Hadi Hariri has sent us his take on Microsoft's TechEd 2007 conference, held in Barcelona.
I was in Barcelona last week for TechEd 2007. I have to say, it was a great conference. This year I didn’t present any sessions so I didn’t have the pressure to prepare presentations. Instead, I relaxed and enjoyed my stay. I had quite a few hours of booth duty at the “Ask the Experts” stands, but this was a really exciting opportunity to meet and talk to other developers and see what problems we all share.
I had mixed reactions from the crowd. It was not surprising to see how many developers weren’t “up-to-date” with the latest technology coming out of Redmond. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the rate at which Microsoft is pushing new tools and technologies out can be a mind-baffling experience for many. In fact, for the past two years, and I would have to say that this year even a little more, TechEd has been shifting its content to more relevant sessions on existing technologies and how to provide developers with the right architectural designs and tools to solve their everyday problems. This doesn’t mean to say that new things weren’t covered, quite the contrary, but there has been a tendency to show existing tools too, not just what’s “going to come”.
In regard to new technologies, one of the things that have really gotten me excited is the new Entity Framework that is coming out sometime mid next year. A CTP will be available sometime in December. I haven’t played with it much, but from what I saw it will drastically not only cut down the development time, but also make maintenance a breeze. The idea behind it is to model your application using objects and have the framework take care of things like persistence, relationships, etc. You might call it an OR/M, and partially it is, but I can see it as being more than that, and actually evolving into a fundamental pillar of future development. I was talking to Pablo Castro, from the ADO.NET team, and he was discussing the architecture and design decisions they’ve made when implemented the Entity Framework. They have made it completely extensible and pluggable; to the point that for those DBA’s that have optimization for break fest, lunch and dinner, will enjoy being able to define the DML that is used in different operations performed on the model. Talking about data, Pablo also talked about ASTORIA, which is basically a web service stub generator for exposing data coming from your EDM. It is not a one-to-one mapping, that is, it doesn’t necessarily take a client entity and generate CRUD operations on it, exposing those as web service calls. Although it can do this, it also allows you to define entities in relation to one another and generate proxies for them as a whole, thus allowing you to create service orientated architectures. But then again, this is something that really needs to be played before passing judgment.
One of the focuses on this year’s conference was about software and services, whereas now you not only have in-house software, but also contract services from an outside provider that might provide you with software on a rental basis and without an infrastructure required by your company. I’m not sure how easy of a sell that might be. For those making the business decisions, it sounds great, since it reduces an initial investment. However, I see a lot of opposition originating from the head of IT departments, not to mention those in charge of security.
It is clear however that Microsoft wants to push out this whole concept of SOA and application compositions, to the point that they’ve even come up with a new project called OSLO that will allow simplify the tasks of design and deployment of SOA by leveraging patterns and tools. More to come on that soon.
For web developers there is exciting news also. Finally Microsoft seem to have realized that ASP.NET is not a very scalable architecture in terms of development. After taking tips from the open source community with projects such as Castle Project, and how people in the Ruby camp do things, they’ve implemented ASP.NET MVC framework which will simplify web application development following the guidelines of the MVC architecture. For those of us coming from the Delphi camp, don’t you find an outstanding similarity to WebBroker technology? When were we doing this? Back in 1998 was it?
On the whole it was a very good conference this year, with over 4000 developers and a lot of interesting sessions. It started off well with Som’s keynote presentation announcing the immediate release of Visual Studio 2008 in November and followed through with great technical content. Personally, I’m very excited about what there is to come, and this is not about being an alpha geek, it’s about knowing the industry finally realizing that RAD isn’t all that RAD after all, and that at the heart of a good application lies a good design. Bringing us the tools to not only facilitate this, but allow us to leverage technology without renouncing to scalable designs is a great thing for every developer.
