August 2008 - Posts
Yay. Of all the Microsoft events, the Professional Developers Conference is the one I most look forward to. It really is THE event to attend. Microsoft employees attendance at these events is very limited. Luckily, I have been allocated a pass to attend and will be heading to LA at the end of October.
The PDC is THE event you want to attend if you need to understand the future of the Microsoft development platform. This year, I am looking forward to information on products and technologies like
- Software + Services - or what some refer to as the Cloud Platform. There is some stuff in CTP format like SQL Server Data Services and BizTalk labs and I expect more information in this space.
- Oslo - Next generation modeling. Not lots of information out there today on Oslo but BillG promised some bits at the PDC.
- Visual Studio and .NET Framework futures - Anders is doing a session on C# v4 and there are other sessions on VB, Workflow and WCF futures
Check out www.microsoftpdc.com for more information. I find https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx to be most useful to get an indication of what will be covered. If you can make it, let me know.
One of the cool features we announced for .NET 3.5 SP1 was the client profile. The basic premise was that for developers creating client sides applications (eg addins for Office or WPF), they would need to install the full .NET Framework. Once you took into dependencies, this redist was close to 200MB. The normal redist had many features that a client side developer might not need, like ASP.NET or Workflow Foundation (although you can use Workflow Foundation from the client application). We had from many ISVs that the deployment of the framework can be a blocker.
With this in mind, we created the client profile. Now, when I first read this it said the redist is just 28MB. Cool. Obviously it is just a subset of the full framework but 28MB sounds nice. This week, however, I have been digging into a bit more and there a couple of things to be aware of.
1) There is no offline installer for the "client redist". There is an online installer where you have a bootstrapper that would determine what you need, and then download the client profile if it met the requirements
2) The "client redist" is largely intended for XP SP2 machines
3) The client redist will not install on machines where the full framework is installed.
For more information, check out the Client Profile Explained entry from Jaime.
For TechED, I delivered some sessions on Rosario. This included a keynote demo and some breakout sessions. That is not the point of this post though. My main demo machine is a Dell D820 with 4GB RAM (although only 3.5GB is recognized :-(). This is a 64 bit machine but I have only installed the 32 bit versions running Windows Server as I wanted things like Team System to run. Rosario though, does not come in an installable format today - so I had no option but to use the virtual pc.
I was lucky to get a loan hard drive and decided to pursue Hyper-V as I told that would be give much better performance. HyperV runs only on 64 bit so I needed to install Windows Server 64 bit.
This was my first install of a 64 bit OS and overall I was happy. All my devices were recognized. Downloading the video drivers for Vista from the Dell site worked great too. I did not install much else on the machine (not even the .NET Framework) as this machine's goal was purely to act as a host for my virtual machines.
Getting started with HyperV was easy. I found the UI very intuitive - certainly a slot easier for me to use than Virtual Server.
After that, HyperV got a little confusing. I am not a regular VPC guy, but I got use to things like "Discard changes". HyperV does not have this concept. It uses snapshots where you can accomplish similar goals. The networking is also a little different, and I had some challenges there. Also if you had old VPC, when you run it on HyperV you need to activate the OS again - it sees it as a HAL change.
Some resources I found very useful.
How To: Get the TFS "Rosario" April 08 CTP running under Hyper-V is a truly excellent post. I used this as my main basis when starting and it made things easy. You will find the steps useful even if you are not running Rosario.
Getting UNDO functionality with Hyper-V Snapshots was very useful for me to understand how to get a clean state (Very important for demo)
I reckon this might well be the developer environment of the future. At Microsoft, there is guy Keith Combs running a Lenovo laptop with 8GB RAM. You can checkout how he was able to get 14 instances of Vista running.
I think all ISVs should make their software available - at least for trial purposes - through a virtual machine. We even have a program you can review at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/partners/vhdpartners.mspx. From that page
The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides Microsoft’s partners a convenient and simplified process for creation of application images, facilitates its widespread distribution by making it available as a free download and enables accelerated evaluation and testing of these applications by customers. If you are Microsoft partner and would like to be able to distribute your applications in a VHD, you will have to sign the VHD redistribution agreement. To participate in this program, send an email to vhdinfo@microsoft.com and ask for a copy of the agreement to be signed and returned to Microsoft.
Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan - the 2 guys who manage the Windows dev team have started blogging at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/
At first glance, this blog looks mainly interesting if you are keen on Windows 7- but if you check out one of their first entries, you will quickly see that this is useful for anyone trying to understand the complexities of building large software. I read the Windows 7 Team post last night and it is truly fascinating. I find the comments just as useful.
BTW Steven blogs internally at Microsoft and his blog entries are LONG!.
