Andrew Coates ::: MSFT

New ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts Book from Darren Neimke

Local MVP, BlogML Author, SUB Creator and all-round good guy Darren Neimke has been busy writing a book on ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts. It's finally available for pre-order on Amazon. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Ordered.

TechEd Australia and New Zealand - Developer Tools Track - Draft Session Plan

I'm responsible for the Developer Tools track at TechEd Australia and New Zealand. I've been beavering away whittling down the 116 US TechEd Sessions and combining them with the local submissions we got and here's the current state of play (in no particular order). Note that 2 of the 18 sessions will be cabana sessions (in the exhibition area) and for NZ, we have to cull the list further (down to 12)

• Using the New Windows Mobile 5.0 APIs for Application Development
• Extending Team Foundation Server
• Protect your Applications: Defensive Strategies that Can be Applied to Applications
• Sharing Assets Between the .NET Compact Framework (Windows Mobile) and the .NET Framework (Desktop Windows)
• C++/CLI. The Best Language for Managed AND Native Development
• Developing Applications That Work on Both Pocket PC and Smartphone
• VSTS Performance Tools
• Securing and Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office (VSTO) Solutions
• Concurrent Development with Branching in Team Foundation Server
• Visual Basic: Tips, Tricks and Futures
• Building Control Hierarchies and the Anatomy of a Super ComboBox
• Introducing an Exciting New Addition to Visual Studio Team System
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server: Step-by-Step Migration and Adoption Planning
• Smart Client: Real-World ClickOnce
• Visual Studio: Leveraging Your Visual Basic 6 Investments with VB 2005
• Visual C#: Tips and Tricks and Future Directions
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server - Applying Version Control, Work Item Tracking and Team Build to Your Software Development Project
• Programming with Concurrency in .NET: Concepts, Patterns, and Best Practices.

We're also running one of the Dynamics CRM sessions.

• Using Web Services to Develop Applications for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

What do you think?

Software as a Service - Architectural Considerations

Yesterday morning I presented at the Sydney sessions of the Software as a Service (SaaS) seminar series (the sessions also ran in New York, San Jose, Boston, Munich, Düsseldorf and Paris). My session about some of the architectural concepts associated with SaaS (slides here (691 kb)) and was derived from a white paper entitled Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail.

One of the authors of the white paper, Gianpaolo Carraro, a Microsoft Application Architect working in this space, chatted with Diego Dagum about SaaS recently. The transcript of that chat is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/SaaSChat_MSDN.asp?_r=1

There are a couple of links to blogs in that chat that are worth calling out: Gianpaolo's blog and in particular his note on the SaaS Simple Maturity Model, and the other author of the White Paper, Fred Chong's blog. Subscribed.

BTW, I'll also be presenting this session next Wednesday at the South Coast Chapter of the ACS.

Expression Web Designer CTP1

MVP Rick Strahl has posted about the first CTP of Expression Web Designer. Rick's a long-time MVP and a pretty demanding tools user (as well as the author of some commercial and some free tools). Rick raves about the new support for styles, the performance (even at this early stage in the cycle) and it's ability to deliver an accurate rendition of the page in the WYSIWYG editor. He also talks about some stability issues he's come across. All in all I think he's pretty impressed.

Check it out.

Cavemen for PocketPC - these guys rock!

Via Frank, I downloaded and played with the public beta of Cavemen - a Lemmings clone for PocketPC using the .NET Compact Framework. The team writing it are a couple of guys up on the Gold Coast.

Have a read about the game and download it. Help our local software industry!!!!

What would make you come to Tech•Ed?

Tech•Ed 2006 is coming to Sydney at the end of August and I've been tasked with making it a must-attend event for developers. Apart from world-class technical sessions, what would make you fork out the $1600 (or fight the battle with management for the budget) to come to Tech•Ed as a developer?

My current remit is "making the Dev’s feel loved and excited about being a Microsoft Developer". I'm open to suggestions. Leave them as comments here or use the contact me link.

Of course, if you've already made up your mind to come, you can register now!

