TechEd Developers 2007 Summary

10 November 2007

I didn’t make it to Barcelona until Tuesday so I wasn’t at the Keynote. By all accounts I didn’t miss much. The good news was that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007.

As is often the case, TechEd was as much about catching up with people as the sessions themselves. It was good to go out on the Sidra with, amongst others Richard Griffin, Una Wlash, Jennifer Forsythe and Johannes Kebeck.

Lots of interesting stuff, but here are some thoughts from my homeward bound plane journey:

ASP.NET MVC will be out as a CTP soon and is likely to be rolled into the mainstream product by middle of next year. I think that having a very extensible Model View Controller pattern will allow for much more of an engineering approach to ASP.NET apps. I’ve always thought that Web Forms is the wrong abstraction. I think this framework will fix all that, and lead to more maintainable and extensible web apps. A big issue is how to support existing web controls. To be honest I think they should ditch those and start again. Anybody considering the jump to Ruby on Rails might like to take a look at this and reconsider.

I’ve done some fun things with XSLT in the past, but building XSLs doesn’t come naturally to me. Dave McMahon’s talk has inspired me to think about it some more. To be honest the talk started out looking like it was going to be rather dull, but those attendees that persevered were rewarded with some very cool demos and code. I didn’t know that Visual Studio could debug XSLT and I was surprised at the opportunities for hacking XSLT from .NET. Generating XAML using XSLT makes an awful lot of sense.

Andy Wigley gave us a comprehensive tour of Windows Mobile 6 from a programmer’s perspective. The tool support in VS2008 all seemed to be much improved. I’m tempted to do more with Mobile, but also reluctant to invest too much time and effort. Surely someday soon, we’ll get full blown .NET CLR . The hardware is getting rapidly more powerful. So is it worth waiting rather than struggling with missing features? I guess I’m just frustrated that I can’t port LSharp to the mobile platform because of missing Reflection features. Sun seem to have dropped their Mobile Java in favour of full blown JVM. When will Microsoft do the same?

The .NET Micro Framework looks very cool. I like the idea that a software guy like me could start prototyping hardware devices without much recourse to a soldering iron.

Silverlight seems to be getting all the glory, but maybe we’ll see more WPF apps following the fantastic demos by the Blendables guys.

WCF seems to bring a whole lot of simplicity to the communications stack and now, with support for REST and for AJAX end points I think we’re going to be using more of it.

If time was more plentiful I’d certainly be thinking about building a LISP or LSharp IDE using Visual Studio Extensibility.

Pat Helland gave an interesting talk entitled “The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects”. He discussed his thoughts on the future and touched on the many-core (multi core) problem. He made some interesting predictions about future hardware (Disk is Tape, Flash is disk, Tape is dead) and about future data centres. I liked the fact that he tried hard to measure, and provide statistics for, what he was talking about. (E.g. only 15% of the cost of a data centre is the building – 40% is power). It was the first time I’d heard about Sun’s data centre in a 20-foot shipping container. I still think multi core is a huge problem. There are lots of things going on at Microsoft to look at it – Transactional Memory, Joins library, F# etc. but I didn’t find anybody who had the big picture.

LINQ is undoubtedly powerful, but I can’t help wondering about how C# and VB are evolving to add new language features. I was interested in Claudio Russo’s talk on C Omega and joins etc, but here we are hacking the language again. Perhaps we should be looking at the original programmable programming language (LISP) and seeing if there is a way to add Macros to C#?