My TechEd day started with Carl Franklin a speaker I knew only from the podcasts,
.NET Rocks and
Hanselminutes. He talked about RSS, podcasts, IE7 and IE7's powerful RSS API.
One of the online tools Carl used was
shrinkster.com. I heard about
shrinkster.com in Scott Hanselman's podcasts but now I finally saw the light.
While I was making notes he would refer to a URL by mentioning just the three characters to use on
shrinkster.com . For example the shortcut for all the URL's in this presentation is F47.
Now if you go to
http://www.shrinkster.com/F47 shrinkster redirects you to the right page, et voila, all the session links appear in your browser.
At the end of the session there was still time to ask some questions. On the question "what to expect from the Microsoft's Zune" he gave this answer: "Microsoft is not hip. Microsoft is like your grandmother. While Apple is more like Elvis". Since I'm writing this post on my Mac Book I can only agree 
.
After Carl it was time again for the clowns of the TechEd 2006, Clemens Vasters and Steve Schwartz. This time the talk was about security. In the first half they explained the common patterns. In the second half they showed where these patters applied in applications you use daily. I must say this is a very clever approach. During the second half I had several "aha" moments.
The second session from the "guys" was about the futures:
- Vista
- Orcas the new version of Visual Studio
- Longhorn the next version of Windows Server
- BizTalkServer 2006 R2
The new .NET Framework wasn't mentioned here since it was already released.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is based on the WCF Channel Architecture. WCF is message based. This combination gives you a very powerful Service/Message bus. Watch out Tibco, BizTalk is on the move!
The next version of Orcas will have support for ASP.NET AJAX and CardSpace. WF and WCF fully integrated. The mentioned that Orcas was just a small release between big ones. I wonder what they are not telling us with that ...
Longhorn will bring us transactions:
- Transacted File System
- Transacted Registry
- TRANSACTION command in cmd.exe
They ended the session with looking into their crystal ball. Interesting but still a bit to vague for me.
The last real session of this day was with
Scott Hanselman. A great session, I read his blog and listen to his podcasts for quit a while now so it was not a real surprise. Nevertheless a very useful session. The takeaways of this session:
- I you have a problem add a layer.
- A dataset is just a bowl, you still don't know what is inside.
- Don't store interface contracts in Word files.
- Automate as much as possible; code generation, check code on coverage, metrics and duplicate code.
After the TechEd we went to a special session with Miguel Icasa. Mr MONO himself.
MONO lets you run .NET applications on Linux and Mac OSX. It is open source but sponsored by Novell.
I must say it was an eye opener. Creating a .NET application in Visual Studio 2005 copying it to a Linux machine and actually run it without recompiling it.
Just today version 1.2 was released. It supports C# generics and Windows Forms. Cool stuff!