TechEd 2007 Barcelona, cuatro

The rest of Day one

After the Keynote speech there was just enough time to grab a quick drink of coffee ( very strong coffee, obviously Microsoft do not want anyone snoring in the sessions ) before it was time to head to the next breakout session.
For those who have not attended TechEd, you are provided with a ring bound book of the available sessions with a brief breakdown of the subject matter. It is necessary to be quite selective of the sessions you attend as there are in general around twelve break out sessions, and five or so Interactive sessions going on at once.
Having decided on two possible choices I headed for the session entitled Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications into your Applications As we at Esendex are in the business of business communication it seemed a fair choice. I sat through 20 minutes of the presentation and realized that the subject matter was really way to higher level to be of any real interest especially as the presentation seemed to revolve pricipally around the Sharepoint tool set, not one that we use. I therefore decided to drop into my second option a presentation by Bob Beauchemin, Best Practices for Optimizing Service Based Code in SQL Server 2005 and Beyond. Unfortunately for me by the time I had found the session and sat down Beauchemin was well into his stride and I was out of my depth not being a DBA. I should add that I found Beauchemin's comments about the slowness of Powerpoint and his dislike graphical visualisations somewhat tiresome. Rearrange the words Workman, tools, blames, his and bad.

Session Two I felt simply had to be better, and i am glad to say was significantly so.

Since signing up to attend TechEd I had been looking forward to attending any of the sessions dealing with Agile development methodologies. Session Two for me was all about the presentation by Roy Osherove Agile Development with Team System. It was an excellent session, humorous in parts, informative and well delivered. At Esendex we use the Extreme Programming methodology, and though Osherove concentrated mainly on SCRUM the principals are pretty much the same. Simply put Agile development requires that the work to be completed is broken up into small easily achievable pieces referred to as Sprints in SCRUM and Stories & Tasks in Extreme programming. Another key factor is the assumption that the customers requirements will change. If the requirements do change whilst a task/sprint is in progress, it should be put back into the product backlog ( list of outstanding work ) to be refactored. This should prevent 'mission creep' from occurring.

In a nutshell the support Visual Studio 2008 offers Agile development teams seems to be a significant improvement with the 'full house' of MSBuild ( not without its flaws see 'partially successful builds' ) source code versioning and unit testing (MSTest). These tools will allow you to write up the required tasks, monitor any changes to the source related explicitly to those tasks when checked in, build the source when any changes are made ( fingering any developer who checks in dodgy code), run the unit tests and also provide descriptive and graphical representations of development progress.

Osherove finished his session with a song.. yeah really and though his singing voice may not be the greatest the lyrics to the the theme of "Every breath you take" by the Police had everyone laughing.

Supplimentary

I feel that i must correct a possible slander on the populace and government of the city of Barcelona as the city really is not the threatening place and dangerous place portrayed by the Microsoft security handout. We have been wandering around with our laptop bags all week and we have had no grief what so ever. Barcelona is a beautiful city full some amazing and diverse architecture, wonderful cuisine and friendly people. "Hola!" to you all :-)

TechEd 2007 Barcelona, tres

The Key Note:
A very enthusiastic presentation by S.Somasegar corporate vice president of the Development division. Key points were the announcement that Visual Studio 2008 will be rolled out by the end of November. He also aims to make the MSDN a more interactive and community based environment with 80% responses to queries with 2 days. His objective is to move away from MSDN being just a static help library by introducing a WIKI functionality and including the concept of an online code library which members of the developer community can post to.
We were introduced to some of the new features of VS 2008, including the split pane for design and markup views which remain synchronised as changes are made. Judging by the examples shown we are all going to need larger screens to effectively view both panes.
The keynote was also used as a platform for a bit of judicios trumpet blowing, Microsoft it seems are going to "have their cake and eat it" having used Visual Studio Team Suite itself to develop 96% of Visual Studio 2008. Bit of a chicken and egg situation one thinks.

"Use what we ship and ship what we use" S.Somasegar TechEd 2007

Tip for the day: Ctrl+k+d pretty formats your code

Within 2008 Javascript has also become a 1st class member of the IDE, with debugging and intellisense fully surported, about time to.

WOW Visual Studio 2008!

