Yet again, more non-breaking news form your TechEd 2005 blogger AC. Wireless connection is useless for me… part because of all the RF interference from the mass power running through this place, but also because I think I’m having issues. That’s ok though… nice being disconnected at times.
The day started off with a keynote that featured Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk 2006. The big news was that they are now all scheduled to go RTM the week of November 7, 2005. Also, they are including a nice migration assistant for those poor souls on Oracle ready to make the cost effective move to SQL Server. During the Keynote they also demo’d the Reporting Services and Report Builder features within SQL Server… VERY VERY COOL. And it’s all included in SQL Server FOR FREE (well, included as part of the product). That will surely some BI tools on the market… least I’d expect it to.
I had a great chat with Arpan as well as a few others in the Portals Cabana about all sorts of things… from MCMS 2002 to SharePoint to some projects I’m working on right now for MCMS that I’ve yet to share with anyone… well these guys are now aware of them. You’ll see more in the coming weeks (hopefully I can make progress by then & 2 weeks vacation at the end of June will help). Just watch my blog… that’s all I’ll say for now.
I also got a slick demo of the MCMS MetaLogix migration tool by Julian, the brains and founder of MetaLogix. Very cool cat… hope we can stay in touch! We had a great offline chat with some other folks as well.
At the end of the day, Heather & I sat with Todd Bleeker (yes, I finally met up with him, and it seemed like we saw each other every few minutes!) and worked through some SharePoint issues as well as each of us showing off some of our cooler latest SharePoint/MCMS warez.
Sessions:
I hit three sessions worth noting on Tuesday: ARC305 - Code Generation: Architecting a New Kind of Reuse by Scott Hansleman . In this he showed how his company uses XSD’s to do auto code & documentation generation… very cool stuff. I’m looking forward to digging into some of the stuff he talked about. Next was Arpan’s PRT337 - Best Practices for Designing and Building Content Management Server Solutions which I’ve already posted about. Finally, my last session was a birds of a feather session: BOF010 - Test-Driven Development is Design! where I was finally able to meet up with Darrell Norton (we traded emails all week). This session was absolutely incredible! A very healthy discussion which Darrell and Scott Bellware guided the topic into many areas… very cool. I learned a lot and even bough Dr. Neil’s book Extreme .NET (he was in attendence).
I’ll post some Day 4 stuff later (even though it’s Day 4 now… maybe tomorrow AM).