I've been, since this morning, at the Centro de Congressos de Lisboa attending the Microsoft's TechDays. And the first day as passed.
Keynote
The day started with the Abertura Solene and the best description that I can give to this session is: Bla..Bla..Bla..Bla, nothing of technological interesting. After that I've attended the keynote. It had some interest, specially because of Nuno's review of Mix08, which he attended. Also, in the keynote, I came aware that already are portuguese companies developing in Silverlight version 1 and 2 (two demos were presented). That's always good to now :)
Some numbers
- 2300 Attending
- 500 Students
- 30 Expositors
- 140 Sessions
- 30 Hands-on-Labs
- 25 Foreign speakers
MOB02 - Sync Framework: Optimizações em Cenários Online, Melhorias em Cenários Offline e de Roaming e Colaborações entre Dispositivos, Serviços e Aplicações (link)
I must say that this was the most interesting session that I saw today. I've left it with the conscience that I've learned something and useful. The Sync Framework has numerous scenarios that could be applied, specially in the offline client side. I'm not going to explain it here (probably in a future post) but definitely I'm going to play with it. Also a word about José António Silva (see here and here). He was good in the explanation and in the demos. But he got a little bit distracted with the time, if you now what I mean :)
VST02 - Boas Práticas na Utilização do Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (link)
This was the Tiago's presentation and, of course, I'm not going to say anything bad about it. (Man...he's my boss!) Hands off...the best presentation ever...in the world...and in the universe (Tiago, I consider the 10€ debt to you paid! :)). Now in a more serious tone, he talked about the Team Foundation Server and how to use it. Unfortunately few portuguese companies are using this fantastic product. But Tiago covered very well the basics and explained the definitions for work items, process templates, check-in and so on. Also he covered how to upgrade from 2005 version to the 2008. For the end he talked about some partners applications that extend the TFS use to Outlook, Word and Excel that enrich the user experience (TeamCompanion, TeamSpec and others).
INT05 - Utilizar o BizTalk Server como Enterprise Service Bus (link)
This was the most specific session for me and for the work that I'm doing recently, and I really wanted to go. Jota really knows about BizTalk. He covered the ESB definition and how the market evolved to reach it. Then he explained why Microsoft built the ESB Guidance. Simply, because they didn't had any product that covered the ESB definition. Although this project could be found in the CodePlex site, it already reached the final and last stage. Probably we'll hear more about ESB and BizTalk in the Oslo context.
Basically, the ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions. Key features are:
- Dynamic services invocation
- Itinerary processing
- Unified exceptions handling
- Management portal
- Governance
- Re-usable pipeline components
The ESB Guidance is only available on top of BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The most enthusiastic, for me, is that I can have a complete loosely-coupled environment. Let me explain: in BizTalk he have to configure Send Ports foe each location that we want to send a specific message. Then it's bounded to the orchestration (or subscribes to the MessageBox). That's tight! With the ESB Guidance there are no send ports. The destination is invoked dynamically. The service that corresponds to the location is discovered using UDDI. This is a very simplistic explanation and I hope that Jota could forgive me if I wrote something stupid :)
DEV06 - ADO.NET Entity Framework e LINQ To Entities (link)
Final session of the day. I'm used to listen to Luís Falcão because he was my teacher in ISEL. I had some classes with him but specially he (along with Paulo Pereira) guided me, João Manso and Pedro Rainho in our final project.
He gave a very detailed explanation around Entity Framework with examples that focused the most common cases. Simply, the Entity Framework allows us to build another abstraction layer upon our database layer. Also we can model it to reflect a more object-oriented structure, including inheritance that doesn't exists in the relational database (everything is generated). On top of that we can use Linq...and you have a very cool data access layer :)
And that's it. Expect my day #2 review tomorrow.
Until next time ;)
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