Tag: TechEd Europe 2013

The last day of my TechEd event was cut in half because of an early flight home (I had a wedding to attend to on Saturday) so this post will be rather short on the sessions of the day and then I’ll conclude with a summary of my conference experience.

I attended three sessions, the first was about 3D DirectX development with Visual Studio 2012. That’s a kind of unusual subject for TechEd but was interesting for me as a general developer. I’d like to see more of this kind in future conferences. The second was a session about news in Entity Framework 6 and that was also good. This was actually a repeated session from earlier in the week since the first one was full.

The last session I attended in this year’s TechEd was this annual edition of Mark Russinovich’s Case of the Unexplained session series: Windows Troubleshooting. These sessions are truly amazing and if you ever get a chance to attend one of them I can warmly recommend them. Mark is one of the best speakers I’ve seen in our industry (together with Scott Hanselman), entertaining and incredibly knowledgeable. A short description of this session that he describes real-world use of the SysInternal utilities (of which he is the creator) to find and solve Windows problems such as crashes, performance problems, hangs, etc. As Windows users we all experience these kind of problems so these sessions are both useful for getting insights to problems that can occur and also to get tips of how to use the SysInternals tools. I’ve experienced a few of these sessions before and they’re always very useful. This was the best session in this edition of TechEd so it was a great way to end this year’s edition for me.

With that it’s time to wrap up TechEd Europe 2013 with some thoughts about the experience. This year, there was about 5 000 delegates according to officials, which can be compared to the 10 000 count of TechEd North America. It’s a much smaller conference than TechEd NA but there were still an abundance of sessions to attend, generally about 15-20 in parallel for each time slot. That’s lot indeed, but if you look in more detail about the contents of these sessions you find that most were targeted at the IT pro community. There were also one or two Business Intelligence sessions for each time slot leaving perhaps room for 2-4 developer sessions. Most of these remaining developer sessions fall into two categories:

• Windows Azure technologies
• Microsoft SaaS offerings such as Team Foundation Services, BizTalk Services, and the like

This makes for a very heavy cloud focus on the developer parts of the conference. There wasn’t much about Windows 8 development, Asp.NET web development, Javascript (which is otherwise mentioned everywhere in the industry these days), etc. Also, there wasn’t much on software architecture or best practises (except a little about Azure, of course). To me, being a an architect and developer, this makes TechEd a less relevant conference than I’d hoped it to be. There was some consensus (at least among some of us delegates) that the IT pro side of things have been given more priority at TechEd than before. I don’t know if this is deliberate from Microsoft or if it just turned out this way, but in either case I will probably choose another conference the next time I get the chance to attend one.

This year the Build conference took place at the same time as TechEd Europe. Build is very focused on the developer and it’s starting to feel like a better match for my work role than TechEd. The planning seems very strange to schedule two Microsoft conferences of this large scale at the same time but I suspect there are explanations we aren’t informed of. Earlier editions of Build have taken place in the autumn but I think that Microsoft wanted to announce Windows 8.1 before the summer in order to not loose more ground than they already have. Therefore they needed to squeeze in Build before the summer. Build was also announced much, much later than TechEd, indicating some urgency from Microsoft.

The problem for me as a TechEd delegate, is that it definitely made TechEd feel a bit like a second class conference for developers, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. That’s not a feeling you want for your delegates if you’re organizing world-class conferences…

However, I attended some quite useful sessions and it was interesting to see what’s happening with Windows Azure and other online services. TechEd is still a useful conference for developers, especially if you have some interest in the IT pro side of things and for me, having some architectural responsibilities and also an interest in systems integration, the conference scope would be a quite good match if only there was a little more general developer content.

That about sums it up, I guess. That’s the final post on this mini series of Tech Europe 2013 reports. Thank you for reading.

/Emil

Yet another day at TechEd Europe has passed. This day started with a second keynote, the reason being that Windows 8.1 was announced at the Build conference the night before. Microsoft had to do these announcements before they could talk about Windows 8.1 at TechEd I suppose. Kind of makes TechEd look like a second class conference, Build seems to receive considerably more focus from Microsoft. Steve Ballmer himself did the keynote at Build and all delegates receive generous giveaways. At TechEd we have gotten a rather good Surface tablet offer this year, being able to order a Surface RT and a Surface Pro with quite good discounts. At Build however, the delegates gets a Surface Pro and an 8 inch Acer tablet for free…

Now, this blog post was not going to be about Build (I’m reporting from TechEd after all) but it’s worth pointing out that it seems that there is less developer focus at TechEd and that Microsoft is expecting developers to go to Build instead. I heard that approximately 25% of the TechEd delegates are categorized as developers, the rest being IT pros, so that’s also an indication.

However, being interested in enterprise development, I have attended several interesting sessions today. There was one session about the news in Windows 8.1 and it seems to be not very revolutionary. Apps can now be snapped more freely than before, for example. Another example is that there is a new speech synthesis API. That was actually not very impressive, it sounded a bit like my old Amiga 500 speech synthesis from the early nineties. Not sure who needs that, actually.

There was also lots of other smaller changes making the Windows 8 experience a little more polished, but nothing major so I guess that the version number 8.1 is pretty accurate. The most peculiar new feature is that Windows 8.1 will support 3D printing inside the OS in the same manor as 2D printing, with a print dialog with preview, etc. Obviously a gimmick, but certainly something that will get some attention (I’m blogging about it right now, for example…).

