First off I went into the Building Rich Web Applications using Silverlight 2 session. Kathy introduced a 200 level session on what kinds of things Silverlight 2 can do over Silverlight. The answer basically is a heck of a lot more. Most importantly now having been built on top of the .NET Framework, it means that you can leverage the power of the framework with the rich presentation controls offered through Silverlight.

The use of a video streaming site as a demo kept enough attention going. I’d have preferred more time to examine the code she’d used to pull in XML data and then format for display but it was an overview session. Her ‘Hola World’ application was very effective when using a VideoBrush to quickly paint media assets into simple controls. 

Second session was on Team Foundation Server Work Item Use and Planning with Chris Menegay. If Chris gets paid on words per minute, he’ll be making a fair buck! He crammed a heck of a lot of useful information with his experience in the field into a standard Breakout session. Some of his best practice tips were very valuable and it made me realise that anyone using a Team Project template out of the box really needs to understand what they’re doing first. No one template will necessarily fit the business demands straight away: for example, the order in which states of tasks may progress from Active to Resolved to Closed may change between businesses. It’s made me want to go download a project template and go rooting around in the XML again to understand everything that’s going on under the bonnet. Chris’ other very useful suggestion was to make sure that any Process Template editing should go into its own Team Project in TFS to manage changeset history rather than just hacking XML. 

After lunch, I went to see Roy Osherove’s ‘Sense and Testability’ talk in the auditorium and had a brief chat with Sarah Blow of Geek Girl Dinner fame (the power of Twitter) and it was great to meet her and put a face to the name. Roy’s talk was excellent and it’s already sent me off researching new methods of unit testing. I was pleased to see some of the approaches we’ve been taking recently in using public properties to allow for mocking, rather than prescribing Constructor overloads (mandatory vs optional) were mentioned. 

The other interesting suggestion was to make every class a virtual class. Whilst seemingly going against the OO principle of encapsulation, it does allow for test methods to be over-ridden. For example, if you had a method which simply retrieved the current time, overloading this virtual method in a test class derived from the virtual base class would allow you to return any time you chose. 

Neil had been to a Scrum session and it bears a lot of similarities to how we’re working currently, anyway. 

Finally at the end of the day, we both went to ASP.NET MVC Practices which was a pretty deep dive into areas which are still pretty much up for debate as the toolset moves from Beta towards RTM. Maybe Hadi Harini had firmer information than is available from the MVC website.

A very useful tip was to write tests to test your Routing class and to remove the default catch-all route (controller/action/param) that is created to avoid patterns that you want to fail to match then serving back a page that maybe not suitable. 

More to follow once I’ve decrypted and rewritten my notes.

Having a tiny special ‘Early Bird’ section down the front did seem a little pointless when I’d hazard a guess that well over 70% of delegates would’ve been signing up for the conference straight away.

The stage was very, well, orange. The black auditorium with its glossy black camouflage ceiling makes the whole place feel like we were about to get a paintball briefing rather than a Microsoft presentation. Loud percussive beats start about 10 minutes to go to fire up the spirits. It did start to work too.

First on stage was Pierre Liautaud, Vice President for Microsoft in Western Europe. His short introduction speech balanced the future ‘magic’ that developers with the right software and support can write against the clear message that Windows Azure platform offered more choice in an economically uncertain time.

He was keen to point out that Windows Azure was Software & Services and not Software As A Service. That the choice on where elements of your system were deployed were still firmly up to you and that they weren’t suggesting that everyone should move lock-stock over to it (funny that).

The main event was Jason Zander’s introduction to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010. Obviously a true developer, he didn’t care that using a pre-alpha version of VS 2010 (and in one demo a pre-alpha version of Windows 7!) lead to a crash and a few hangs. He just wanted to show off the features and it therefore had an honesty to it that a PowerPoint slideshow would’ve totally lacked.

The video of his keynote is up on TechEd TV and its worth a watch. The four areas he covered were 

1. Understanding the code
2. Building web applications
3. Office business applications
4. C++ improvements

In Understanding the code (watch the video at 21 minutes on), he introduced the Architecture Explorer. Able to delve into the depths of your code, it builds a clear diagram of the interdependencies in your project. So so useful. VS2010 was also able to generate a UML 2.1.1 Sequence Diagram for a class with a single click, showing all calls to objects and other methods. It’s the kind of overview information that developers looking at code fresh (or when you’ve been away for a bit and things have changed) would love to have. All built into the IDE. Why can’t we have this version already?

He also briefly touched on TeamLab, a feature allowing you to provision test environments with all of the settings you need. This leads to the ability for developers and testers alike to know that the machine that code is being tested on is common and controlled. Filing bugs in this system will also capture all of the Virtual Machine information too so that the developer can load up exactly how the environment was at the time of failure.

At around 31 minutes on the video, watch for the information about how the IDE has been totally rewritten on Windows Presentation Foundation and the add-ons they’ve already done for it. The debugging and historical dialogs are great information tools.

In Web Applications (watch the video from 43 mins on), a lot of the stuff I already knew from looking at the ASP.NET MVC stuff. The web.config transformations directly in the IDE is a welcome addition. 

The Office Business applications is IDE support for SharePoint Web Part development and the C++ IDE changes are vast and far reaching but not something I’m interested in with my current skill set and challenges.

It certainly set up the rest of the week and I’ll write more as it happens.