Dave Donaldson

TechEd 2005 Recap

Friday, June 17 2005

OK, I know. I promised to blog the whole time I was at TechEd last week, but I didn't blog at all. Not a single post. I've had 3 or 4 people actually razz me about it, namely Jennifer and Alex. Alex gave me a hard time about it yesterday while we were both giving sessions at the VS 2005 DevCon in Detroit (which, by the way, I think was a resounding success). Sorry about the no blogging, but I never really found the time. Just too damn busy with sessions, volunteering for INETA, and parties. Plus, I didn't have internet access in my hotel room for the first 4 days I was there.

So instead of writing a play-by-play of the week, I figured I'd write a recap about TechEd and the week that was. Beware, this is a long post, but here goes:

The Venue
The Orange County Convention Center was huge. I guess it would have to be to handle a group of 11,000 people and all the staff that has to deal with them. If I'm not mistaken, the OCCC seemed much bigger than the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the last two PDCs were held. Wireless connectivity sucked bad and contributed to me not blogging. The TechEd Store seemed lacking in having any substantial TechEd gear. It had plenty of Microsoft stuff, but not nearly as many items with the TechEd logo as I had figured to see. I did pick up a Halo 2 t-shirt, which made my 7 yr old a little envious (and just for the record, I looked for the Halo 2 shirt in kid sizes but there weren't any). As for the food, I almost never eat conference food because I don't think it's very good. I had lunch one time last week at the conference and it just reaffirmed my stance on the whole food issue. But overall, I thought the venue worked out well and was fairly well organized.

The Keynotes
I only went to the opening keynote, which was given by Steve Ballmer (most other keynotes at large conferences tend to suck). I had never seen Ballmer speak in person before, so I was really interested to see what his speech as like. He didn't disappoint, although I don't think he was *quite* as animated as I expected. Samantha Bee from The Daily Show helped add a little humor to the keynote, but like James said, it would have been better if she had interviewed Ballmer. Two things stick out from Ballmer's keynote: the ability to remotely wipe a remote device and the ability of MOM to manage a Unix box. Both of those things were pretty cool to see.

The Sessions
I didn't attend nearly as many sessions I had hoped, but I knew that going in because of all my INETA volunteer duties that I had to do throughout the week. Below are some notes from a few sessions.

Building and Using a Software Factory - Jack Greenfield and Wojtek Kozaczynski
This was a good session. Well, let me restate that - the content was good, but the delivery was a bit shaky. That notwithstanding, what was shown was quite nice, as they built a small app with DSL and the GAT (Guidance Automatioin Toolkit). The best part about them building the app was that they used a factory to build the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern for the UI behavior. If you're not aware, to implement pure MVC in .NET you must use the UI Process Application Block, which is no small feat (I spent lots and lots of time researching it for a project back at NW). It's very large and complicated. With the software factory stuff they showed, the MVC pattern was implemented out of the box, which was a surprise. Really cool stuff going on in that space.

I mention below that I talked to Harry Pierson - this session drove a lot of our conversations. He wanted feedback on what I saw and I had plenty of questions for him. I was already thinking of stuff for 3 years down the road and Harry kept telling me to slow the train down. Even though they've been working on this stuff for a good couple of years, they are still in the beginning stages of whats to come. This is why I dig architecture.

Code Generation: Architecting a New Kind of Reuse - Scott Hanselman
I've never had a chance to see Hanselman speak in person, so I wanted to make sure I caught his act last week. He did not disappoint. He's a very good speaker and you can tell he's quite comfortable up on stage. He talked about how his company Corillian is using code generation techniques to write better software. Very interesting stuff here, especially how they use codegen for their ASP.NET custom controls. ASP.NET custom controls can be a pain in the ass to write, and they use codegen to even build all the webforms designer stuff so that developers can drag and drop those controls and use them as richly as they use the standard .NET controls. Pretty cool stuff.

I picked up two other things from him in his talk: Magnifixer (helpful when presenting) and CR_Documentor (to compliment NDoc). Both very cool tools.

Design Considerations for Enterprise Application Frameworks - Kyle Huntley
This session started out so bad that James and I both left about 10 minutes ino it. I was expecting to see something useful about building frameworks, which I spend quite a bit of time on, but instead we got a terrrible speaker and a bunch of crap about how Avanade built Enterprise Library, which I've heard too many times to count. And this guy was supposed to be the lead architect for EntLib. Whatever.

Web Services Interoperability - Simon Guest
I have a special place in my heart for interoperability between disparate sytems (because of all the work I did at NW figuring out how to get DNA, .NET, and J2EE apps to work together seamlessly), so I was looking forward to this session. It turned out to be very good, as you can tell Simon spends more time on this subject than practically anyone else. The best part about this was how it started. Not 2 minutes into his talk, some guy comes up to one of the microphones and rudely interrupts Simon, saying something like, “That sounds real nice Simon, but I want some real world examples, not this piddly crap you're going to talk about“ I mean, it really was very rudely done and I think it caught Simon off guard. I was like, “I can't believe this guy has the balls to interrup a speaker like that and say this stuff“. So Simon actually invited him up on stage to let him drive the session to see if he could do better.

