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TechEd Europe Report: Most Memorable of the Rest (and MS Ireland Party pics!)

  • Artigo

I've been distracted from my attempts to finish my wrap-up to last week's TechEd Europe, and in the interim, Marcus has been very eloquent, and Clare called out my favourite moment from the latter half of the week: Senior VP and CTO David Vaskevitch, in his keynote, observing that we tend to overestimate what’s possible in a two-year time span, but underestimate what we can collectively accomplish in ten years. 

That makes intuitive sense to me (and I realized afterwards that it applies equally well both to the progress of technology and the progress of our own personal achievements).  I'm not quite so sure I believed Vaskevitch’s next assertion: that programming paradigm shifts occur over 30-year time spans.  I don't believe we have sufficient evidence (or history) to support that.  But that being said, I love the idea he described: that we'll soon "move up a level" and define business logic using a semantic programming language.  It's the stuff artificial intelligence has dreamed of for decades - and I have no doubt we'll eventually get there.

I saw several great architecture talks.  Bill was right about Gregor Hohpe; he discussed event-driven architectures, and I acquired a whole new vocabulary for describing the architecture I worked on prior to joining this team!  Maarten Mullender described "anti-patterns" in distributed application design.  One of them was the "CRUD-y" anti-pattern, where an understanding of database design, but misunderstanding of distributed application boundaries, lends itself to an inappropriate and chatty communications protocol that looks more like a database’s Create, Read, Update, Delete methods.  He writes about it in this MSDN article.  He also ratted out "Loosey Goosey," where you effectively recreate a protocol like ADO.NET and overexpose your underlying database rep.  Talk about brittle!

I attended a number of hands-on labs, including some Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) .  I’ve written before on extending Outlook using .NET, and with VSTO, it becomes a relative cakewalk.  Take a look: there are some VSTO hands-on labs you can download online that walk you through extending Outlook, manipulating Inbox and Contact data, adding everything from new menus to forms.  The labs require you to install, among other things, Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2, which you can currently get for free through the Beta Experience program.  If we ran these as hands-on labs somewhere in Ireland -- would you be interested?

One last thing: The social highlight of the tripwas unquestionably the Microsoft Ireland Party, which was hosted over Tuesday night's dinner and featured the stand-up comedy of improv team Boom Chicago.  Hats off to Clare, with sincerest thanks to her for uncorking yet another memorable night, and for invoking her formidable karaoke superpowers to serenade us.  Repeatedly.

And, as a special treat for reading this far -- here are some photos from the Microsoft Ireland party!

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