Sunday, December 5, 2010

MS Tech ED 2010 Day 4, Friday November 12, 2010

Today only 2 sessions (out of 3), because we have to leave early.

Architecture in Agile Projects – How to do it right

Speaker: Mitch Lacey (www.mitchlacey.com)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/ARC208
Timeslot: 09:00-10:00

Notes:

  • Don’t expect that software will be right the first time. Accept that and write throw away code, just to learn. Create a working solution as quickly as possible. That’s when the light goes to green for the first time. After that refactor the code in order to complete new tasks (user stories), but always keep the bar green.

Light up on Windows 7 with WPF and Silverlight

Speaker: Pete Brown (http://10rem.net) pete.brown@microsoft.com
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV308
Timeslot: 10:30-11:30

Notes:

  • This presentation was all about possibilities with the new Windows 7 API
    • System.Device.Location API access to GPS devices
    • http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack
    • Demo: Out of browser with Silverlight
    • Use dynamic for accessing IDispatch objects
    • Automation: Automate Excel
    • Location API: For connecting GPS and other kind of location sensors
    • Icon Overlay at the taskbar icon (automatically fading in/out)
    • Taskbar buttons at the button of the preview dialog (buttons can trigger an ICommand or event) TaskbarItemInfo.ThumbButtonInfos.
    • Progress bar overlay for the taskbar icon
    • Jumplist: Not specific to an instance of the application but to all. Defined in App.Xaml or App.Xaml.cs
    • WpfAccelerometer: About $30. Brand Freescale
  • All in all a very nice closing session and worth viewing.

MS Tech ED 2010 Day 3, Thursday November 11, 2010

Giving your Windows Phone XNA Games Plenty of Whizz and Bang

Speaker: Rob Miles (www.robmiles.com)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/WPH310
Timeslot: 09:00-10:00

Notes:

  • Very entertaining and informative session. Watch the video for lots of information about Windows Phone Development and a good laugh.

The Future of parallel programming in Visual Studio

Speaker: Drew Robbins
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV208
Timeslot: 10:30-11:30

Notes:

  • Current (available in .NET 4.0 for doing parallel programming):
    • Programming Models:
      • PLINQ,
      • Parallel loops
      • F#
    • Tools:
      • Concurrency Profiler
      • Debug
        • Parallel Tasks window
        • Parallel Stacks window
  • Future (available in .NET 5):
    • Tools:
      • MPI/GPU Profiler
      • MPI Debugger
      • GPU Debugger
      • Parallel Watch
    • Programming Models:
    • Language:
      • “async” modifier
      • “await” operator
  • HTTP://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/async
  • DryadLINQ (Parallel LINQ on the cloud):
  • http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryadLINQ/

Microsoft Silverlight Performance on Windows Phone 7

Speaker: Oren Nachman (www.nachmore.com/blogs.msdn.com/oren)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/WPH311
Timeslot: 12:00-13:00

Notes:

  • At least 2 threads in SilverLight
    • UI Thread
    • Compositer Thread (Phone specific)
    • User Threads
  • Debug Tools:
    • Counters
    • Redraw Regions
    • Calculate Fill Rate
  • CacheMode = new BitmapCache();

Managed Extensibility Framework in Action

Speaker: Dino Esposito (dino.esposito@crionet.it)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV402
Timeslot: 14:30-15:30

Notes:

  • MEF:
    • A special IoC framework available right within the .NET FX 4.0
    • Component based
    • Does IoC, but has different goals
    • and IoC overlap, but are different
  • Imports are automatically
  • Overlap: Injecting code into classes

Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010: Making it Real for YOU

Speaker: Brian Keller
Link: n.a.
Timeslot: 16:30-17:30

Notes:

  • Discussion session about VS 2010 capabilities for software testing.
  • VS 2010 Ultimate supports a record mechanism for automated UI testing.
    • References UI elements by their name (if possible), not their clicked mouse positions.
    • Replay is default as fast as possible, but can be slown down by inserting special commands.

Agile Estimation

Speaker: Stephen Forte (Telerik)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DPR201
Timeslot: 18:00-19:00

Notes:

MS Tech ED 2010 Day 2, Wednesday November 10, 2010

Yesterday I found out that Microsoft focusses on “the Cloud”. I want to know more about it. Especially how a private cloud could be created and if it would be of benefit for our customers.

The public cloud is especially usefull in case where a solution must be very scalable, like the website of an event (i.e. Tech ED). This is due to Microsoft’s pricing strategy.

Private Cloud Reference Architectures with Hyper-V and System Center

Speaker: Arno Mihm/Bryon Surace/Scott Rosenbloom 
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/VIR201
Timeslot: 09:00-10:00

Notes:

  • Software as a Service
  • Platform as a Service
  • Infrastructure as a Service (Today)
  • Private cloud hosted by a third party is possible also with a Hyper-V Cloud Service Providers
  • 6 different Service Partners (i.e. HP, Dell, etc.)
  • Private Cloud Management stack hardware should be redundant

WCF and Windows Server AppFabric - Services Made Easy

Speaker: Jon Flanders 
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/ASI304
Timeslot: 10:30-11:30

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS.