In a more light hearted demonstration of the features of Visual Studion 2008, it was demonstrated how you can now integrate a World of Warcraft add-on development environment into the IDE (should be available on CodePlex). The demonstration being a pretty basic target recognition add-on which notified the player if a target was to higher lvl and also played an MP3 from Halo when more than one target was killed. What was impressive about this was that you could effectively write code in the World of Warcraft scripting language with intellisense within Visual Studio, then deploy the addon within the game. Defenitely something to experiment with in my own time.

TechEd 2007 Barcelona, dos

Sunday 4th of November

Having woken, showered and breakfasted at the hotel we decided to venture onto the Barcelona Metro system in search of the TechEd venue to register for the conference. It has been my experience in the past that the metro systems of foreign cities can be quite baffling! I must admit that Barcelona is leaps and bounds ahead of Paris for example. If you know what line you need and what colour it is then your sorted, as all the platforms are colour coded and the signs are all multilingual. Even the ticket machines have a English option!

We arrived at our destination in approximately 40mins and wandered out into a very much Business Expo style area. The TechEd event it transpired was hosted at one of the many modern buildings in the area within 5 minutes walk of the Metro. We walked in straight up to the registration and were soon presented with our passes and assorted Microsoft paraphernalia including a rather natty laptop case. It was somewhat amusing to be also handed a rather inflammatory sheet of paper warning us about the supposed hazards of pickpockets. We were instructed not to wear our TechEd passes outside of the conference Area as “muggers are much more likely to target visitors” and to avoid displaying TechEd/Microsoft merchandise when out in the evening. So Neil and i now carrying new laptop cases emblazoned Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 set off back into town! I do wonder if the whole procedure of giving delegates a warning leaflet and then Microsoft branded bags and t-shirts was an experiment in Darwinism.

TechEd 2007 Barcelona, uno

Saturday 3rd of November

We flew into Garina, approximately 70 Kilometers from Barcelona itself and got a taxi from the airport to our hotel in Barcelona, at a cost of 130€. It has to be said that the taxi driver was refreshingly accurate and honest in his estimate of the possible cost of the trip if a bit eratic in his driving.

Having arrived at our hotel, checked in and freshened up we ventured out and were soon walking down Las Ramblas, a street seemingly dedicated to people watching. There are a multitudes of bars, cafés and street performers. Typically, having walked only a mile or so we found an Irish bar. Is it just the Irish the English and the Australians who feel the need to have nationally themed pubs and bars ? If so does that mean we are obsessd with beer?

Having left this establishment we carried on walking down Las Ramblas until we reached the end at the Monument to Columbus. It was approaching midnight local time by this point and so we decided to venture into a Tapas bar in search of some food. At this point our collective lack of Spanish began to show, we had managed to get by thus far with 'Hola' and 'dos Guinness por favor', not exactly mastermind standard! Fortunately where language is a barrier sign language and gestures are universally understood. Having picked Paella of the menu we were soon presented with a steaming hot bowl of rice and vegetables in my case, seafood in Neil's. Having eaten as much as we could we decided to head back to the hotel for some much needed shut eye.

Transaction Scope - Hopes dashed

Recently we have implemented Transaction scope within our solutions, as the perceived benefits were many.

• An external process is not used to execute the assembly


• Nothing needs to be registered beyond adding to the GAC


• Objects do not need to be marshaled across the COM boundary


• Transactions control is much finer


• MSDTC calls are only made when they are required

These factors combined would have a significant impact on the speed of our build, test and release processes.

Initial tests were very positive not only were the build, test and release processes improved but there were also noticeable performance improvements.

A planned release was built and passed in QA for testing. During QA of our invoicing process we started getting transaction scope errors. Investigation into these errors showed that our data layer architecture which involved tiered data mappers creating and closing their own database connections was the root cause. I.e. when the datamapper closed its database connection it caused the transaction within which it was running to close. Investigation into this via Google (other search engines are available ^^) produced some rather telling results, the most informative being;
MSDN Forum
My reading of this is that

• Microsoft recognize this as an limitation within Visual Studio 2005 & Transaction scope


• resolution of this issue would involve changes to the client, server and the client-server protocol


• This change is not going to be happening any time soon!

So having read all this we are now in the process of rolling back our changes to pre Transaction scope changes, though we are investigating a change to our datalayer to pass around the database connection as suggested in the final post.

To be continued...

Esendex Support

Part of my role at Esendex is providing support to customers world wide and also responding to queries on forums and blogs.

As an example this customer needed clarification as to the correct process to access the messages in their inbox via the Esendex Soap Service

http://www.dotnetspider.com/qa/Question41592.aspx