3 Days Vista Developer Training for AUD200

Update -You'll need the coupon code, which is VistaTDANZ

As part of the Vista Readiness campaign, We're offering 3 days of developer training in Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland.

The cost is AUD200 (or NZD230 for Auckland). The information page is here. Although it says you have to be an MS partner to attend, Shuk assures me that we've got extra spaces available for non-partners.

OVERVIEW:

This three day hands-on lab will take you through the process of building a Windows Vista application . The course will focus on the new features introduced in this product. The course is geared towards developers utilising Windows Vista. It is a combination of presentations and hands on labs that focus on growing services opportunities for ISV partners, and a series of new hands-on technical exercises that highlight some of the compelling new design enhancements in Windows Vista.

COURSE AGENDA

Day 1

• Intro Session
• Windows Vista User Experience, HOL
• Consuming Search and Organise Services, HOL
• Best Practices for User Account Control in Windows Vista
• Consuming RSS Data from your Applications

Day 2

• WPF: 2D Graphics
• WPF: Tools
• WPF: Styles, Templates, and Resources, HOL
• WPF: Data binding
• WPF: Animation, HOL
• WPF: Documents, Text, and File Formats
• WPF: 3D Graphics
• WPF: Interop and Migration

Day 3

• Lap Around Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), HOL
• Lap Around Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• C++ CLI
• Establish a Feedback Loop
• Windows Vista Software Logo Requirements
• Windows Vista Application Compatibility Issues and Resolutions

Dates	City	Time	Registration
May 30, 2006 - Jun 1, 2006	Sydney	9:00AM-5:00PM	Register Now!
Jun 5, 2006 - Jun 7, 2006	Melbourne	9:00AM-5:00PM	Register Now!
Jun 14, 2006 - Jun 16, 2006	Auckland	9:00AM-5:00PM	Register Now!

Making VSTS integrate into your current systems - Adam Cogan Tours Aussie User Groups

Adam Cogan is touring the country talking about integrating VSTS (and TFS) with your current practices. He started at the new Newcastle Coders Group last Wednesday and is visiting 10 User Groups in a month!

See also http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/events/conference.aspx

Sun Developers Conference in Sydney - Part III

Day 2 of the conference started with a "keynote" session, which was essentially the draw for a couple of competitions. Numbers looked about the same as the previous day.

The conference then split into tracks again and I chose Lee Chuk-Munn's "Building Great Games for the Mobile World". I haven't done a lot of thinking about game development in general and I've done even less about game development for mobile devices, so the introductory 30 minutes were really fascinating and applied to game development on phones regardless of the OS. The general thrust was that it's a mistake to just try to recreate/port a game from PC or console to a phone. Phones have distinct characteristics that make the user experience very different.

On the down side:

• Screen size and resolution
• Available space for application and storage
• Processing power
• Form Factor
• Use cases (where will the game be played - what external factors will be in play)
• Colour and Sound support
• The thing might ring at any time!

On the up side:

• The phone has characteristics that many PCs and consoles don't - Camera, Address Book, SMS/BT/WiFi/GPRS/3G, Location awareness
• The phone's always with you (one of 4 things you "always carry" - Wallet, Keys, Watch and Phone)

Other things to take into consideration are:

• Allow play in short, interruptible chunks. The game doesn't have to be finished in a short time. it just has to be possible to stop pretty much any time and start again from there later
• Game play should generally be slower than mainstream PS/Console games
• Games should work both on and off line.
• Mobile phones are social devices - at a party for example, everyone's likely to have one
• Game play should be simple (like Sudoku) but not simplistic (like Tic-Tac-Toe)

The session then started diving into screen shots of code for the second half. I really would have liked this to have been done live, or at least with some demos because staring at Courier New on the PowerPoint slides gets a little boring . There was also no discussion of emulators or of deployment.

One really interesting idea presented at the end was of different devices connecting to the same game server and providing a different experience for the same game. The example given was an online FPS where a mate of yours needs help in a situation and he contacts you. You're off-line but you've got your phone. You connect to the server via the mobile and you're presented with, perhaps, a scope view only so you can do some sniping. We've been talking about this for some time in enterprise apps, but I, at least, hadn't made the leap to gaming. Very cool.

