James Brown

Introduction

The following report outlines how I spent my time at tech-ed 2001, first I briefly summarise the sessions attended, during the main conferencing hours and then the student sessions and finally I give a short summery of how my time was spent outside the conference centre.

Conference Sessions

Below is a short summary the sessions I attended as well as the hands on labs.

DEV201 – ASP.NET Overview

As an overview and a 200 course, I thought this session would explain what ASP.NET is to a person with no knowledge of ASP.NET and then what it can do however it was assumed that attendees had knowledge of ASP and thus it was a session comparing ASP.NET to ASP from the start and it wasn’t long before the session turned into comparing the two on a coding level.

DEV215 – A Big Software Project: Secrets of Most Successful Developers.

I found this session to be a very good well thought through session and Rafal Lukawiecki to be one of the best lectures at the conference. Even though he was trying to sell the Microsoft Solutions Framework, he used his own experience of using MSF to give us some good hints and tips to completing projects on time. He also showed us how Microsoft uses the daily build to there advantage which was very interesting and how 95% of projects can use this method after the first couple of days and he showed us how to troubleshoot problems.

DEP301 – Best Practices For Active Directory Design – Part One.

This session was very complex especially for a 300 course. I attended to learn about design considerations in Active Directory, which could be used over the summer. However the way the session was given was really a carry on from sessions from the previous year, and so never explained active directory, and only described practices of designing directories for multi-national companies with up to 100,000 users and not for the simpler average network.

DEV325 – Personal Productivity and Customisation in Visual Studio.NET.

Although this was a good session with being the final session of the day attentions spans where low especially since the Drinks party was soon after. This session was good overall describing how a person can customise Visual Studio to there advantage and also how developing on two monitors can also be off advantage. The talk was given in a down to earth manner and although some aspects where fairly technical it was explained very well, even though a lot was common sense.

DEV409 – .Net Debugging.

I though the classification on this session was very accurate, the session was very technical and went into detail. Even though this session was not for me since I wanted to learn how to debug my code in Visual Studio.Net whilst I wrote it, I thought this session was well explained and showed how to debug release versions of our code even though most of this went over my head.

INF311 – Developing For a Multi-User PC Environment

I thought this session was too much of an overview and although Kyle Marsh gave it very well and made it interesting, I was hoping we could see how a developer would program for a multi-User PC. However the session really described Windows XP and how it is a multi user environment and how well it works and not really giving to much in detail on how and what would be expected from a developer developing code for Windows XP. Although it did list what a developer would need to show to obtain the “Made for Windows XP” sticker this was done very quickly towards the end.

INF312 – Using The Windows XP Look and Feel In Your Applications

This session again was given by Kyle Marsh and was made into to much of an overview of Windows XP. He showed the problems Microsoft had in developing windows XP and how the system had to be changed to cope with the new look and feel. Towards the end of the session like the previous he did go into a little bit of detail on how a manifest file is required to give your applications the Windows XP look and feel I thought an hour to tell us to add this file to our code was a little to excessive.

SEC312 – About Modern Cryptography and Security in One Hour:

Rafel Lukawiecki again gave this session and I thought it was one of the best I attended. Cryptography sessions are normally very complex and deals with a lot of mathematics or on the overhand are very general and you learn nothing from. However this session went into a lot of detail but was explained very well such that everyone understood. Instead of describing how the cryptography works inside he told us where and when certain methods should be used.

LAB330 – Microsoft Visual Studio.NET

With already attending the C# course over the summer term I didn’t bring anything new away from this hands on lab, I thought it was very vague and didn’t show how to use any of the features of the Visual Studio but really was just a copying exercise from the hands on manual to the Studio and pressing ctrl-F5.

Dinner Student Sessions

During the dinner hour students where given the good fortune of rushing dinner in 15 minutes, and then going to special private student sessions which had been scheduled. Although I found this to be a little awkward on the first day with still trying to find my way around, I found these three sessions to be some of the best and well worth my dinner hour.

Visual Studio.Net

Although this session was good and was given very well it was really a repeat of what I had learned in the .NET Overview Andrew Scott gave during the C# summer course. So I didn’t really find this session to be of much use however it was good to go over a few topics again.

The Development of Windows NT

This session showed us the development of the windows NT kernel from its origins in 1991 thought to its present form in Windows XP, the main focus of this session was really on the current windows 2000, however a lot of this content I had already covered in a CSC210 Lecture.

Comparing Java to C#

I thought this sessions was every good, I wanted to attend this session earlier in the day during the main conferencing hours however I found a Session Full Sign. This session was not so much comparing Java the language to C# the language it was more of a comparing the .Net Framework to the Java Framework. He showed us how Sun blatantly ripped of the EJB from Microsoft, and how when developing a program not just to look at what benefits a programming language has but at what benefits the entire environment has. He also described patenting hell where although you knew a company may have ripped of your code or ideas you can never do anything about it, since you never know what you may have copied in the past.

Life after the Conference

There were three main evening events for us to attend, first the student dinner, then the tech-ed country drinks party and finally the main tech-ed Party.

The student dinner was quite interesting since it allowed us to meet other student’s from other universities; however it seemed silly to have a mini session towards the end of the dinner after they had been given out many drinks to get us all socializing. However this was useful since we were told a list of which sessions in tech-ed to attend and which to stay clear off and also the content of the special sessions at dinner for students so we could decided whether to attend or have dinner.

The Country drinks part was also very good it was situated outside an old 18^th century castle, and the entertainment was excellent, the only problem for this night was both that the bar kept on running out of beer and the distance the party was away from the hotels and the centre of Barcelona which meant leaving early.

The Tech-ed party was very good, especially the activities laid out for us such as using the trampoline and motor-biking, although these activities where soon removed once a lot of drink had been consumed, I personally didn’t think much of the Royal Family, queen tribute band and by that time a number of people had left the party since coaches home only ran until 10.15.

Conclusion

My overall thoughts of the tech-ed conference was that the conference was not really aimed at students or really developers, but more Project Manager who decided upon which software or development kit their companies should use.

The Tech-ed Conference centre was overall very good except for its location, although Barcelona is a very nice city especially to have such a conference; however the centre was too far outside of the city as well as any events which were staged.

I enjoyed tech-ed thoroughly and learned a few interesting facts, and if given the opportunity to go to such a conference again for free I think I will.