Not wanting to pick on anyone in particular, but I’ve heard the expression “it’s not rocket science” all week at TechEd, usually in the context of how easy it is now (as compared to previous versions of products) to build wonderful, enabling, awe-inspiring solutions to enterprise problems. I have to admit I wasn’t exactly sure what rocket science was, but thankfully...
I’ve held off talking about the TechEd keynote from Wednesday (because it was extremely disappointing), but thankfully the locknote was slightly (but only slightly) better. It was good because it was a chance for us developers to say goodbye to Frank Arrigo (he’s heading over to Redmond). Frank has had an amazing impact on the developer community (and to a small extent the IT Pro...
I popped into the end of a session delivered by some of the AFP (Australian Federal Police) Computer Forensic experts. The surprising discovery for me was how under-resourced they are. Sure, they know how to recover data ‘deleted’ from a hard drive, and they also get pretty good at finding incriminating stuff, but overall my impression was that these guys rely on a lot of luck...
More out of interest than any compelling business need I dropped into Neil Roodyn’s session on Vista Gadgets. And I have to say I found it quite thought provoking. Neil went through some simple examples but most importantly stressed some of the design considerations to be employed. Designing for Offline (or worse, unexpected disconnection scenarios) from the outset is the most important of...
Why SharePoint Branding?Answer: Because we can. Finally. Yes, the customization ‘features’ of SharePoint have been well criticised for a while, so it is good to see that branding and formatting is now a simple combination of master page changes and CSS. Not that it is trivial, but as Kathy Hughes covered (extremely well I might add) in her session, it is very straight forward once you...
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...