Well, as it turned out, it was rigged; the whole thing was planned. The guy turned out to be a feeder of questions so that Simon could show this and that. And there were some funny moments in there too, so it worked out very well. I take my hat off to them for pulling that off because I know everyone in the audience was fooled when it first happened. It made for an enjoyable session.

.NET Framework: CLR Internals - Jeffrey Richter
Richter is another one of those persons who I've followed in the industry (because of his writing about low-level stuff), so I wanted to make sure I saw him speak. He also did not disappoint and it was cool hearing him talk about the stuff he wrote in his book, which if you are a .NET developer and haven't read, then you've missed out on the last 3 years. A lot of under-the-covers stuff I know came from his book. A lot of the things he talked about I actually talk about when I teach (because I learned it from him in the first place), but either way, to see him deliver it was quite good.

Building Distributed Applications with an Eye on the Future - Doug Purdy
This was a really good session about Indigo and some of the things you can do today to make life easier when moving to Indigo. As I mention below, Don Box was there to help give the talk and as usual added his unique dynamic to the talk. Doug and Don feed off each other quite well, which made the talk both informative and entertaining, which is the best way to have it. I won't cover all the Indigo stuff here, but I'll be digging into it more in the coming months, so I'll be sure to blog about my experiences with it later.

Optimizing Scalability, Performance, and Availability with Systems Built on the .NET Framework - Ingo Rammer
Winner of “Longest Title for a TechEd Session“, this might be my favorite session of the week. For one, Ingo rocks, plain and simple. I found that out from talking to him earlier in the week. He showed some very interesting ways to determine how, where, and why an application might be a slow performer. Basically, he used a network sniffer, a CLR profiler, and a SQL profiler to show possible locations where slowdowns can occur. And for each one he showed what symptons to look for and how to resolve them. The SQL profiler alone was worth it because it really hits home why the DataSet is not suited for large-scale, high-throughput web apps. I'll be using his little demo with the SQL profiler when I teach, that's how good it was.

The Parties
There were parties pretty much every night last week. Here's some highlights.

Party with Palermo
This one took place at the Peabody hotel on Saturday night, the night a lot of people arrived in Orlando. Jeffery Palermo is the one who organized it and was actually wearing a namebadge. We gave him a hard time about that all week (in a good natured way) because there was just something fun and innocent about it (btw, congrats to Jeffrey on his new gig). James and I got to the party a little late, but hooked up with everyone at the bar. I met and talked with so many people that night, let me see if I can list them all: Darrell Norton, DonXML, Don Smith, Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin, Ingo Rammer, Christian Weyer, Clemens Vasters, Brian Randell, Scott Bellware, and Jeff Julian. I'm sure I'm missing a couple people; for a complete list see this post on Jeffrey's blog.

Microsoft Central Region Influentials Party
This one was held on Monday night at the Nascar Cafe at Universal Studios. Since Amy came to Orlando with me for the first couple days, she went with me to this party, which we got there a little later than most of the other people (you'll notice that theme a lot - me being late to parties). This was a really good time and I met some more people that I only knew in the online world, such as Joel Ross. The best part about this night was me and Drew dancing on the Dance Machine and riding that damn horse. In fact, watching James ride this horse game was just about the funniest things I've ever seen. I'm actually still laughing while I write about it. I will never, ever, ever, ever get that image out of my head.

Speaking of the Dance Machine, Josh Holmes snapped a photo of Jeff Julian and Drew dancing the night away and even captured part of it on video. Check it out. And just between you and me, Drew gets a little bit *too* into the Dance Machine. His body starts to find a groove and wiggle and stuff. Kind of freaky. I was concentrating on not spilling my beer while trying to keep up with Drew. By the time we were done, I was doing my best not to slip on the beer that I did spill and yet still hit my dance steps. Not easy.

Many thanks to Rodney (Drew's boss) for hooking us up for this one.

Microsoft MVPs and Influentials Party
This huge party took place on Wednesday night at the Matrix and Metropolis bars. Pretty cool places, and of course, I got there late (about half way through) because I was working the BOF sessions for INETA that night. Everyone there had a great time and afterwards a few of us hit another bar at Universal Studios. I had way too much to drink and was harshly reminded by my body (and my wife Amy - sorry honey) the next day as to why I can't do that anymore. College was 12 years ago! We'll just leave it at that.

The Pictures
I snapped a number of pics last week with my camera phone, and you can see those on my Textameria moblog. You can also see some TechEd pics from James here and from Drew here. Here's a good one on Drew's moblog of me, James, and Nate (Nate - get a damn blog!).

