NYC VSLive 2007

NYC VSLive 2007 Sep 16 – Sep 19 2007

Well, this is no product launch and no free software doled out like other Microsoft events.

The keynote speakers were good and the demos are Microsoft quality! (products tooJ). The technology at the forefront of these few days was .NET 3.0 (mainly WPF, Silverlight, WCF, WWF) and SqlServer 2008. WPF & Silverlight (www.silverlight.net) are the Jazzy UI while the WPF catered to the Desktop apps, the silverlight catered to the web; The WCF (replaces the webservices & .net remoting) lays the foundation for the underlying communication between two disparate systems opening up myriad possibilities for the protocols and WWF caters to the workflow (I couldn’t attend any of these sessions as there were overlaps). Silverlight is being built as a cross-browser cross-platform solution. It would work on IE, firefox, Safari and both windows & Mac. Novell is developing the Silverlight for Unix / Linux. The session towards Ajax & Sql 2005 were pretty much what we are using and not that great. Except for one new thing on Caching in Sql Server might be useful to us.

Apart from the stuff that are useful, certain sessions helped clear the doubts on things that are better not used like the webservice factory (a code generator) CLR (read .NET) based SQL queries. The code generator for webservice factory was cumbersome at the best and CLR based SQL is more overhead for database queries. However the CLR based stuff eases development by providing the .net constructs for database programming. The newer version of the webserver (IIS 7.0) makes it easier for the webmasters & web administrators to manage websites by making it more modular, flexible and moving the configuration to the host.config file.

In addition to the MS technologies & concepts, there was a speaker from Amazon (Mike Culver) talking about their Storage; access to a ton of code samples that would helps us to develop stuff faster.

The highlights of this event are

1. Except for the keynote speakers not many people used Vista! Only three out of Ten speakers had a vista machine and even one of them was complaining its utility.
2. Every speaker used Google.com for search and not Microsoft live.com
3. IBM is competing with Microsoft in the freeware market by coming up with a free database DB2 Express on the lines of SQL Express. But when I pressed the sales guy on how different it is from SQL express, he didn’t know! (I saw him sitting in the SQL workshop on the final day taking notes)
4. Even though the demos were very good, the tools that had to be used to develop these (WPF & Silverlight) are quite not ready yet and they are clunky at best (even the speaker on WPF admitted this) and good that we decided not to use WPF now.
   

The toughest part of this whole exercise was not sitting in some of these boring sessions but it is the commute to the city all three days!