Today is the last leg of a total of four stations of this year's Big>Days (Helden von Heute) event from Microsoft Austria. I am speaking in the developers track on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) with Visual Studio Team System (and beyond) together with Georg Drobny from MS Consulting Services. We only have seventy minutes to get this topic across, which really is a challenge when covering such an important topic. But so far, we managed to overrun our alotted time only very little. Let's see how it works out today.

It's been quiet on this blog recently, one reason being that it is conference season again. Last week, I was in Munich for VSone, where I did three talks:

• LINQ to SQL
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services

At this very moment, I am at the airport in Frankfurt waiting for my flight back from the ready.for.take.off Visual Studio 2008 / Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 launch event here in Germany. It was the biggest developer event in Germany so far (7000+ conference participants), and Microsoft gave away quite a nice package of software: VS Standard, TFS with one CAL, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with 5 CALs plus a voucher for SQL Server 2008 that will be available later this year.

I was staffing ATE (Ask the Experts) at this event, initially for IIS7. However, we were very pleasantly surprised that the attendees showed great interest in TFS / VSTS, so I switched duties to that area (VSTS / TFS is a growing business for me as I do training and consulting for those products). Hopefully this free license will trigger more adoption because Team System is such a great tool!

TechEd Developers 2007 is over, and before moving on (and flying back to snow in Austria), here is the list of sessions I attended this year:

• TLA201 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
• OFF401 - .NET Developers Advanced Introduction to SharePoint 2007
• TLA324 - What's New in Team System for Software Testers
• SEC301 - CLR Security in .NET Framework 3.5
• DAT201 - Entity Framework Introduction
• WEB401 - Building Highly Scalable ASP.NET Web Sites by Exploiting Async Programming Models
• TLA304 - Building Services with the Service Factory: Modeling Edition
• DAT303 - Entity Framework: Application Patterns
• TLA305 - Continuous Integration With and Without Team System
• TLA307 - Improving Code Performance with VSTS 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
• DAT304 - Managing Unstructured Data in SQL Server 2008: Introducing the FileStream Datatype
• TLA403 - Loose Coupling in Practice: CAB in the Real World
• ARC401 - Designing High Performance, Persistent Domain Models
• TLA407 - Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies
• SBP307 - Modeling and Composition of Applications
• TLA319 - The Joins Concurrency Library
• TLA405 - Parallel and Async Functional Programming on .NET with F#
• WEB403 - Securing your High-Risk ASP.NET Web Applications - A Case Study

Compared to last year, I managed to attend more sessions, however, there were also more duds. The last session (WEB403) turned out to be the one that earned the raspberry this year (a close runner-up: TLA403). Coming out on top I decided to nominate three: OFF401, TLA307 and DAT303.

Tuesday June 19th I will be doing two sessions on IIS7 - administration and programmability.

Yesterday was the last day of VSone, the German .NET conference featuring almost all  well-known German speakers. As I had hinted at earlier, I did three talks there, and I still owe the audience of my VSTE DbPro talk a couple of resource links:

• Sachin Rekhi's blog
• Samples project for Microsoft Visual Studion Team Edition 2005 for Database Professionals
• A Security Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
• Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (if you weren't awake at this time in the morning <g />)

Michael Howard has all the links in this blog entry Online Security Sessions from TechEd IT Forum Available. Topics include: malware cleaning, UAC internals, social engineering, Vista kernel changes, Vista firewall and IPSec enhancements. Which reminds me that the post-conference DVDs should tip up in my mailbox rsn.

At next year's VSone in Munich (a German developer conference taking place in February), I will be doing three talks:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
• User Account Control (UAC) in Your Applications
• Advanced Code Access Security (CAS)

Two security topics, one team-development focused. See you in Munich!