The People
By far, the best part about hanging at TechEd last week was meeting and talking to all the people I only knew from the online world. Finally being able to put a face with a name is quite nice, and when a person turns out to be as nice and cool in person as they are on blogs and emails is always a good thing. Here's a few people I got a chance to meet and talk to, in no particular order:

Darrell Norton
Darrell is certainly as nice in person as he is online, and he's a cool guy to just talk to and hangout with. We had a very interesting conversation about Python, for which he's still yet to convince me of Python's role in the development landscape. Come on Darrell, I'm waiting! ;-)

DonXML
Don rocks. His writing on being an independent consultant is how I first “found“ him, so it was cool to finally sit next to him a have a beer. I didn't get a chance to hangout with Don as much as I would have liked because of our schedules, but I'm sure we'll have plenty more opportunities down the road.

Harry Pierson
Harry, aka DevHawk, is an incredibly bright person. He's a lead architect at Microsoft in their Strategic Architecture team and was the chairperson for the Architecture track at TechEd. If you let him he'll take over a conversation, but it doesn't matter because he's really fun to listen to and trade ideas with. Ted Neward introduced him to me and from there Harry and I chatted a couple different times throughout the week about mostly architecture and Team System related stuff.

Ingo Rammer
Ingo is a super cool guy who obviously has not let his popularity and fame get to him. Brian Randell introduced him to me at the Party with Palermo and from there we talked about various things over a beer or two. I also talked to him for a few minutes later on in the week and then saw his session on the last day. Definintely someone to go see.

Jon Lam
OK, I admit it. When I was hanging out at the DM booth and met Jon Lam, I had a brief fanboy moment. I don't think Jon noticed, but inside I was like, “Holy shit, I'm talking to Jon Lam!“ Jon goes way back with DM and wrote a ton of COM stuff that I used to follow back in the day. He's also a real nice guy and was enjoyable to talk to.

Don Box
A while back I wrote a blog post about some instructors leaving DM and on that post Don left some comments. So when I walked into Doug Purdy's Indigo session and saw that Don was there, I took the opportunity to see if he remembered that post, for which he did. So he and I talked for a couple minutes about that and other DM stuff. Again, he was also a cool guy to talk to and he thought it was very ironic and funny that I wrote that post and then ended up being a DM instructor.

The INETA User Group Leader Summit
On Sunday before the conference got started, INETA held its User Group Leader Summit for about 175 user group leads and associates from around the world. There were lots more people there than I expected, partly due to INETA and Culminis putting on the day-long event together. Very much like TechEd, the attendees were made up of not just developers, but IT folks as well. We saw two presentations, one from Dave Thompson (VP Exchange Server) and one from Ari Bixhorn (Lead PM, Web Service Strategy; sorry no blog link). To me, the Exchange talk was not good, as I found it to be too much marketing for my taste, and I just have no interest in it. But Ari gave an excellent talk on Indigo which was well received by all attendees. He demonstrated a simple chat application using Indigo and he really generated some excitement around the technology. Good stuff going on there.

In the afternoon there were several “breakout“ sessions going on, and the one I like most was about organizing local events, such as Code Camps. Thom Robbins and Chris Pels lead that discussion and I wrote down a bunch of notes for our Day of .NET events.

I also did my first book signing here. OK, “book signing“ might be too strong a term, but Josh Holmes was there and had James, Cory Smith, and myself sign his copy of “Visual Studio Hacks“ since James was the author and Cory and I were both contributors.

The Other Stuff
Here's some random notes:

- I hung out at the DM booth a couple times and got to meet fellow DM instructors Kent Tegels, David Cowles, and Jon Flanders.

- I didn't go to the attendee party at Universal Studios. Two reasons: been there, done that (simulation rides don't do anything for me), and I was quite partied out by then.

- The JW Marriott is a fabulous resort. Very posh, very nice. My wife Amy thoroughly enjoyed herself by the pool while I was out.

- This was my first TechEd, which definitely has a different feel from a PDC. TechEd is split about 40% developers and 60% IT Pros, whereas PDCs are for developers only. This was reflected with the list of sessions and the exhibitors in the Expo Hall. Another big difference is the promotion of community involvement at TechEd with all the BOFs, cabanas, and community lounges. That's something PDC doesn't focus on.

- On Friday night after the conference was over, I went out to dinner with Jeff Julian, John Alexander, and Drew Robbins (Drew started TechEdBloggers and now Jeff and John are running it). We went to a Japanese restaurant and had lots of sushi (except John - wimp) and Shabu Shabu, which I highly recommend. It's expensive, but definitely worth it.

And Finally...
A big, huge, enormous “Thank You” to INETA and Microsoft for putting me up for the whole week. They took extra good care of me throughout the event and I truly appreciate it.

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