The VS08 SP1 install took about an hour to install. At one point it told me about running processes and I told it to retry. If I just ignored, it might have finished quicker.
TFS SP1 was a really quick install. about 5-7 minutes I think.
If you are using Silverlight, you need the updated Silverlight chainer for SP1. That install finished just a second ago. In my case I was brave and did not uninstall the old Silverlight bits. The install did not moan
Overall, quite painless for me- but I now need to actually test it.
The Service pack is downloaded - took about 2 hours to download the 831MB ISO image. The ISO image is burned to DVD (< 5 minutes). Ran the setup and it moaned and told me to get the PatchRemoval tool. Downloaded that (about 13MB) and it ran for a couple of minutes. Says I might need the original media (not so cool). That ran fine.
SP1 install now starts fine. Install started at 11:22. Will blog later on status
At TechED I promised to post some links to resources on Silverlight 2, specifically around Tips and Tricks. When prepping for this session, I could easily have done around 30 tips. I ended up covering just 12 and even that was a little rushed. The resources below should help you in understanding the various areas better.
Videos from Silverlight.NET
There are a number of good videos covering some of the areas I showed, including Isolated Storage, the Install Experience, Visual State Manager, ASP.NET Application Services, Dynamic Loading of Assemblies and HTML Integration. Some of my samples were adapted from these.
Check them out at http://silverlight.net/learn/videocat.aspx?cat=2
Screencasts from Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond.
All 52 of them. Some of them cover similar topics to above. You can also find some screencasts on DeepZoom.
You can view them at http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=10
Blogs
Check out Jeff's blog for some useful Silverlight tips.
Scott Guthrie's Silverlight Tips, Tutotials and Links Pages
Mike Snow's Silverlight blog. You will find a whole series of "Tip of the day" - some nice tips in here
Unit Testing with Silverlight. I showed this briefly. Check out this blog entry introducing it and this updated entry for Beta 2 from Jeff Wilcox for more information
Check out Dan Wahlin's blog entries here and here for a nice sample of using Sockets with Silverlight.
No need for me to blog about the availability of the VS08 SP1 or .NET 3.5 SP1. It is all over the show. The SP contains a whole bunch of stuff. If you want to learn about it check out the training kit
The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.
And in other news, IconWorkshop lite is available free for VS08 users. Check http://www.axialis.com/download/iwlite.html for more info.
If you are leveraging some new functionality in the SP, especially if you are an ISV, I would love to hear about it.
I recently got a new HDD on loan (for TechED to install Windows 64 bit). I get a bit irritated when the hard drive and the description shows 160GB when the actual size if 148GB. Is this now just acceptable way of doing things?
These were some of my impressions at TechED
Audience
- Lot of C# Developers. Not lots of VB
- Not too many Project Managers or Dev type managers. Am I wrong?
- Lots of interest in language type topics - C#, LINQ etc
- Appeared to be many new faces. First time attendees. To a degree I felt that some of the "regulars" did not attend.
- Looked to me like many people left a bit early every day. The days are hectic, starting at 8am and maybe some attendees would not "handle it" :-)
- The title of the session makes a huge difference. In some cases, it seemed like attendees did not read the description and just went with the title.
Sessions
<Eben and I looked after the dev tracks. One of our primary objectives was for attendees to leave with the view that TechED is about great sessions. Fun and parties are cool, but ultimately we want them to come back for the content>
I went to lots of sessions, sometimes sitting for just 10-15 minutes and then going to other ones. I tend to spend very little time prepping for my sessions when I get there. My feeling was that the content was excellent. I have attended many MS internal and customer events and the overall sessions ratings I would give would be right up there with those events (and in some cases the overall content was better). Now this could well be just my biased opinion.
Many of the attendees I spoke too were also very happy with the content. This year, we only had an online system for evaluations so we need to see what percentage of attendees filled in these forms (the ones that are upset are usually the first to fill in :-()
Other stuff
Some people miss Sun City as they feel everything is enclosed and you get better opportunities to mingle. Others told me they missed morning coffee. I am not much of a party guy and left early on the Sunday to do some prep. So there is not much opinion I can give on this.
Check my previous post where I asked for some feedback.
If you attended TechED, please share your feedback. If you have feedback from others feel free to post it. If you know others who did attend, please send them to this blog. You can either make a comment on this entry or use the "contact me" bit. I will post some of my impressions later today. The main categories of feedback:
1) Sessions in terms of speakers and content (what Eben and I own for the dev audience)
2) The Social aspects of TechED.
3) Logistics (Food, transport etc)
If you can give an overall rating per section (out of 9, does not have to a whole number so something like 7.2 is ok) and for the event as a whole that would be great. Seeing that this was the first event in Durbs, any comments on the move would also be good.
Finally, comments on areas of improvement are welcomed too.