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30 June 2004
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I just came out of a couple of sessions on Visual Studio Team System. Although the demos showed that it's still very early days for this new addition to the Microsoft family (lots of freezes, crashes and loud "Bings" from error dialogs") the product does look like it's going to have awesome potential.
<snip snip snip>
I just tried writing a blog post about everything I saw and it's surprisingly hard to elucidate. Give me time and I'll come up with something. It's a damn impressive system though.
4:08:21 PM 
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You know, you have to admire some of these speakers - well most of them actually. I've spoken at big events myself in the past, but there's always the pre-talk butterflies and nerves. I don't know how I came across in my talks at those events, but I always find it amazing to see just how calm, matter of fact and confident many of the big tech-ed speakers really are. Yesterday I saw Don Box's talk on SOA and Web Services, and Don as ever was fantastic. He had absolutely no slides though. He presented from an XML file containing the questions that he was going to answer through the presentation. There's a lot of great technology on show here this year and if you know what you're doing with that technology it would be fairly easy to take focus away from your presentation skills by blowing people away with great technology demos. Don though just engaged the audience in what could be a very dry topic in a light, entertaining and downright funny way. At one point he even likened SOA to teenage sex (everyone talks about it, but no-one's actually done it, etc).
Scott here is also awesome. He presents like he's just having a chat with a product team. It's fast moving, engaging and always interesting. I don't think over the years that I've been to TechEd that I've ever seen Scott stumble or panic on stage. Awesome stuff.
11:39:35 AM
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I'm just waiting for the second Scott Guthrie session on ASP.NET 2.0 to start. The first session was awesome, packed with demos of Whidbey and ASP.NET 2.0, and it occurred to me that there's a very strong message in Whidbey that Scott really didn't dwell on. In ASP.NET 2.0 you use smart tags to set up binding and properties on controls. It's in fact fantastically brainless to bind a control to any data source, and that means ANY data source. For example you can easily bind a grid to a dataset returned from a middle tier business object's method. You can set up validation groups to link for example a button to a text box to say that the button shouldn't work until the textbox validates. You can set up cross form posting by telling a control to send parameters to a second page, and in that second page grab an instrance of the first an interrogate it's state and that of it's controls.
These things Scott covered. But the underlying story here is that at last web designers can work with developers painlessly. There are exceptions but by and large fantastic web designers are not typically fantastic developers. Conversely, a great developer can't necessarily produce a great looking web application. With the smart tag binding stuff in particular we are at last in a position where we can develop strong business components, GUI controllers etc and then hand these to a web designer to connect to and use. THe web designer can do what she does best - design great looking user experiences, and developers can do what they do best - design and write code.
I wonder how many companies though are going to realize this and start getting all those fantastically talented HTML designers back into work.
Update: Scott did hit this point in the second session, showing how a designer can edit the CSS and Master page templates for a site, without touching any code, and add a much better looking user experience to the project independently of the site's programmer.
11:39:29 AM
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Next up on the TechEd Morons list - the "late" jerk.
This guy feels it's not important to turn up on time. He doesn't believe that speakers are real people who can actually be put off by anyone coming in and making a fuss late. He does however believe that because he's late we'll all pay him attention and welcome him with open arms. You've all seen this guy. 25 minutes into the session this guy will throw open the double doors to the conference room filling it with light and noise from the outside. He'll stand there for a minute or so looking at the slides and the presenter and around the conference room, presumably trying to find somewhere to sit.
Then, he'll enter, leaving the doors open of course. Everyone is paying attention to this guys dramatic entrance and he's sure someone will be honoured to jump out of their seat and shut the doors behind him. After spending a minute at the door disturbing everyone by looking around etc etc he'll make his way to the busiest row of seats in the conference room, and then make people who are settled down with their bags, taking notes etc, move all their stuff so that he can sit down. But he won't sit. He'll flop. The arms get folded and people both sides of him get elbowed in the ribs. The left leg will come up resting his left ankle on his right knee so that the guy on the left also gets kicked. He'll at this point pretend to be really interested in what the presenter is saying and thus be completely immune to everyone around him saying "Hey, watch it moron/jerk/etc".
