to Sql (formerly known as DLINQ) is an extremely powerfull ORM (object relational mapper). It goes way beyond the products available at the moment. I’ve had some experience in using ORM (both static generators and dynamic frameworks) but Dlinq just goes that little bit further.

Thanks to the query language itself which is mapped to very good SQL, it doesn’t have the performance problems that some of the ORM frameworks have. Anders Hejlsberg is showing us a number of complex linq queries that are mapped to their equivalent complex T-Sql queries.

I should also note that DLinq uses a mapping between class and DB, so it doesn’t generate it on the fly, but there are three way to create a mapping. Create the class manually and attach attributes, use an xml mapping file or use the SQLMetal command line utility that will generate the csharp files and mappings manually. It will generate objects for tables, views (which are mapped to tables), sprocs and functions. Stored Procedures are converted into methods with full Intelli-Sense support and functions aswell. You can (if you specify it manually) also tell the mapper to use sprocs for insert, delete and updates of objects.

Under the hoods it’s using optimistic concurrency and will throw an Exception with options for resolving the problem.

If DLinq is not sufficient enough, because you need to write some more or less complex custom sql code, you can do so and still utilize the Linq infrastructure (identity mapping…) and it will map back to classes.

It’s probably a bit of a learning effort getting to know Linq and all the language constructs, but once you know it, you can rely on the way the sql is generated and concentrate on what you should be doing, the business logic.

Download and more Info on Linq

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 2/5: Windows Vista: Tips & Tricks for Targeting Key Native Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from Managed Code

 

Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Forms doesn’t now about anything new that came with Vista, so we had a short trip through 4 of the important changes:

1. User Access Control

If you need administrator privileges you have to run in elevated mode. You can do that by config, which gives you general administrator access, or…

you can start a new process from within your app that does the stuff you need administrator rights for. Yes, you can’t actually elevate a method or a class or any in-process object, you can only elevate a complete process. I personally don’t think that’s a usefull way, having to export all you logic to a console app or similar to launch to do the dirty stuff, but on the other hand how much will there be that you need admin rights for. Time will show… but I do wish you could have elevated a method, and the CLR did the dirty (lifting to it’s own procesS) on it’s own.

BTW: for legacy apps there is a per-user virtualization for filesystem and registy. So if old apps are writing to program files and registry, even though they are running as non-admins and won’t have access to them, they will not break, because they are virtualized in this special per-user store. (There are examples of course like High Score where that won’t help.)

2. CommandLink

A new button type in Vista, that is big and has a description. (Ok the marketing guys may describe it a bit differently, but that’s basically it.) To be able to use them in your managed apps, you need to do some dirty SendMessage’ing. We were shown how to do it, then we were shown were the Samples are (in the Windows SDK) and that there was a class that wrapped all of that.

Same goes for the little shield indicating a UAC command comming up.

3. Common Dialog Controls

They’ve changed in Vista, showing a much richer API. So if you use OpenFileDialog in .net 2.0 they will automatically be mapped to the new ones. NO THEY WON’T! Ok, they could have, not quite sure why they didn’t exchange the dll’s or the calls on the Vista CLR, but basically you’re back to PInvoke. But once again they’ve wrapped it one of the samples.

To sum up the Windows SDK has a number of samples that show you how do to the dirty stuff to get the Vista Style, but you don’t have to undestand it, you can just use it (see the VistaBridge sample). It’s unfortunate that they didn’t integrate it better into the CLR or wrap it officially (because the samples are I assume unsupported). It’s similar to the Gadgets where they just seem to have forgotten about their major development plattform (.net) and return back to the basics (dhtml + js).

Now I’m sitting in Anders Hejlsberg’s DLINQ session…

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 2/4: A Day in Life of a Query – What happens when you type GO?

 

It’s a pity the Whiteboard Sessions aren’t marked with difficulty level like the Breakout Sessions. The talk was so informative, but went so deep that I was swimming in all the tech-talk and it was hard to follow everything. I’m sure it was very valuable for the SQL MVPs in the room, but it definetely was a level 500 or so talk…

You can get a log of technical details on Paul Randal’s blog.

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 2/3: DEMO: biTunes – Business Intelligence (BI) with Sql 2005

 

This was an interesting (and my first demo) track. Basically take the ITunes library as xml, transform it into normal xml using and publish it into a database with SQL Integration Services. Then create a cube with Analysis Services to let the use do some querying and use Reporting Services to create reports.

I’ve been interested in these SQL Server services for a while, but never had the need to look at them. This session gave a great overview on what you can do with them, the business case wasn’t that far off, ok you wouldn’t use a itunes library, but a big xml chunk as input is not that unusual. It was entertaining and showed that it’s not as hard as it looks (for the basic stuff).

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: AtE: Sharepoint and Custom Outlook Attributes

 

Outlook is the central point of information for the information worker. I’ll just leave that sentence without any further comments.

So when thinking in terms of context-aware environments (and for other business scenarios) where is the first place you might want to meta tag communication (emails) with context information. Outlook of course. So you attach a number of custom attributes to your emails depending on the context.

The next question is how do you find those emails based on custom attributes. There are two ways we would like to do it.

1. the Sharepoint Search way

We’ve just been at the AtE stand for MOSS and they’ve told us the crawler indexes those custom attributes (in public folders) anyway, and through central administration you can specify managed properties wihch then map these to specific Sharepoint attributes. You can also expose them to advanced search. So that’s an interesting way for all your enterprise email.

But the second question ist, what about personal email, stuff you don’t push to PFs and so on. Well the obvious answer would be Desktop Search. Now we didn’t get any response on the NGs about our question (wether it is possible to index custom properties and search for them with WDS -we are using 3.0) so we though we’d go and ask the guy at the AtE. As it happens he’s a very busy man Lot’s of questions and we gave up, so we’ll have to retry tommorow.

I’ll update this post as soon as I have an answer…

Tags: TechEd-Developers

TechEd-Dev07: Day 2/2: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF): Building Secure, Reliable and Transacted Distributed Services

 

This one is going to be a short review. I spent most of the session using some new stuff I has learnt in Ingo’s last session to tackle a customer problem.

The session itself was an intermediate overview of WCF. I can’t really judge a lot of it, because my attention was mostly on my task, but every now and then I popped up to get a few interesting things.

#1 Security is enabled by default for communication

#2 You can use your own Session Token Service and Authorization Manager for WCF

The rest was about basic features that any communication framework needs (reliability, confidentiality…). See the slide for more. I wonder if there is an advanced session on the topic.

Tags: TechEd-Developers