Glen Dobson

Intro

The following is a brief summary of how I spent my time at the Teched 2001 conference in Barcelona, which took place between July 3^rd and July 6^th. The bulk of the content is a discussion of the conference sessions attended from Tuesday to Thursday. Unfortunately we were unable to attend the final day of the conference because we were flying home early.

Tuesday

Keynote 1 – C# and .NET

This was an interesting first session of the conference very much setting the tone for the large amount of .NET material which was to follow. Some interesting demos of the increased capabilities of Visual Basic.NET and of the simplicity of creating and integrating Web Services were given.

Visual Studio.NET Overview

Some repeated material from the keynote and overall not a useful session for me, having encountered much of the content already at Lancaster.

ASP.Net Overview

Having never used ASP this was perhaps not quite as much of an overview as I needed. However there was some interesting content and a clear idea of how .NET could unify web development into the single development environment was given.

Best Practices for Active Directory Design (Part 1)

Since we were interested in seeing what could be done with Active Directory over the summer I attended this session, but did not get much out of it. It concentrated on large scale design issues and purposefully avoided discussing how Active Directory worked, etc. This was not quite what I needed from this. For planning large scale deployments there were no doubt some invaluable titbits however.

Best Practices for Active Directory Deployment

I thought I would give this speaker another chance (the same speaker as for the previous Active Directory session), but I really was not interested and did not feel he was doing any justice to the subject so I gave up on this session.

Wednesday

Developing Visual C++ Applications for Windows CE with eMbedded Visual Tools

I really enjoyed this hands-on session, which was admittedly very simple – but was at just the right level of difficulty for a complete introduction. It is a shame there were not more sessions like this.

A Big Software Project: Secrets of the Most Successful Developers

This was a well presented and somehow entertaining session on large scale project management. In retrospect it did not have a great deal of immediately useful content. The most memorable thing was probably the videos about a day in the development of Windows 2000 and the same for XP.

Teched 2001 iPAQ Conference Assistant Applications: an Architecture for Enterprise Mobility

This was also a relatively interesting talk at the time, but in fact did not present “an architecture for enterprise mobility”, so was only of interest in finding out how KPMG and COMPAQ had developed this project. No more general themes were really drawn out in this session.

Windows 2000/XP Internals

David Solomon was a co-speaker in this presentation, which I though was very interesting. He really seemed to know what he was talking about. I also went to two of his sessions given later in the week, which were more in depth on the same subject.

Thursday

Building Embedded Solutions Using Windows CE 3.0

Like many of the sessions, this was too much of an overview. If you were wondering “what can I do with CE?” or even “what is CE?” this would have been OK, but otherwise was not very useful.

Writing Games and Multimedia Apps for Mobile Devices

I was hoping this would give me some insight into the area of my final year project which involves streaming multimedia to mobile devices. It did not. However, it was quite interesting and the CE versus Pocket PC comparison was interesting.

Windows 2000/XP Memory Management Internals & Windows 2000/XP Thread & Process Scheduling Internals

These two sessions were perhaps the most interesting that I attended. Presented by David Solomon who had given a student session the previous day, these were the closest thing to actual “Computer Science” to be found at the conference! They were enjoyable in their own right, since it is interesting to know what is going on behind the scenes, as well as in the technical insight which they gave. There content on XP also added to the interest of this session.

Comparing .NET and the Java Environment

Another student session by a non-Microsoft employee – this one was relatively impartial at least, and although I had not used all of the technologies in question, the comparisons given were still clear and well reasoned. What came out the winner? Have a guess!

Developing for the Microsoft XP Visual Styles

There are some interesting questions arising from this session. Will the “side-by-side” concept of XP work fully (i.e. the ability to run multiple application versions simultaneously)? If not, how many legacy applications will fail due to the new common controls dll? How long will it take somebody to hack this, and customise their own Windows XP Visual Styles? Why did Microsoft not allow them to do this in the first place?

The Conference Overall

The conference was a good opportunity to be introduced to some new Microsoft technologies, although having already used .NET, the main focus of the conference was not quite as revolutionary as it could have been (although I think they’ve sold me on the concept of Web Services!). The final conclusion on the sessions is that they were all very well presented and contained good introductory material, but none of them were very technical. The all encompassing nature of the conference no doubt means that this is inevitable however.

A final note on entertainment: The arranged evening activities included a student meal by the harbour, a drinks party in the grounds of a castle, and the Teched party in an Olympic stadium – the venues just got more spectacular! These were all excellent fun, if a little rushed. Our final Teched activity of watching the firework display over the stadium, high up on a hill in Barcelona was a good note on which to end the conference.