Just as the people around him get back into their note taking, Moron number 2 will suddenly bend over, rustle in his bag, and bring out a bag of food. After all, he was so busy all morning making a grand entrance that he forgot to grab breakfast. He'll then spend the next 10 minutes loudly slurping, eating, unwrapping and munching.
Oh, by the way, he'll also raise his hand to answer every poll, cos he's really special. "Who works with ASP.NET" - hand goes up. "Who's currently learning Cobol" - hand goes up. "Who's a complete jerk" - hand goes up.
This particular guy is sitting right next to me as I write this, and looking quite concerned as he blatantly reads everything on my screen. Moron
11:39:20 AM
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Every year at TechEd you get to encounter strange new breeds of morons. I thought I'd start documenting them for future generations to benefit from.
First up then, the "I'm really important and so is my computer moron". This is actually the guy that stopped me connecting to the network yesterday. All credit to the Microsoft support guys, there was nothing they could do to help me yesterday because some guy had wandered into the wireless area and decided to set up his computer as a wireless peer - basically an access point. I'm assuming since he's at TechEd he's not so amazingly stupid that he didn't know anything about what he was doing. So, more likely, this guy is important. Very important. This guy is so important that it offends him to think of his computer as "yet another client". He's the guy who expects people to come to him for sagely, but ultimately useless advice and help. So, his computer should be configured the same. Result = about 100 people completely unable to anything on their computers because of one brainless dork who subsequentpacket sniffing revealed was not even actually trying to do anything on the network. He just borked his config, turned his notebook on and sat somewhere trying to look important.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you TechEd moron type number 1.
11:38:43 AM
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I had a brief chat with Gary Cornell, my publisher, yesterday, and found out that my new book, Beginning VB.NET Databases has been handed to another author. It's not as bad as having it cancelled, and I'm glad it's not been cancelled; there's some great stuff in that book for VB database developers, especially now that Express has been released out into the wild.
I'm not surprised the book's been moved, although it is depressing. After all the hassle I had at Avanade, then starting a new job, struggling to cope with the collapse of Wrox Press and then as a result of that falling seriously ill for 6 months (it's actually more like 12, but there's a period of time that I didn't actually know that I was ill), I didn't actually submit anything to Apress since the end of the last book. They advanced me in a 4 book deal to help me out with some problems I had at the time and so in many ways I've let Apress down. I feel pretty terrible about that, but it was unavoidable. If I had pushed to produce a couple of books as well as everything else the books wouldn't have been of that high a quality and my subsequent illness would have been far worse than it was (and it was already pretty dire).
Still, Buddhism says (no, I'm not a buddhist) that Whereever you go, there you are. You should treat each moment with a "This is it" attitude, this is the only moment in your life that should really count, and the thoughts and actions you take in this moment dictate what will come. It's pointless worrying about the future or the past then and instead focus on the now to make sure that the uncontrollable and unknown future is the future you want it to be. With that in mind then, this is a great opportunity for me. An upside of the discussion with Gary was that I need to get some books out, quality books, rapidly. The obvious topic for me to hit is Visual Basic. I used to "own" that space in the book market, and I'm quietly confident that I can do it again. I got a blog comment a while back basically saying that my VB books introduced a whole generation of programmers to the world of WIndows programming. That's a nice feeling, and a great responsibility. I want to do the same again.
Microsoft have made some great moves by releasing the Express line of products, and this is an ideal opportunity for me now to do what I do best; teach! It would be soo cool if could bring yet another generation of programmers to Visual Basic, this time to VB.NET and using Express. You'll see a lot of blog entries coming up then as the book starts to get written (early next week).
8:50:03 AM
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2004
Pete Wright.
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27/11/2004; 12:29:01.
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