TechEd 2010 in New Orleans

TechEd 2010 was held last week in New Orleans. There seemed to be a big turn out this year in the Big Easy, and the conference provided some good information.

Microsoft was definitely pushing the Cloud this year with its Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric products. All looked interesting, but it was never clear to me how much it costs to have Microsoft host your apps and database.

Another topic of interest to me was Windows Phone 7 (WP7). Unfortunately, it is not capable of supporting sophisticated applications like Pocket GTViewer in its October debut. I wrote about what is missing from WP7 in another post. While we (GTI) should easily be able to interface with GTWeb from a WP7 device using a slick Silverlight app, WP7 is not capable of running Pocket GTViewer or GTField for Windows Mobile.WP7 cannot access large data files (such as a .gtx on a SD card), and it can’t use native code (our raster libraries from ECW are native as well as a good chunk of code shared with the desktop version of GTViewer). There are also issues with having to load apps through the Microsoft Marketplace, no interaction with the desktop via RAPI, and no custom TrueType font support. Microsoft admitted that WP7 was a rush job so that they could to get it to the market this year and may have more essential functionality rolled into it with later versions. Nevertheless, it is a radically different platform from Windows Mobile and may very well open up a door to new and different applications (while at the same time closing the door to applications we are using today).

On the pure development front, there are many good things that I saw like the Task Parallel Library that will make getting the most out of multi-core processors easier. Also, Silverlight 4, Expression Blend 4, and Visual Studio 2010 finally look good enough in respect to WPF to leave Windows Forms behind (at least for new development).

Mark Russinovich gave an excellent presentation on the Unexplained such as slow running machines and crashes. Anyone with unexplained machine problems would have benefited from this presentation (search his blog for some of the same information).

Next year, TechEd 2011 is in Atlanta.

TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles

This year the TechEd Developers Conference was merged with the TechEd IT conference and happened last week in Los Angeles. While there were significantly fewer Developer oriented sessions, it was interesting to sit in some of the IT sessions. With around 700 sessions to choose from and only about 20 you can actually attend, the need to be particular about what you want to learn becomes very important. I heavily weighted my track with “Mobile”, but I also checked out SQL Server’s Spatial capabilities, and the future directions of the development environments and programming languages.

The push, I mean focus, this year was definitely the yet to be released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, followed by a healthy dose of Virtualization in the form of Hyper-V and Windows Virtual PC.

I did have an opportunity to run GTViewer on a beta copy of Windows 7 at the “Bring Your Own App Lab.” There were a few glitchy things with reading some values out of the registry, but overall I was very pleased with how well GTViewer worked the first time on Windows 7. I have already checked off a lot of grief on my to-do list from this experience. The free booze they were passing out was not even necessary to favorably color my opinion of Windows 7.

The focus last year was definitely LINQ, which seems to have been toned down now to is actual value. WPF and Silverlight, looked cool to try, but now they look usable. Microsoft’s creation of tools to help spawn the development of new programming languages is supposed to bring about an explosion in new languages. I along with everyone else in the Polyglot Programmer session cringed at the idea of having to learn dozens of new languages, but like LINQ, this idea may fade into a manageable and productive tool in our programming arsenal. I was hoping to see Windows Workflow (WF) be a hotter topic than it apparently is, but it may take a few iterations before it catches on.

I was pretty pleased with TechEd 2009. I will continue to process the information for a while.