Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

No Nucleus news today: I spent today on the Microsoft Developer Days in Brussels (Belgium), and will be going over there tomorrow also.

Obviously, this event is targetted towards developers that develop on Microsoft platforms (which is what I do in my daytime job). But I wanted to share this with you guys anyway.

If you're interested in which track I took, read on.

Updated! Added information on the sessions of day 2

Slides

If you're intersted in the slides of the sessions, they are available online. Apparently, their not linked from the main site, so let's do that here.

Day One

1. Keynote by Bill Gates. Not much to say about this. No developers-mantras (or try this one) or pie-incidents. I can't remember that much from his speech. It mainly was a high-level view on the progress in development. And Gates was happy about the new electronic ID cards that are currently being introduced over here in Belgium.
2. Closing the gap between development and operations: a developers perspective. As the title says, this session highlighted the problems that often arrise between developers (the ones developing) and operations people (the ones deploying/configuring/...). The suggested solution was to add more monitoring and control into the software, and a demo was given using the newly released Enterprise Library (January 2005) from Microsoft Patterns & Practices. To do: download and play around with this Enterprise Library, find out some more on MOM.
3. Developing on a secured infrastructure. I eventually chose this session over "Sneak Preview of the future of Web Development (ASP 2.0)", mainly because the security subject is generally harder to understand, and "What's new in ASP.NET 2.0" articles pop up anywhere anyhow. Main things to remember: don't re-invent the wheel, since security is nearly impossible do do good. Instead, use Windows APIs for authorization/authentication where possible. Also: the electronic ID cards here in Belgium are a good thing, since it means that everyone has a client certificate (signed by the government CA) with which they can prove their identity. This way, e.g. a two way SSL connection could be set up (client authenticates with server and vice versa)
4. Services, SOA, Now! by Clemens Vasters was probably the most enjoyable and enlightening session of the day. Unfortunately the code for his sample application (an Amazon-like bookstore) isn't currently available yet (it will within a few months). I'll need to make sure I don't forget about this :) In the mean time, I might need to check out FABRIQ, another reference implementation by newtelligence. Also to do: learn more on MSMQ (message queues) and Enterprise Services (aka COM+)
5. Best Practices for Windows Forms Development on the other hand, was the most boring session of the day. Badly presented, oversimplication, lots of attention for "straightforward" or commonly known stuff, while skipping/skimming over the apparently interesting bits.
6. Last but not least, I followed one of the community sessions. The eXtreme Programming Belgian Users Group explained their eXtreme Programming software development methodology. It sort of sounded like a cult, all following the eXtreme Programming rules as in the book. I must say that some of it made sense: continuous testing (unit tests written in bits and pieces while developping, acceptance tests) and decreasing the "truck count" (amount of developers a truck can run over before your company runs into trouble; usually 1) by pair programming & daily standup meetings to communicate progress. The continuous testing, together with constant refactoring (cleaning up/improving the code) and split-up problems also limit the possibility for bugs

Day two

1. Keynote: SQL Server 2005: Bridging the Gap between Development and Administration by Kimberly Tripp. Since I'm not actually using Microsoft SQL Server on a regular basis, this session wasn't really my bag of tea. It was extremely interesting though, as it showcased some of the wide range of features that SQL Server 2005 has to offer. I must remember to play around with SQL Server Express Edition (which will be the successor of MSDE). It was also nice to learn that this Express edition will have a GUI management tool.
2. Visual Studio 2005 (2 sessions). This one was all about the new stuff in VS 2005 (as well as new C#/VB.NET language features .NET 2.0). If you've been following .NET blogs, there was nothing really new here, but it was nice to see some demos. One thing that surprised me (in a good way) was that there will be a visual class designer embedded into VS.NET 2005.
3. Distributed .NET Applications - Today And Tomorrow by Ingo Rammer (2 sessions; slides and code samples). The session started with an overview of communication options and their performance ans scalability, as well as their pitfalls: .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, ASP.NET Web Services, Sockets and Message Queues. Next up were some general tips, like trying to achieve idempotency, load balancing tips, database issues (learned that sending/manipulating DataSet s can be a very bad thing memory/bandwith wise). One last topic in the session was Indigo, but that got "skipped" since a new Indigo version will be presented to the world soon, turning any overview of the current version into a waste of time (and Ingo Rammer was forbidden to speak about that new version).