.Net Jonesie - TechEd Wrap Up

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Day 3 was great. I got in a few good sessions and picked up a couple of useful tips plus some extra insights into some stuff I already knew about.

Sessions

Sam Spencer presented an excellent session on ASP.Net 2.0 Membership, Profiles & Roles. This is where I learned about AzMan - a priority for me to investigate now I'm back at work. I've been to a few similar sessions on this stuff now and the one thing I can say for sure, Microsoft have done a fantastic job with ASP.Net. The quantity of code you DON'T have to write is just amazing.

The next session was by Nigel Watson on System.Transaction. I've had an attempt at using the new transaction model in VS05 but foir some reason it wouldn't work. I'm not exactly sure why but I suspect it's something to do with DTC. Nigel did demonstrated that when using SQL 2K, you don't get the new LTM (Lightweight Transaction Monitor) - all transactions are automatically promoted to DTC. With SQL 05 you do get the LTM. This is a bit of a bummer. I'll see if I can get it to work easily but for my current project the old style transactions will probably be sufficient.

Derek Watson then presented on C# Internals. Again, I'd already seen this material a few times (from Dr Nigel Perry and others) so it wasn't anything surprising but I did pickup a couple of useful tidbits. 1) .Net 2.0 Fx has a StopWatch class for timing processes and 2) there has been a late change to the CLR for handling nullable types in regard to boxing - don't ask me to explain it now, I'll see if I can find a reference.

And that was it for the day. We had to bug-out early to catch a flight home so missed out on the drinkies.

Summary

Overall, I think TechEd 05 was a great success and the crew at MS did a great job. The venue was good, if a little cramped at times, the catering was excellent except at TechFest - if I ate one more mini-Mac I would have barfed.

All of the presenters I saw were very professional and knew there subjects very well. A few of the demos or slides crapped out in places, but everyone recovered very well and it didn't cause any problems.

I guess my only complaint is VS05 and Team System and SQL 05 have been coming for such a long time that a lot of the content was getting a bit tired. I see a lot of this stuff repeated so while I did pickup a few new things I shouild probably have done some sessions on stuff that was new for me, but I didn't want to get distracted from my current focus.

Will I go next year? Maybe. Every second year is usually enough but if there's something new to see, then I'll be there.

Back to work.

Here's a pic from TechFest. I took more but this is the only one that looks any good.

Thursday, September 01, 2005 9:28:08 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

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