Another week, another ATE (Ask the Experts) assignment. Aside from the keynote, I got around to watching to these sessions:

• ARC202: Design for Operations using VSTS and MOM 2005
• DAT309: SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: Integration with 2007 Office System
• WCL403: Windows Vista System Integrity Technologies
• CSI401: Microsoft.com Operations: Solutions for Highly Available and Secure Web Sites
• MGT310: Microsoft System Center Essentials (SCE): Technical Overview and Drilldown
• ARC301: Microsoft, Open Source and Interoperability
• INF303: How to Virtualize Infrastructure Workloads
• IAM403: Monitoring Active Directory (AD) Security with MOM 2005
• MGT320: Using Application Virtualization to Decrease Your Application Management TCO
• DAT401: SQL Server Always On Technologies: Disaster Recovery Strategies for Isolated Damage and Human Error
• SEC402: Securing your Certification Authorities (CAs) Private Keys
• WCL402: Windows Vista Kernel Changes
• CSI303: Building a Custom Log Analysis Solution with Log Parser 2.2 for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6
• DAT402: SQL Server 2005: Advanced Indexing Strategies
• MGT311: Performance Modelling: A Powerful Tool for Planning Deployments

The dud-of-the-week award goes to IAM403 which didn't live up to its level. Enjoyable as ever was Steve Riley in his security sessions. I didn't get around to watch "Windows Vista User Account Internals" by Mark Russinovich because of ATE duty, but will do so once the conference DVDs turn up in mail!

Another noteable tidbit from the "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" preconference session: the whitepaper Partitioned Tables and Indexes in SQL Server 2005.

Currently listening to the half-day preconference session "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" by Kimberly Tripp. Interesting tidbit for decreasing downtime for operational tasks (like create database or restore): Instant File Initialization. The figures really point to huge time savings! Quite a selling point for Enterprise Edition of SQL Server.

It's two weeks in Barcelona for me - and for IT Forum, I am really doing ask-the-experts for Visual Studio Team System!

Being ATE (Ask the Experts) means that you cannot go each and every session you would like to. As a reminder for myself here is the list of sessions I made it to:

• ARC305: Connected Systems Part 2: Logic
• OFF303: VSTO 2005 SE
• SQL402: Implementing the Service-Oriented Database Architecture with SQL Server
• ARC304: Connected Systems Part 4: Data
• ARC201: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for SOA
• DEV314: Building Rule-Based Systems in WF
• ARC302: Connected Systems Part 5: Identity and Access Management
• DEV322: Unit Testing Best Practices
• DEV360: Windows PowerShell
• DEV302: Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development
• DEV366: Boost Your Data-Driven Application Development using SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (Olymars)

The only session to be rated "eminently forgettable" was DEV322. Well, at least I got to read my emails... The top-rated session definitely was Bob Beauchemin's SQL402, which kind of was an interesting session to go to before ARC304. Great fun was Rob Miles' XNA talk (this session doesn't fit the pattern of my interest, does it?).

There are a couple of sessions I missed, but I'll watch those once the post-conference DVDs have landed.

From the nuggets page: Don't have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. If you haven't seen this yet, check it out!

I will be in Barcelona next week for Tech·Ed: Developers. You can get in touch with me at the Team System booth (Tuesday afternoon & Friday morning) of the Ask the Experts pavilion.

Update Actually, I am assigned to the ASP.NET booth as it turns out.

In case you were wondering why there is no new content on this blog - I am pretty busy, including preparing for my sessions at ADC06:

• Architecture Jumpstart 1 & 2
• Full-day VSTS / TFS Jumpstart

See you next week in Frankenthal / Germany!

Today, Daniel held a talk comparing AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET. He limited the scope to indirect frameworks, which means: those AJAX frameworks extend ASP.NET, and you don't necessarily need to know much about AJAX. On his Web site, you will find a comparison of AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET (direct as well as indirect).

As promised, here is the list of links / articles / samples that I used for preparing my talk "Build Provider in ASP.NET 2.0":

• Provider Toolkit
• Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Part I: Creating Custom Build Providers
• Jaw-dropping experience with custom build providers
• DLINQ ASP.NET Build Provider and DLINQ DataSource (Andres sent me a newer version for the May CTP)
• RSS Toolkit (sports two build providers, one for .rssdl, the other for .rss)
• Web Services Contract First: Drop Schema in app_code with a Custom Build Provider

Hope you will find those useful.

Half an hour ago, I completed my talk "Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0". As promised, here is the list of links to sites / documents that I used to prepare this talk & accompanying samples.

• Coming improvements to ASP.NET hosting of Windows Workflow Foundation after WF Beta 2.2
• Cutting Edge, Windows Workflow Foundation Part 1, Part 2
• Examples of using Persistence and Tracking in ASP.NET
• Using WF to run a page-flow
• Of course, http://wf.netfx3.com/ (Webcasts et al)

Also, see my last post on ASP.NET PageFlow CTP. This was the last part on "future technologies".