More info on the two Microsoft products named AppFabric: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppFabric

Building Windows Phone Games with Microsoft XNA and Visual Studio 2010

Speaker: Rob Miles (www.robmiles.com/)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/WPH307
Timeslot: 12:00-13:00

One of the most interesting sessions IMHO. Worthily to watch the presentation.

  • Silverlight 3D is 2.5D
  • Appeared with SL 3.0
  • Now with GPU acceleration
  • Source code of all demo’s is available trough Rob’s own site

Windows Azure Boot Camp, Part 2

Speaker: Brian Prince
Link: n.a.
Timeslot: 14:30-15:30

Microsoft RemoteFX – What is it?

Speaker: Max Hermann/Rob Williams
Link: n.a.
Timeslot: 16:00-17:00

RemoteFX is a technology for making rich media applications capable to run realtime from a MS Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1/Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1. Basically it will sent compressed bitmaps of changed rectangles on the screen.

In order to do this, one needs a special ATI/nVidia graphics card that has a RemoteFX logo. This physical GPU will split it’s GPU into virtual GPU slices. Virtual GPU’s will use such slices. These specifications of those slices can be configured, so that a specific user can get more/less FPS and/or bandwidth.

One advantage from this technique is that very thin clients are now possible, needing nothing more than a monitor, keyboard and mouse attached. Vendors already have devices no larger than a couple of inches that can be mounted on the back of a LCD monitor. The size depends on the needed connecters (DVI, USB, etc).

A great deal of effort has been put in support for USB devices. It’s now possible to connect (at least one) USB device (i.e. phone or multifunctional printer). The thin client does not need to have a driver for this device. A generic USB driver at the thin client routes this device to the (virtual) RemoteFX OS.

Unfortunatly this technique will not be available between clients for remote support scenario’s

Architecting Applications for High Scalability – Leveraging the Windows Azure Platform

Speaker: Eugenio Pace
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/ARC309
Timeslot: 17:30-18:30

Notes:

  • Tailspin is a Software as a Service provider creating Surveys as a Service.
  • Command Query Responsibility Seperation (CQRS) pattern
  • Used many times in highly scalable systems
  • Create many tasks/roles and put them in a single workerrole. This is because you pay per workerrole.
  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices

MS Tech ED 2010 Day 1, Tuesday November 9, 2010

Getting your Return on Investment with Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

Speaker: Drew Robbins
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV201
Timeslot: 09:00-10:00

Notes:

  • It’s possible to run .NET 4.0 side-by-side with older .NET frameworks. It’s also possible to install VS 2010 side-by-side with older Visual Studio versions.
  • With an application manifest file it’s possible to force existing .NET applications to use the new .NET Framework 4.0
  • Starting with the .NET Framework version 4, you can use in-process side-by-side hosting to run multiple versions of the common language runtime (CLR) in a single process. By default, managed COM components run with the .NET Framework version they were built with, regardless of the .NET Framework version that is loaded for the process.
  • Install Visual Studio 2010 trough the new Web Platform Installer: http://www.microsoft.com/web/ 
  • The .NET 4.0 Client profile has been reduced in download size:
    • 28 MB for x86 platform only
    • 41 MB for x86+X64 platforms
  • A new Enterprise Framework (version 4.0): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ef.aspx
  • Introduction of Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Building Data Visualization Applications with WPF & Silverlight

Speaker: Tim Huckaby
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/WCL321
Timeslot: 10:30-11:30

Notes:

Seen a few interesting demos showing the power of WPF/SilverLight and the Microsoft Surface device:

Windows Azure Boot Camp, Part 1

Speaker: Brian Prince
Link: n.a.
Timeslot: 12:00-13:00

Notes:

  • If anyone wants to give a Windows Azure Boot Camp within his/her own company, take a look at: www.windowsazurebootcamp.com. The Windows Azure Boot Camp team is helpful in supplying training material and free hours on “the cloud” for training purposes.
  • The GreyBox application is designed to alert a user if their Windows Azure compute services are currently running, or are even simply deployed. Great for Azure speakers and POCs you don't want left running: http://greybox.codeplex.com

The Total Noob’s Guide Windows Workflow Foundation 4

Speaker: Max Knorr (http://www.knor.net)
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV211
Timeslot: 14:30-15:30

Notes:

  • WF basically is a visual programming language.
  • Activity can be seen as a control
  • Activity consists of “work to be done” and data.
  • Learned something new along this demonstration about code-snippets with CTRL K,X in Visual Studio: http://saraford.net/2007/12/10/did-you-know-ctrlk-ctrlx-inserts-a-code-snippet-103/
  • Different kind of activities
    • CodeActivity
    • AsyncCodeActivity
    • NativeActivity
    • DynamicActivity
    • CodeActivity<TResult>
    • AsyncCodeActivity<TResult>
    • NativeActivity<TResult>
    • DynamicActivity<TResult>
  • Windows Workflow foundation can be hosted in AppFabric (which in turn is build on IIS 7).

Tips & Tricks: Visual Studio 2010 IDE & Extensions

Speaker: Chris Dias
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV302
Timeslot: 16:30-17:30

Notes:

10 Things Every New Silverlight and WPF Developer Must Know

Speaker: Pete Brown
Link: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/DEV205
Timeslot: 18:00-19:00

Notes:

  • Very little new stuff for me as a experienced WPF developer.