What an awesome end to the day. I’m already sold on the whole Silverlight concept, but this session was an eye opener. Joe Stegman impressed, with a slickly crafted presentation, perfectly delivered. No woffle or hype, just demo after demo of Silverlight goodness.Part of the attraction of Silverlight is how it opens up the programming of media and interaction via Visual Studio (admittedly...
The old joke about WPF being the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked is still around I guess, and thus a session on WPF is treated by some with a little bit of skepticism. Although only a mini-session, Paul Stovell did a great job of explaining why WPF is now relevant. Actually I don’t really think his aim was to address relevance, but he did it none the less. With the release...
INSERT INTO cheek (tongue) This was a great mini-session, with the remarkable Nick Hodge covering the all-too-important science of LOLCODE.I’m with Nick on this, in believing it to be the single most important technology initiative in years.The benefits are countless, but include the long lost art of ensuring maintenance coders are amused long into the future, and also the ability to SMS in...
Developers (like me) often can’t comprehend the overhead of installing security tools across a large server count. Afterall, we are usually only dealing with a handful of servers. So how do the people looking after large numbers of servers (eg hundreds) cope?This is a difficult problem and a number of vendors are targetting applications at the problem. One particular area is ensuring all...
Business Activity Management (BAM) is an important area for growing businesses to embrace. IT is basically the act of observing key processes in a business and being able to proactively respond to issues. In this session Mick Badran (local BizTalk guru and MVP) along with Rahul Garg (Microsoft Technical Specialist) took us through an introduction to using BizTalk to implement BAM. The...
Rounding out a solid day of excellent sessions was Australia’s favourite son Andrew Coates (OK, so I might have hyped that a little bit). Office Business Applications (OBA) will be getting increasing focus from Microsoft in the coming year and it is no wonder why.VSTO, now in its third version, allows developers to easily build functionality on top of the Office applications. With Visual...
This session was my pick of the day. Perfectly presented by Jon Barrett and Ian Palangio, the content covered an immense amount of material, complemented by excellent demos. SharePoint is of course a mammoth platform, so any session on it is only going to cover a small chunk. This sessions’s chunk was document management. Covering Document management, Records management, policies and...
I’ve decided to cover a lot of areas this year (not just Developer sessions). This includes Server and Security sessions. This session blew me away. Eric Deily gave an excellent overview of the Web Server edition of Windows Server 2008. IT Pros who’ve been following Server 2008 will be well aware of the details of course, but for me it was an eye opener. Here’s why companies...
I missed the start of the blogger’s lunch, but managed to catch the panel answering the whole Web 2.0 question. The panel: Phil Sim, Michael Platt, Darren Neimke, Jane O’Connell and Des Walsh were guided by Frank Arrigo. Highlights included hearing them each give their view of what the hell Web 2.0 is. My favourite was Phil who summarised it along the lines of ‘it is a period in...
Always entertaining, and sometimes even informative :-), Adam Cogan walked us through Visual Studio’s history, and then looked at the future of the Team editions of the product. Many of the benefits are already shipped (in part at least) via the recently released Power Tools for TFS. Team Foundation Server incorporates and builds on these. A few warrant special mention, and...