Update A foto from my talk on Monday (debugging a workflow in ASP.NET):

In less than ten days, this year's ASP Konferenz will take place in Burghausen, Germany. This time, I will be presenting four topics: Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0, Build Providers in ASP.NET 2.0, IIS 6.0 & ASP.NET 2.0 Secure Deployment and finally Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0.

Next week, I am doing the first in a series of security on-site briefings for Microsoft Austria. Mario has blogged about our TTT event in two entries Security Technical Briefings - Train-The-Trainer... a looong evening (Part 1) and Security Technical Briefings - Part 2. Thanks to the workshop character, no two briefings will be alike.

Will be there Wednesday & Thursday as ATE (Ask the Experts), so drop by in the experts zone and say hello!

Next week, I will be in Rosenheim, Germany for the ADC 2005. I'll be teaching the Visual Studio 2005 Team System Hands-on workshop (Tuesday as well as Friday), plus doing two talks during the main conference: IIS 7 and ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring. See you there!

The only way for me to not come home with tons of books is to give bookstores a wide berth. This is not an option at a PDC where so many new books are presented, and so many other ones are deeply discounted. Hence the list:

• Threat Modeling We got that book during Monday's Attack and Defense preconference session. Free, of course.
• Coder to Developer That was on my list for a (too) long time.
• Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation I didn't make it to any of the giveaway sessions, so I bought a copy.
• Programming Windows Presentation Foundation I wonder why I couldn't resist <g />
• Visual Studio Tools for Office Since I saw VSTO 2005 for the first time at an event in Redmond this year, I was looking forward to playing with it. Here's my ticket.
• The best of Verity Stob Special thanks to Gary Cornell from Apress for giving me a free copy! A real classic. Shame on you if you don't know Verity Stob, however, about everyone I told about the book so far was like "Verity Who?". You're definitely reading the wrong rags.
• Mastering Windows Server 2003 Affectionately know as "the Minasi", I simply could not pass up on that book on Friday - 42 USD! Compare that to the regular selling price of 55 Euro...

A hopefully luggable list of books...

The conference is over, and my brain is full - full of (semi)stupid ideas what I'd like to try with all those new technologies I saw this week. Task #1 for next week is to set up a VPC with Whidbey Beta 2, because I no longer have such an image, but need it for LINQ, Atlas et al. So plenty of good reasons to go back in time.

What did I see today? The obligatory session list:

• Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with Relational Data
• Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with XML Data
• Tips & Tricks: Developing and Testing with Virtual PC
• Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): Going Under the Hood to Understand the Architecture

The day started with Luca Bolognese's talk on DLINQ (Luca was PM on ObjectSpaces, so it is your guess...). His samples contained a few "references" to James Gosling, and it was a fun session to start with on the last day (whoever came up with deadlock victim had some humor too) Luca weighed in on the top three questions on DLINQ:

1. Do you support stored procedures?
2. Do you support database xyz?
3. How's your performance?

For #1, this is an unqualified yes. For #2, a provider needs to be written. And last but not least: at runtime, you only incur conversion to SQL, and the generation of objects. So no significant hit should be expected.

The day started out with one of those famous spoof videos - this time about a "variation" of Windows error reporting, dubbed WE-SYP (we share your pain). Error reporting tied to a - let's call it - "multimedia" chair. Fun to watch.

Right after that, Bob Muglia showed off what we can expect from Windows Server in the next couple of year. Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution was demoed together with Excel Services - impressive. TxF (transactional NTFS) wasn't any less exciting, just like the identity solutions - and, of course, IIS 7.0. We got the bits for the latter today. 

Sessions I attended today:

• Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo"): A Deep Dive into Best Practices Using the Windows Communications Foundation
• ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2)
• ASP.NET: A Sneak Peek at Future Directions in Web Development and Designer Tools
• Windows Vista & "Longhorn" Server: Under the Hood of the Operating System—System Internals and Your Application
• ASP.NET: Deep Dive into the ObjectDataSource Control

The under the hood session for Longhorn server had one interesting tidbit - they aim to require mandatory signing for kernel mode drivers on x64 platforms - bye bye kernel root kits!

Bradley Millington quite overshot his allocated timeslot for the ObjectDataSource control, but he covered interesting areas: filtering and master details,