Sun Developers Conference in Sydney - Part II

This afternoon was spent on some more detailed presentations (and yes Nick, my badge does say Microsoft).

First up was a session on performance tuning GlassFish - Sun's next version of their Application Server. Tom Daley presented this to about 40 people (there were two tracks running by this stage). Tom obviously knows the ins and outs of both the App server and the various databases to which he connects it. It was interesting to see how much effort Tom (and other speakers) put into not mentioning the word Microsoft, for example when listing members of TPC. I have to admit that a lot of this session went over my head, but I'm sure that'd be the same if someone like David Lean gave a similarly themed talk on tuning SQL Server. The bottom line that I took away from this presentation was that when you do tuning, consider the whole stack. the other useful tidbit I picked up was that Solaris has disk write caching turned off by default.

Next up was Lee Chuck-Munn (LCM) on Interoperability using Advanced Web Services. This was also in track 2, but a heap of people came in from the other track to pretty much double the numbers from Tom's session.

One of the big advances in JSE5 (and JEE5) is the addition of the concept of annotations. This means that instead of writing a huge amount of code to expose a class as a web service, one merely now needs to import a namespace, decorate the class with the annotation @WebService and the methods with the annotation @WebMethod. Both of these annotations can take parameters so you've got much more granular control over what's actually emitted. The compiler then adds the code to do the heavy lifting. Astute readers will recognise this pattern from elsewhere . It still seems like the tool support is not quite complete for this, there are a number of manual steps that need to be taken before the web service is deployed.

Some cool things about this session were

• the reference/test app Sun ship so you can check that your application can talk at the WS-I basic profile level.
• the fact that Sun have committed to making their Web Service stack work with WCF (still referred to by LCM as Indigo)

The final session of the day was a 90 minute marathon by Doris Chen on JavaServer Faces and Java Studio Creator. The theme for this session and the parallel one (on Windows Client Development) was "Code Camp", but I have to say it wasn't much like the CodeCamp I know. There wasn't even a demo for the first hour. Tough going at the end of the day.

Having said that, there's some nice bits in JSF, and the Creator tool is very nice indeed. The basic premise of JSF is Model-View-Controller and it allows you to mark up a page - ASP.NET-style - and have server-side actions taken. This means that you can emit different markup based on things like browser capabilities etc. The IDE is very nice. Looks a lot like VS and has some of the same capabilities, including drag-n-drop data binding.

All-in-all a good day. I've had a couple of polite enquiries from attendees about what I'm doing there, but I haven't yet had to ask myself the same thing. Looking forward to tomorrow's sessions.

Sun Developers Conference in Sydney - Part I

I'm spending today and tomorrow at the Sun Developers conference here in Sydney. It's really interesting to see where Sun's going with dev tools and developers. They've made some interesting claims in the keynote (especially around Microsoft not understanding community), but generally it's been pretty balanced (he said from the moral high ground <grin>).

There were about 150 people in the keynote, and it looks like quite a few more have come for the meat of the sessions.

The keynote was broken up into a couple of sections. The first, by Bob Brewin, concentrated on where Sun are going with their dev tools and what they see as important. He emphasised community, good tools, alignment of the platform and the runtime and Application Lifecycle Development and Management. No arguments there.

Next up was Matt Thompson (can't find a blog link for Matt). he talked about Sun's approach to developers and how they see them as a conduit to revenue through infrastructure sales. To this end they have decided to release all of their dev tools for free under various open source licenses. He also made the following points about open source development:

• Open Source does not mean something's free - the ongoing costs are actually probably higher than other options.
• Development time for Open Source projects is usually longer than projects that are developed in-house
• Open Source does not help you find bugs. Having lots of people looking at the code generally means that you find the same (simple) bugs lots of times. Finding deep bugs needs thorough and rigorous architecture, investigation and testing with experienced people and advanced tools.
• Without community, most Open Source projects will fail.

