Melanie Welch

Introduction

The conference ran from Tuesday 3^rd July to Friday 6^th of July. We arrived on Monday to register and attend a special MS Student Consultant dinner in the evening. At the dinner we met the other student consultants (SCs) from the UK and the rest of Europe totalling about 120. We were given an introductory talk during the dinner by Rafal Lukawiecki (owner of Project Botticelli Ltd). He gave us advice on which talks he believed we should attend and which we should avoid. This was exactly the same type of talk as he gave last year and didn’t really benefit myself very much but perhaps did the new members.

During the week I attended three talks on Visual Studio.NET, three Hands-on Labs sessions, two talks on mobility and a random selection on various other specialities. I have discussed each of the talks I went to under their track headings below.

Developer Tools and Techniques

DEV 200 – MS Visual Studio.NET Overview. Ari Bixhorn

In this talk he explained the architecture of Visual Studio.NET, detailed the new features of Visual Basic (VB), C++ and C#. He talked about some of the features of the ‘start page’ (i.e. profile views) and some of the other features of the application. He showed how to write an example of a web service in VB, a web application in C# and a windows application in VB. The talk was quite good and helped in understanding how Visual Studio.NET was to be used. The ‘new features’ part of the talk was perhaps not as helpful as they were to do with issues we had not been concerned with in our course (such as performance, XML services, unsafe RAD code).

DEV 355 – Comparing MS .NET & the Java Environment. David Chappell

This talk was repeated only for our group (the SCs) during the lunch time. He did most of his talk but focused mostly on the technical issues ignoring the commercial side as he had no need to try and sell us the product. The areas he looked at were; the application servers, device platforms, development tools, web service support and the run-time environments. It was a more informal talk so lots of people asked questions during the whole session. It was very interesting but maybe showed more the similarities between the products than the differences. Unfortunately a lot of the talk was cut as it had to be fit into a shorter time slot.

DEV 409 – Debugging MS.NET. Pranish Kumar

The talk focused on how to debug Visual Studio.NET. It was an advanced level talk and so only really suited to people with an in-depth technical awareness of the topic. I could just about follow it, having used Visual Studio 6, but what I learnt would not really be applicable unless I was working for a company requiring highly optimised code. The talk was okay, but felt like it did go into too few areas in too much detail (but then it was an advanced talk). Also as the talker relied heavily on demonstrations of how to debug, the talk was quite slow moving as applications kept failing for one reason or another.

Infrastructure Deployment

DEP 308 – Integrating MS Active Directory with Existing Directories using MMS. James Booth

I attended this talk as I thought it would help in working with Active Directory (AD) when I got back to Lancaster. Unfortunately I had not been able to make the earlier talks on AD and this talk seemed a bit abstract as it turned out to not even be on AD, but more on Meta directory service (MMS). This was to do with managing relationships (called identities) between the user and directories. It merged information from many sources and routes to produce a joined workspace. He then went on to discuss the architecture and then dived into loads of slides showing how the wizards worked. It came across very much as a sales pitch and I did not really gleam any useful information from it.

Infrastructure Development

INF 313 – Developing Rich Graphical Applications with GDI+. Kerry Hammil

This talk was incredibly high level and would was more a basic overview. It began with how GDI+ is used within the .NET framework and then showed some examples of the features it provided. The demonstrations only seemed to show subtle improvements to the existing package. It was a very slow moving talk and the speaker should have been more aggressive in her presentation skills. It came across quite weak.

Mobility

MBL 314 – Extending the Pocket PC Platform using MS eMbedded Visual Basic & MS Visual C++. John Wyer and Mike Hall

The talk covered the features of the eMbedded Visual Studio environment and included some demonstrations and snippets of code. However a lot of the features they talked about I had not used before in any project. Also the C++ code was quite alien and as I had not done any Pocket PC programming it did not help or inspire me much. Still, the talk was still relatively informative. It did help when I attended the corresponding lab session later on.

MBL 332 – Writing Games & Multimedia apps for Mobile Devices. Marcus Perryman and Mike Hall

In this talk the speakers discussed the differences between WinCE and the Pocket PC. They showed some demos of games that had been written for palm top technology (such as Quake). They then started to show lots of functions and algorithms that you could use to improve game production. It would not have really made much sense unless you had been writing palm top computer games for some time. It was dull to follow and after the first fifteen minutes was completely worthless for anyone else to be there.

Security

SEC 312 – Modern Cryptography & Security. Rafal Lukawiecki

I attended this talk last year also and found it to be very interesting and easy to follow. This year it did repeat most of the material but I still found it worth while. There was some new information on cryptography algorithms available. It was put together well and gave a good general overview on what cryptography is and what is available.

Web Services

WEB 321 – XML & Web Services. Eric Schmidt

This was the second part of an earlier talk. He talked about what data was and the problems involved in manipulating it. The talk assumed a lot of XML knowledge, discussing SQL XML Services, relational databases and how to manage data in businesses. There was a demo of readers and writers using .NET and C# incorporating XML. The talk was quite good but did get a bit boring with so many slides of just XML code.

Hands-on Labs

LAB 310 – Developing MS Visual C and C++ Applications for MS Windows CE with eMbedded Visual Tools

This was a really good lab and enjoyed it the most out of all the labs I attended. Each computer had its own iPAQ and exercise book. The supervisor stepped through the exercises really well so you got a better appreciation of how the environment was setup. The help from the other supervisors was non-existent, and if you got lost you had a job trying to catch up when you had sorted out your problem. Still I feel more confident after attending the lab. We wrote a simple picture viewer application and were showed how to add items to the ‘start screen’.

LAB 330 – MS Visual Studio.NET

In this lab we wrote a simple ‘Hello World’ console application in C#, were shown how to upgrade VB projects to be enable them for use in Visual Studio.NET and then an exercise to do with inheritance in Visual Basic. The session didn’t really demonstrate anything new or interesting. The C# program was too simple to see any good use of the features of VS.NET. The upgrade of VB projects is basically just clicking Next through the upgrade wizard. Finally the inheritance exercise may have been interesting but was too tedious to follow given we had not any experience with Visual Basic.

LAB 340 – MS Biztalk Server 2000

In this lab we were left alone to explore Biztalk Server 2000 using the exercise book. The book was very unclear as to when it was asking you to do something or just giving you background advice. The package didn’t appear hard to use and I could see the use of it. Unfortunately the exercises were impossible to follow and seemed to be aimed more at people who had been using previous versions of this in there businesses for many years.

Other Student Consultant Special Sessions

Windows 2000 & Windows XP. David Soloman and Mark Russionvich

This again, was a session only for the SCs. The speakers gave a brief history from 1988 of Windows talking about the original requirements and how those have evolved. They then spoke about why XP is so good by listing its new features and discussed what was meant by the processes and threads screen in task manager. They also talked about the environment subsystems, device drivers and tools for exploring the internals of the OS. It was an entertaining talk and was well tailored for the SCs.

The conference was well presented with many interesting talks. It was much more worthwhile going this year as I had a better understanding of MS products having used Visual Studio for a year and having more knowledge of computing. It would have been nice to meet more of the SCs particularly from the UK as after the Monday evening we didn’t have another opportunity to socialise.

Although the conference closed on Friday we could not make any of the talks due to our relatively early flight times.