Other sessions I’ve been to have been about Team Foundation Server / Services and Azure Service Bus, both of them quite interesting. I can’t help noticing that most of the sessions that have been relevant to me have been about Azure or TFS so it seems that Microsoft is really pushing those technologies.

Microsoft also had a challenge at the conference that if you did certain experiments with Azure and Team Foundation Services (mainly creating a web site and deploy into that from your own project in TF Services) you’d get some prizes. Of course I couldn’t help accepting the challenge and was up last night doing 4 of the 5 challenges and in return I collected a water bottle, ear plugs with the Azure logo and an R/C car to play with. 🙂

It was actually rather fun trying out these technologies and the challenge was a way for Microsoft to make us take a little time to actually do some testing. And it worked, I’ll probably be using this stuff in the future…

Emil

So I find myself at the keyboard again after another long day at TechEd Europe in Madrid. My sessions of today were about Team Foundation Server, Windows Azure BizTalk Services, Windows Azure Mobile Services, continuous integration with TFS Service and Azure web sites and finally an interesting session about F#. There is much happening in Azure, I already knew that but after attending these sessions I realize that the pace of progress is faster than I thought…

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m starting to get really impressed with Mobile Services, the demos I’ve seen in Madrid has really been an eye-opener. Steven Sanderson had another great session on that subject today, entitled Develop Native iOS and Android Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Service. First time I’ve seen Android programming and iOS programming on a Microsoft event (and boy, is Objective C ugly!). Really great stuff, check it out if you’re interested in mobile services!

Dustin Campbell held an interesting session about Build Data-Rich Solutions Faster with Microsoft Visual F#. The talk was not so much about data-rich application as a set of cool F# demos. Without a doubt he gets the geek award of the day for his demo of his text adventure game compiler written in F#. He was very proud to demo playing Zork, written in a grammar that was runtime compiled into MSIL by F#. Rather cool, and utterly unnecessary 🙂

I’m also more more interested in TFS again, the agile planning tools keep getting better and better. TFS 2012 Update 3 is coming out any day and now includes tag support. More interesting stuff is happening in TFS 2013 but we have to wait little more for that. When I asked about the time frame, MS refused to answer, other than that they’re going to respect the year part of the name…

Inspired by today’s sessions I signed up for a TFS Services account (i.e. TFS in the cloud). This way I can try out some features not yet released in the on-premise version. It’s dead simple and the feature auto-deploy to Azure web sites is very neat. The integration between TFS Services and Azure is obviously something that Microsoft has put some effort into.

A new Azure service that I haven’t seen before (I just heard about it a few weeks ago) is BizTalk in the cloud, Windows Azure BizTalk Sevices (currently in preview). I’s a little unclear however how much is actually the good old BizTalk we love and hate. They have new designers and this time you get to configure the entire path from source to destination from inside Visual Studio in an artifact called a Bridge. If you have worked with BizTalk you know that today you define schemas and transforms in Visual Studio but you have to associate them with receive and send ports using the BizTalk administration tool, causing complex deployments. Just this single feature make the new version very interesting but the main aspect is of course that integration is now available as a service in the cloud, with scalabitity, quick provisioning, and so on. BizTalk Server 2013 is also in the pipeline but for the moment these two offerings seem to be rather separate.

That’s all for today. I’ll be back tomorrow…

Emil

I have now spent the first day of TechEd listening to keynotes and sessions, and walking between the different rooms where the presentations take place. Actually it’s a lot of walking, then venue is pretty large…

The keynote discussed four themes:

1. Empower people-centric IT
2. Enable modern business applications
3. Unlock insights from any data
4. Transform the datacenter

A lot of sales talk of course, and not a whole lot of news. A little unexpected for me, it was actually point 3 above that was the most interesting with a some very cool demos of Excel Data Explorer and GeoFlow, new tools for data discovery and BI in Excel. These worked with data sets coming from HDInsight (Hadoop) in Azure.

If we skip the sales talk it seems the main trends are the cloud (of course), big data, BYOD (bring your own device, i.e. how IT departments handle people bringing their smart devices to work)

Also interesting was the announcement of Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server, enabling automatic provisioning of VMs in on-premise servers letting user’s configure their environments using the well-known Azure Portal locally. Pretty neat.

I went to several different sessions, most of them relatively good. Best was probably Steve Sanderson’s talk Cloud-Powered Web Apps in Minutes with Windows Azure Mobile Services where he developed a SPA (Single Page web Application) using Azure Mobile Services as a backend. Really cool presentation with almost no PowerPoint. Interesting to see that Mobile Services is not just for mobile apps, it can be used as a backend regardless of the type of application, something I had not realized can be quite useful.

This evening there was the customary welcome reception with free food and drink and a lot of exhibitors throwing swag at you if you let them scan your badge. Being a TechEd alumni, I have learned that it’s not worth all the spam you’re going to get in the coming year so I got away with just foldable frisbees for my kids and a “tech trap”, apparently used for stowing away mice and cords in the computer bag…

To sum this up I think it was an okay first day. Comparing to TechEd North America it’s a quite similar experience but in a smaller scale (perhaps half, or a third, of the number of participants). The sessions are of similar standard to those that I have attended in the US.

/Emil

My trip to sunny Madrid is now just a few days off. I’ll probably not be working much on my tan though, since I’ll be at TechEd Europe this year. Really looking forward to it, as I’ve been to two great TechEd North America events before. This time it’s Europe so it’s probably a slightly smaller event but I’ve found plenty of interesting sessions in the agenda.

I’ll be writing reports about my TechEd experience next week so stay tuned if you’re interested 🙂

/Emil