Me and a few thousand other developers got together in the main auditorium at the International Convention Centre in Barcelona to hear the Keynote address for Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Developers. The previous week over 5000 Infrastructure specialists had convened at the same location for the sister conference for IT Professionals.
The attendees from Charteris had all flown in the day before, so we convened over dinner to discuss the best way to absorb the most from the conference. One tip that Roger Whitehead gave us was to get along to the keynote early as it would start filling up 45 minutes before the scheduled time. So we made sure to get along early and get our place in the main auditorium. We were treated to some loud music by Loomis and Jones to get us all excited and ready for the presentation and to set the scene for the week ahead. Looking around, the auditorium seemed to be filling with a similar number to the previous week, if not more, and although the auditorium was a typically austere collection of black walls and surroundings, the orange of the Tech Ed backdrop attracted the eye to the visual display put up by the DJs.
To introduce we had Pierre Liautaud, Microsoft VP for Western Europe. He was there to help us get excited about the event and put it in context, it was the second of the two week Tech ed at the conference centre in Barcelona, and 5000 IT Professionals had gathered the week before. We were to expect lots of great content and cool demos for what is one of the best times to be a developer. Why? It is one of the best times because the PC is currently the most popular development platform and this was the conference in Europe to show how to use it.
As you may or may not know from reading the other blogs, these four weeks are quite busy from a conference perspective with Tech Ed EMEA coming hot on the heels of the PDC Conference a couple of weeks ago. Inevitably the big Azure announcement was featured, with the Microsoft emphasis - this is not plain cloud computing, but computing where you run the application where it makes most sense - not just in the cloud. It was then good to see a map illustrating the investment by Microsoft in Europe with 24 Innovation Centres, 13 Research and Development Centres and 4 collaborations with Universities. Although there are only two R&D centres in the British Isles, the centre in Cambridge is one of the most established in Europe. Mention was made of the Microsoft acquisition of FAST in Norway, specialists in Enterprise Search, but in Internet Search Microsoft are establishing European centres in Paris, London and Munich - because they think that there is still scope for innovation in that space.
Having been warmed up by the potential of software - the magic that enables the world, we got to listen to the General Manager of the Visual Studio Team for the remainder of the keynote. Jason Zander was obviously revelling in the opportunity to show off some development work, although he admitted that day to day coding was something he did 10 years ago on the CLR team. He was going to let us in to the exciting elements of the upcoming version of Visual Studio, VS 2010 and concentrate on what he described as four "pillars" supporting developers in dealing with the challenges of our time. These four pillars are:
- Understanding Code - we have all been on projects where we are the new guy, or we are in a team and they bring someone in half way along and you just think it would be easier to get on with it than answer this guy's questions. To try and help them, Visual Studio 2010 comes with a number of visualisation and analysis tools to explain code, show interdependencies and show calling sequences. Architectural discovery tools have been enhanced to help understand and refresh the memory of those looking at the code for an application. To help with the quality of code and its deployment, Test Lab Management has been introduced. For instance, when a tester is running a manual script, Visual Studio can record a video of their steps, and can capture debug information. Instead of relying on the tester's memory at the time it supports their efforts in the background and adds that key information that really helps the developer to understand how and what happened to the application (and also to believe what the tester reports!).
- Building Web Applications - Carrying on from the test driven development approach, a number of elements have been added to assist with the building and control of virtual environments - essential for the multi-tier infrastructure of web applications. And a little thing that they have added at last - config transforms to properly adjust all of those dev / preprod and production web.config app.config and all the others through deployment environments.
- Create Office Applications - I didn't note mention of SharePoint "14" but the new library support for SharePoint greatly assists the development and deployment of SharePoint work. That said, we were all reminded of VSeWSS (Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services) because that is a stated upgrade path to the new functionality in 2010.
- Power of C++ - Now I'm not going to admit to any real knowledge of C++, I have dabbled in C in my time but unfortunately my lean towards business value has usually only left me time for scripting languages, with a good medium dose of C# from time to time. And I don't think I am alone from the 30 or so hands that went up when Jason Zander asked for a show of hands from those "unmanaged code" people. But he did go on to describe the assistance that VS 2010 will give C++ programmers in coping with all of the multi-core machinery that has been emerging from manufacturers for the last year or more.
In summary the keynote is one of the few sessions (only two) where the whole delegate community gets together in one place and it was good to see the sheer numbers of people from across Europe and further that are really interested in making the best of their development investment in Microsoft technologies. The address certainly fired us up to get the most out of the following breakout sessions.
Key Facts:
Session Code: KEY01
Speakers: Pierre Liautaud, Jason Zander
Track: General
Rating: 8/10
Attendance: 4000+