Damian Brady’s Blog

This should probably be titled “Tech.Ed Night 2″ to be fair; I’ll probably be talking about last night a lot more…

So yeah, last night.  In true Tech.Ed style, they threw drinks at us until we could drink no more.  Last year (on the Gold Coast) they booked out Movie World and threw drinks at us.  This year they booked out Home nightclub in Cockle Bay (Darling Harbour), opened the bar completely and brought celebrities to play XBox.  So I found myself at one stage watching Anthony Mundine boxing against Willie Mason (on XBox obviously) while drinking free Heineken.  Apart from Mundine and Mason, Hazim el Mazri, David Peachey and Nick Davis were in attendance.

So today was more about stuff that was cool than stuff that was necessarily useful.  I went to a few sessions on Atlas (Microsoft’s AJAX framework), and one on tips and tricks in C#.  The Atlas stuff looks pretty good.  You can do some fairly decent stuff with very little (or no) code.  Most of the Atlas controls just extend the existing ASP.NET controls so there’s no real need to design with Atlas from the start.  I’ll definitely be giving this stuff a try at home.

Anyway, that’s enough from me, and that’s enough of Tech.Ed for this year.

Damo

So day 2 of Tech.Ed is actually turning out to be a bit better than day one in terms of interesting sessions.  I’ve mainly been going to sessions on topics that I find personally interesting or useful and there are a few more of these today than yesterday.

One of the first was a Panel discussion on what they called “Web vNext“.  It’s basically Microsoft’s name for Web 2.0, and the host confessed that it’s pretty much Microsoft policy not to use a name made popular by anyone else for a new technology.  The whole thing was recorded and will be podcasted (or whatever Microsoft wants to call it) from the www.arcast.net site.  This one was mainly interesting because the questions were largely asked by the audience (myself included - yes, I’m a huge nerd) and answered by two Microsoft employees and the founder of the Australian gnoos website, Ben Barren.  It gave a a frank insight into how Microsoft sees this space and what they’re doing about it.  Some stuff looks pretty interesting, particularly the live.com and Atlas technologies.

The split session I just finished was an end-to-end development of a web site in ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7.0.  This was really cool.  In about two and a half hours, he went from scratch to a data-driven website with templating and styles, role-based security and memberships, profiles and customization, and caching.  In addition, the Atlas stuff provided legitimate AJAX support that was actually cross-browser (he used Firefox throughout rather than IE).  It looks really good.  I’ll certainly be having a play with .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 when I get back to Brisbane.  My machine needs a format anyway.

Anyway, that’ll probably be it for me today.  We’ve got the good old Tech.Ed party at a nightclub here on Darling Harbour.  If it’s anything like the one last year they’ll be throwing drinks at us, so I think I’ll make the most of that…

Damo

Well thank God for that - I passed.  I am now officially an MCP (well when Microsoft sends out my official certification I will be).

The exam was a little more difficult than I thought it would be.  There were a lot of questions on areas that I wasn’t too knowledgable about because I tend to use other methods to solve those problems (case in point the in-depth features of DataSets).  I was actually quite worried at around question 7 because I hadn’t had one that I was 100% sure I got right yet.  Revisiting them all and looking a bit closer helped a lot though.  I ended up getting a score of 829 (pass mark is 700), so I’ve gotta be happy with that.

A couple of interesting sessions at Tech.Ed today, most notably a keynote from a Microsoft employee who is a social anthropologist (I can’t remember her name and I can’t find it on the Tech.Ed site).  It seems that Microsoft is actually realising that their customers are humans who might not necessarily be particularly good at using and setting up computers…  When this speaker joined the company she found that (in her words) about 99.9% of Beta testers for Windows were techies.  Obviously the statistics they’d gathered on how easy things were were slightly inaccurate.

Anyway, got more architecture sessions to go to in a minute, so I’ll leave it for now.  Internet connectivity here is very good (even for those of us like myself who didn’t bring laptops), so I might be blogging a bit in the spaces between sessions.  If you care, keep an eye out.

Damo

Just look how long it’s been since my last post!

If you’re expecting an excuse, then here it is: I’ve been flat out with a few things. I’ve mainly been involved with the fundraising for the Australian Uni Games (that I’m not even going to), and I’ve been fairly busy at work. Also, I’m sitting an MCP exam next week, but I can’t really use that as an excuse because I only really started studying last night.

And speaking of the MCP exam (Microsoft Certified Professional - exam 70-315 - look it up if you’re interested), I’ll be heading to Sydney next week for Microsoft Tech.Ed. Hopefully that’ll provide me with tons of info on upcoming MS technologies and how to use the current ones better. This will be the first year I’ve gone alone though, so I expect to be all lonely… maybe I can (God forbid) socialize with the geeks… scary…

I’ll try to post a bit while I’m down there about what’s going on and what’s been exciting me.

If you’re a personal friend of mine, firstly why are you reading this?, and secondly keep an eye out on the QUT Volleyball site for information on the second installation of the QUT Zoolander Walkoff, appropriately titled, “QUT Zoolander Walkoff 2: Derelicte”. If you could make it along to help out with tour costs and generally to have a laugh at the idiots who are walking (myself included), that’d be great!

Damo