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Malachi's Log: 010617-010621 TechEd 2001 (sunday-thursday)

For simplicity, all times are EST unless otherwise noted.

010617 (sunday)

12:30pm CST

We met and sent Charlie and Matt to rent a van and start the long drive to Atlanta, GA to attend Microsoft TechEd 2001.

The drive down was uneventful.

6:00ish EST

After we arrived and checked in to the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Atlanta, we went over to the Georgia World Congress Center and picked up our registeration information. [Commnet at Teched] [Commnet at Teched again]

We walked around to get an idea of where things were located. We found CommNet which consisted of several hundred* Compaq machines with LCD flat panel displays running a Windows Whistler beta and hooked up to an Exchange server so that everone had an email address and an MSN Messenger account.

8:30pm EST

Since there were no real events planned for sunday night, we went back to the hotel to decide where we wanted to eat. I actually talked the other guys into going to Soul Vegetarian restaurant. Four of us tried the BBQ Hebrew Twists, and the other guy had stir fry vegetables with brown rice. I also had the Ginger Juice to drink. SPICY! All in all, it wasn't bad. Then we stopped by Harry's in a Hurry and picked up some food for the rest of the week. Then we road the MARTA bus back to the hotel.

Apparently the good theater was over near where we ate. It was playing Panic and Memento. They also play Rocky Horror every Friday night.

010618 (monday)

7:15am

We gathered in the hotel lobby and rode the MARTA train back to TechEd. We ate breakfast and then went to the opening keynote. It's interesting that the big flashy video they played at the beginning of both keynotes had the words "java" and "perl" in the text.

8:30am

The First keynote was by Paul Flessner, Senior Vice President, .NET Enterprise Server Division. It many consisted of several flashy demos of new technology they are releasing. One had a demo of the next version of MS SQL Server, but it won't be out until 2003!

10:40am

After the keynote I went to a session on Microsoft Message Queuing 3.0 (MSMQ) in Windows XP. The guy really knew the stuff and was very security aware. The biggest thing that struck me was the fact that Network Load Balancing (NLB) will break MSMQ if you want reliable messaging.

12:22pm

The next session was a 45 minute lunch "chalk talk". I didn't find any of these to be very useful and they didn't really live up to the name. Mostly a quick overview of a technology that I already knew about. Most days I just ate lunch instead. This one was on Architecting Enterprise Application Frameworks in .NET. Nothing I hadn't already heard before.

1:31pm

After lunch I went to a session about where ADO is headed and where it came from. Not really news, but I found the infromation to be useful. The most interesting thing is that ADO/OLEDB/MDAC was created with the vision of being a universal data access layer that could interoperate with any database. That goal was tossed, however, and the new versions are pretty much geared to exclusivly work with Access and MS SQL Server and nothing else. Kind of sad, really.

3:14pm

After that I found a seat in the very packed talk about what new features are in VB.NET. It was pretty cool. I'm not going to try to list them all, but suffice to say that if they keep making VB easier to use then I'll be out of a job.

4:53pm

My last session for the day was "Visual Studio.NET: Database Modeling". I thought it might be interesting, but after a ten minute overview of the history and future of Visio the session turned into "Visio 2000 for beginners" which I didn't find too useful.

6:45pm

I had signed up for a hand on lab of Visual Studio.NET. We all decided that the hands on labs weren't really that useful. It crashed on all of us at least once and basically was just a forced march through the different parts of the product. I think it would have been more interesting or useful if they had a group of 3-5 people team up and build a small application off of some simple requirements (and given us more time). As it was I didn't really learn much from the experience.

10:00pm

We got back to the hotel pretty late but we decided to go out to eat anyway. Tracey flaked out so the rest of us piled into the van and went to Rocky's Brick Oven Italian Restaurant. I got the linguine pesto. It was pretty good.

Since it was late, I decided to take some pictures of the cityscape at night*. [Atlanta Cityscape at Night]

010619 (tuesday)

7:30am

Met in tho loby again. Tried to get there early so we could get decent seats for the Bill Gates keynote. We ate breakfast at a table with two of the guys that wrote the VB compiler.

8:28am

We ended up more than halfway back and the keynote wasn't scheduled to start until 9:00am. The keynote wasn't that exciting. Bill's not much of a speaker and the material wasn't that compelling. He was supposed to announce some technology and a special session was supposed to occur after the keynote, but they didn't. I don't know what it is or why they scrapped the plan. I guess that's the biggest open question left by this TechEd. Bill promised that the release of VS.NET would occur "this calander year".

10:18am

After the Tuesday keynote I went to an intro to C#. It was good information. Learned a lot about how C# is different from C++ and VB.

1:03pm

Attended a session on .NET and COM+ interop. Basically the lesson is to avoid it unless you have no other options.

I spent some time on the vendor floor. It's a lot like the NAMM show. Lots of chatty vendors and swag. It's amazing how many people will line up and give away personal information to try to win a free iPAQ.

It was sometime early tuesday afternoon that I realized that normal people can't really hope to make it to all the sessions. I was just saturated. Too much information. Too fast. Too many people. I kind of blipped out. During the next break I went outside and sat in the park across the street from the conference center to try to gather my wits.

2:45pm

ASP.NET, volume 1

The first part of two sessions of how to create ASP.NET "web forms". The presenter was really good, and the material was interesting, but it got tiring after a while.

4:30pm

I learned a bit about how to create versioned controls in .NET, which is pretty cool. Instead of the old system where any new version of a control or DLL overwrites the old version on a system and destroys compatibility, the new versioning system allows side by side versions of the same control.

The new security system, which is evidence based, is kind of weird, though.

5:59pm

I went back out to the park. While I was out there I got hit on the arm by a bird that flew past me. While wandering around the vendor area with Travis, I met a guy that likes linux. That makes three of us counting the guy with the KDE shirt I saw on the first day. =)

6:16pm

Ahhh... the wonderful world of .NET debugging. The C++ guys basically wrote a debugger for VS.NET that works across all languages in VS.NET, supports real remote debugging, and other cool stuff. Hopefully it will be pretty useful.

7:30pm

We all attended "Peer Talk", which is a chance for everyone to ask questions and talk to the people that wrote some of these tools.

The cool part was talking to one of the guys from the VS.NET team. He explained that the Visual Studio team is one of the few in microsoft that has fewer testers than developers (something like 23 testers and 28 developers). The only reason they can get away with that is because all the other parts of VS plug into it and so they test it by using it and all of those groups have more testers too.

010620 (wednesday)

8:54am

More ASP.NET Web Forms, whoo!

10:41am

Web Forms Security. Eek!

010621 (thursday)

We decided to leave our bags with the bell captain. I had reservations about doing it because of the lackluster service we had recieved from the hotel up until that point, but I did anyway.

Bleh, I'm tired. I'll do this later...

* links to pictures I took

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Malachi B-J Brown malachus+spencerandbrown@gmail.com