CurtBlog : TechEd

Enterprise Library thoughts

skills0 — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:03:00 GMT

I spent some time yesterday catching up with Billy Hollis. Billy is the Nashville Regional Director and I first met him while at my last job in Nashville before moving to Chicago. We talked a bit about the new Enterprise Library as Billy works a bit with the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft. I personally find that for most applications, the new EL is a bit overengineered and it takes a bit of a learning curve to get up and running with the new app blocks. Definitely not as simple as the old Application Blocks, although maybe that's good. But sometimes simple is better. Billy is continuing to refine what he calls the Composite pattern for Smart Clients, where you have a main exe shell that takes care of basic plumbing like security, logging, tracing, context. etc. This exe then can load other assemblies on the fly, depending on the user's needs and security profile. I was struck by how similar this idea is to one that Jon Rauschenberger has been thinking about for one of our clients. In addition, the Patterns and Practices group is working on their own Composite Application Block, currently up on GotDotNet Workspaces. So it seems that people are pushing the envelope enough with Smart Clients that it is time to start thinking about more extensible architectures.

The Guthrie sessions

skills0 — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:27:00 GMT

Well, as usual Scott Guthrie gave a very compelling 2 sessions on ASP.NET 2.0 here at TechEd yesterday. Now I've seen a lot of this stuff before along the way, but it was still pretty incredible to watch what he accomplished in just a couple hours. Starting from a completely blank solution, he built a web app including:

Datagrid bound to a custom business object, going to a details screen with editing
SQL based output caching
A complete login system including login screen, status, custom message based on login user and new user wizard (these are all new controls in v 2)
Role based authorization, including page customization
Drag and drop webparts
Localization

That's just part of it. Also demoed the new validation built into the IDE, allowing you to target either browser or spec (XHTML, 4.01, etc)
and have intellisense change in the aspx code view to only show the supported client-side script, events, controls, etc. that are supported.
Also can check for disability compliance.

This morning he also demoed default focus at the form or panel level, as well as scrollbar position memory on postback that can work separate from
SmartNav, as well as client callbacks for doing AJAX style stuff like filling in a treeview on the fly when you have a lot of data. The cool thing is
this all works not just in IE, but also in Firefox, Safari, etc. Any number of these features would take 2 days to a week or more in the current
1.1 platform. It's going to be cool to see what is possible with this release, it's a big jump forward in functionality and productivity.

TechEd Day 1

skills0 — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:37:00 GMT

I think the day 2 keynote is going to be a bit more interesting than day 1, at least we're hoping so. Samantha Bee from the Daily Show is here for both keynotes doing a spoof called The Techie Show. Some pretty good moments this morning. I got to attend one session by Steve Schwartz today that was pretty good. Other than that I took a nap and then I've been tweaking stuff for the demos.

It's been crazy

skills0 — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 10:57:00 GMT

Haven't had much time to post due to work being crazy. We are helping with the Tuesday keynote demos at TechEd. I did get to go out to Microsoft for a couple days a few weeks ago. It's always a combination of stress and excitement there, stress because you work hard and things change and excitement because there are a lot of smart and interesting people that work there. Anyway, I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Orlando to start getting set up for the event. We have to get some computers set up, rehearse some things, etc. I'm not presenting, I just helped a lot with developing some of the demos. I've never been to TechEd, so should be interesting although PDC would probably be more my cup of tea. I've been using Visual Studio .NET beta 2 exclusively for these demos, along with the latest version of SQL Server 2005 and some other beta stuff. It's frustrating, because there is a lot of really cool stuff to work with and some great new features, but it's still pretty buggy in spots for a beta 2. Other stuff works great. It's going to be a good release, the new toolbars feature in Windows Forms is really interesting and lets you do a lot of stuff quickly that used to take forever.