My favourite quote from Matt's talk was "Companies that don't understand citizen technologies are like media companies that don't understand citizen media". I agree with this. Where we differ is what we do with that understanding. I feel very strongly that it make a lot of sense to provide the infrastructure in a stable and consistent way on which developers can innovate. Citizen technology is not about the OS or the plumbing layer, it's about the stuff people interact with. The job of the OS or the framework is to do the drudgery, and let the developers solve the new problems, not the old problems over and over again.

I just attended an interesting presentation from Simon Ritter - one of the Technology Evangelists - on current and future versions of Java SE. Without him saying so in as many words, it looks like some of the upcoming features (especially in "Dolphin" - Java SE 7) are trying to catch up with the new bits in .NET framework 2.0 and Orcas.

My impression is that all of the speakers are from the US and that the local office is providing logistical support.

Managing SQL Server Express

I showed off integrating SQL Express with VFP at OzFox Lite last weekend, and as part of the presentation (515 KB), everyone got a copy of SQL Express (as well as all of the other Express products). I did mention it at the time, but a couple of people have asked me again. SQL Express doesn't ship with any management tools, so if you don't have a copy of SQL Server Management Studio you need to grab the SQL Server Management Studio Express tool.

Internet Safety for Kids

Last night I presented to parents at my kids' school on the topic of "Internet Safety for Kids". This follows on from Jeff's great TechEd presentation last year, which in turn derives from the materials on Laura Chappell's great site. We had a great discussion afterwards and as promised, I've posted the presentation deck here.

Please feel free to use this material (acknowledging Laura's work please) if you have a local group you think would benefit from this presentation.

Update

Here are the points I raised at the end of the presentation as the
Bottom Line

• Talk to your kids
  • Stranger Danger on the web
  • "We’re around and will look after you"
  • Use the online resources
• Keep internet access in public location
  • Watch out for signs of hiding things
• Don’t be afraid of the technology
• Don’t rely on the technology alone

TFS MSSCCI Provider Update

Brian Harry's posted an update about the availability of the next drop of the MSSCCI provider for TFS (should be some time in the week of April 3). This will allow you to use the TFS source control features from IDEs other than VS2005. The IDEs they've tested against so far are

• Visual Studio .NET 2003
• Visual C++ 6 SP6
• Visual Visual Basic 6 SP6
• Visual FoxPro 9 SP1
• Microsoft Access 2003 SP2
• SQL Server Management Studio 2005

Many more IDEs than this support MSSCCI for integrated source control operations. Brian's asking users of those IDEs to check it out and let us know that (or whether) your favourite IDE works.

Beyond features, we would like to have this MSSCCI provider work in as many hosts as possible.  We don't have the resources to go test each of the many dozens of hosts that support MSSCCI.  We're hoping that you, the community, will help us with this effort.  We'd really appreciate it if you would try out the TFS MSSCCI provider in as many IDEs as you can and let us know what you find.  Please report success or failure and any bugs that you find.  Also let us know what version of the IDE you have tested it against.  We're going to add a web page to our Developer Center that lists all of the IDEs that have been confirmed to work.  Help the community out and report your experiences!  You can do this by sending mail to mailto:tfmsscci@microsoft.com  This email address should be active within 24 hours from the time of this posting.

 I certainly think it's worth taking Brian up on his challenge.

OzFox Lite Rocks the house!

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend OzFox Lite, a Code-Camp-like event for VFP developers organised by the indefatigable Craig Bailey. 40 VFP aficionados from as far afield as Adelaide, Perth and even New Zealand descended on the MS HQ in Sydney for 2 days of sessions on VFP and other things. There was a special video keynote from Craig Boyd. Special guest speakers included Adam Cogan and Greg Low, Australia's two Microsoft Regional Directors, plus nearly a dozen other members of the community. Sunny Chandra was especially passionate and popular.

It wasn't all tech talk of course, 20 of us went out to dinner on Saturday night and some hardy souls came back after that to play on the one X-Box 360 that MS didn't have down in Melbourne for hospitality at the Commonwealth Games.

Great geek weekend and huge kudos to Craig.