Keynote
The first thing you saw when wandering into the room for the keynote presentation was the sheer size of the event. The next, was the impressive display at the front of the room - they had a presentation that was being outputted to 5 seperate projectors. Note that I'm not talking about the same screen being shown in 5 different places - they'd lined up the 5 projectors, and designed the display (which was a highly visual Tetris style 'demo' showing sponsors logos and other things) to take advantage of the whole thing as one seamless output device. If this is the sort of stuff you can do with Avalon (yes I'm ignoring the newly announced proper names too) then I'm looking forward to using it inside Windows Vista.
First speaker was the Microsoft CEO. It was a fairly generic speech, "exciting times", "moving forward" yadda yadda yadda, fairly generic stuff which you can probably download somewhere as a standard CEO speech template. The next speaker was Iain McDonald who spoke a bit about Vista, Longhorn Server, and a few other things for the future. He's an interesting speaker, and had a few interesting demonstrations, some of which were presented by other people. The whole thing was designed to give a small taste of some of the higher profile sessions taking place later on through the seminar. One of which was a quick demo from Ari Bixhorn center around the features of Indigo (now called Windows Communication Foundation). He did a good job of making a technology which is primarily running in the background look very interesting - message queueing, web services, ASMX, and service interoperability aren't usually things which have people on the edge of their seats, but in this case I think his demo in the keynote pulled quite a few more people along to his first session.
Indigo (Windows Communication Foundation) - Ari Bixhorn
In this session, Ari basically expanded on the quick demo he'd shown during the keynote, and also laid down a good overview of Indigo for those who might need it. It was pretty informative - the overall message to take away is that interoperability between message dependant systems is going to get a lot easier with Indigo, and that there's a lot of flexible options for developers coming up in the future.
Future of Games Development with XNA - Tony Goodhew
This presentation goes into the category of "sounded more interesting than it actually was". XNA is a concept still in development. Tony talked about some of the issues being faced by game designers (ie, developing custom systems and scripts for each game project, and not being able to reuse any of this stuff), and about the goals of XNA (for Microsoft to exploit a current market vacancy.. urr.. I mean, for them to help game companies be more productive by investing in reusable systems). Some of it was interesting, but it's a bit hard to talk about something which doesn't exist yet - I know this full well after last week. So he made it a bit more interesting by throwing in some videos of some Xbox 360 titles which perked the audience up a bit.
Data Driven Websites with ASP.NET 2.0 - Bradley Millington
This session showed some examples of new data controls coming in ASP.NET 2.0, and gave some examples of how to use them. At times there was too much fluffing about in Visual Studio, and in some ways I found he was going a bit too slow for my liking. I got the concept in 30 seconds, so the rest of the 8 or so minute explanation was just too labored. I guess if you didn't have any Visual Studio exposure then you might appreciate it a lot more - but then if you didn't have ANY Visual Studio exposure, why the hell would you be in a session talking about Visual Studio controls?
Anyhow, it was a pretty useful session. It showed a couple of the new controls, and a couple of the new objects, and how you could abstract the data access from the control using an intermediate object, and why you'd want to do this. The other useful thing they mentioned was that some of the objects/controls can are now more aware of the "page lifecycle" - the point being that the developer doesn't need to worry about placing bindings in postback statements, the control will work out when it's appropriate to bind or rebind all by itself. Handy. Overall it just looked incredibly easy to get the basics done, even more so than in the current ASP.NET implementation.
Windows Vista Fundamentals - Amy Stephan
This was a pretty full session. I think a lot of people just wanted to look at Windows Vista, and they probably didn't really get what they were after. Amy showed some slides talking about how they've tried to re-architect Windows from the ground up, etc etc, and some of the things they were trying to achieve with this release. Overall, fairly interesting (although not the 2nd time around, as I was to discover in day 2), but not a lot of "oooh pretty look at the window animations" etc. She showed some of how the Protected Administrator stuff was going to work, and how they'd rearchitected most control panel functions so they can work as a "normal" (ie, non administrator) user, as well as some of the improvements they've made to things such as the event viewer. There was also more talk about IE7, and how malware/spyware etc was a major part of their considerations for Vista.
One of the recurring themes is how much stuff is tied into Group Policy - so Active Directory is going to play a big part of this. I'm sure there's going to be ways to do similar things with local policies, but it'll be interesting to see how painful some of this is for anyone not using AD.
Overall, an interesting enough presentation, but it was more aimed at Sysadmins (who they kept referring to as "IT Professionals") and desktop support people on busy Helpdesks who needed to maintain 100's of Windows PC's + Users.
ASP.NET 2,0: Best Practices for Building Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes, and Site Navigators - Bradley Millington
This was similar to the data driven websites presentation - Master Pages sounded like something I needed to know about, as a template based approach to ASP.NET is something I've not been able to find a decent way to approach yet, and everyone I've asked about it has said basically not to bother. So I was hoping at least to get the nod "it's fixed in ASP.NET 2.0", and it is, so once I heard that I left.
Basically Master Pages look good, you define a master page which has content areas, and you then simply need to fill those content areas in your child pages after you've specified which master page they use. You can also nest master pages so they derive from other master pages (ie, you might want to define another master page for a subcategory of pages in your site, which still inherits the main elements of the overall site design). That's a simplistic summary, but the point is that it looked very cool and easy to do with ASP.NET 2.0, and they've taken all the issues people were having in the previous version into consideration. Yay! The rest of the thing talked about Site navigation controls, and themes, but as I said - I left, as I couldn't see much personal value of those controls based on the quick overview of them at the start.
Summary
First off, there's a lot of Australians working in Redmond. Weird. Oh well. Overall some good sessions, I got a lot of value out of the ASP.NET related sessions, and a few interesting things from the personal interest sessions I went to. The Vista presentation was a bit average, mainly as I was more looking at it from the angle of "show me something cool which I can do with my home PC" versus the Sysadmin angle, and the games/XNA one was a bit lacking in content, but overall pretty interesting. As I was sitting in the keynote room, I was thinking about the sheer size of the event (which was even more impressive given the cost) - there is no way an IBM/Lotus event in New Zealand would get that many numbers. I guess even they know this, which is why LotusSphere/Lotus Fusion only makes it as far to Australia (and I *think* there's only a single event for all of Australia, which is kind of for all of Australasia really). It's sad in some ways, but in others it reinforces the reasons behind why I'm making the shift that I'm making here. A couple of weeks back I had a conversation with a friend (who also works with IBM technologies, but not Notes/Domino) about the general slackness of IBM New Zealand, and things like Tech-Ed vs NOTHING just reinforce that.
A few of the speakers mentioned that now was a really good time to be involved with Microsoft, and that there was a good positive buzz around some of the things happening. Perhaps before today I was in need of a little more convincing - after day 1 of Tech-Ed I don't think I need that anymore.