It's been quite a while since I attended recent teched 07 in Gold Coast and I thought to put some memories of the conference here before I forget them.
Overall impression,
A nice experience, very well organised with a balance of knowledge + fun, good speakers and plenty to learn at one's own pace through sessions or hands-on labs, provided opportunity for networking and catching up with some old fellows + finding what others are doing/thinking in the industry ........
New things coming,
Well not exactly new as most of the things presented there were already out there in the market or at lteast known. The things I pick were
- Office Business Applications (OBA) Wave, Microsoft looks real serious about that
- further growth of SaaS trend (Software As a Service),
- Architectures moving furhter away from dedicated synchronous calls to asynchronous messages, like system A sends a message to B, B to C and C to D and then D replies to B and A, invloving C whenver required => Mesh of messages (thinking of WCF, WWF ?)
- .Net 3.5 and C# 3.0 with loads of features
- Establishment of SDC (Solution Development Centre) at Microsoft in Sydney where Microsoft will develop the solutions with its partners, with the support of an ideal environment equipped with right machines, software and Microsoft Technical expertise to speed up the development and bring the innovative solutions. http://www.microsoft.com/australia/services/consulting/sdc.mspx
An interesting debate,
After attending a session on "using the web to develop connected systems" which talked about an idea of using http infrastructure and messages (like 404 etc) to run communication between layers (UI, Middle tier etc) of an enterprise application, I really did not like that session and then had an interesting & hot debate with my collegue Fernando with Mundeep as a mediator :D, Fernando's argument was (if my memory is working)- This was some new idea and really simple and workable, a unqiue and different session at tech-ed where all other things were routine but this one was innovative thing
- It could be a nice idea for a lab or close group discussion not for tech-ed which is not a research conference and we have very limited sessions to attend
- Personally, We have already got enough crap on internet, we have hardly managed to come to some standards like Web servies and WS-* and please no more crap on a crappy infrastructure
and then my last argument gave rise to another inconclusive debate between us on scrapping of the internet as it was not designed for the entire global family or should we wait and it is bascially evolving? { http://www.livescience.com/technology/070413_ap_new_internet.html } I took the stand I would love to scrap it because we are basically doing workarounds to overcome the limitations but I know practically it is not possible so we have to live with it, Fernando's opinion was nothing can be built in one day and it is basically going through evolution and no need to scrap it. At the end it was good mental exercise :)
Some interesting junk info: where will our data live?
Here =>
This football stadium size structure has 9 floors, 6 with storage disks & disks & disks and 3 floors with cooling fans, it belongs to Microsoft where our data (hotmail etc) will be stored.The interesting part is its location, it is in middle of no-where, it is located in west Washington, near-by a Dam, ? Why? Because this is the place where electricity is cheapest in USA, the big players (Microsoft, yahoo, Google) believe that whoever provides the cheapest data storage would win the war of free internet spaces,
But the most interesting part is the right top corner of the bigger picture and right bottom (not visible). The top corner building belongs to Yahoo and towards right Google is constructing its own building :) They are keeping an eye on each other,
More Junk,
How does Microsoft come with its codenames? For Visual studio they looked for areas near Seattle and chosen the names like Everett, Whidbey, Orcas island and now Rosario. check this interesting blog for more detail http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/12/20/what-s-in-a-code-name.aspx
