Alcides Fonseca

This last week was quite exciting! I didn’t have much time to post stuff as I wanted, most of the times it was from my TyTn, others from a borrowed-for-one-minute laptop. I also haven’t included photos so the posts might be hard to read, but if you are interested, you can check Flickr or PicasaWeb. This post contains my impressions and conclusions of this week that was pretty remarkable.

About the city

Barcelona is a pretty nice city, with a lot of monuments, especially Gaudi’s art and lots of gardens. Metros every 3 minutes and Starbucks every corner astonished me! There was also a great cultural variety and that special people at Ramblas.

About the guys

They were amazing company (excluding the fact they didn’t want me to return—) and pretty interesting folks! There was the goodies girl, the always-on-the-pc geek, the pervert , the Responsible guy and the girly socks fetishist.

About the event

Microsoft did in fact organized a pretty good event! No logistic problems, there was a lot of sessions at the same time, so I always went to those I like the most and in every slot, a HTC touch was offered. Too bad I wasn’t one of the lucky ones!

The presentations were pretty good and they were managing them according to our feedback. They did thought about the “users”! They also brought independent speakers (from dev, blogging and communities). They didn’t brought from the competition, but thinking again, it wouldn’t be such a good idea, as I have experienced.

About Microsoft

From TechEd I notice that Microsoft is really improving and upgrading into this Web2.0 age. Open APIs for live services! Popfly’s mashups for everyone! REST, MVC pattern, ActiveRecord, History support for AJAX and a bunch of things that developers want to use. They are also worried about Firefox and Safari support!

From what I learned from the experts they are also starting to worry about non-office end users (I might write about this soon) and worried about the experience they are giving the user.

About the After Event

One of the highlights of the event for me was the two nights we went out. The first one with all the MSPs from the EMEA and with some speakers and Microsoft staff. We went bowling and as we didn’t care too much about it, we learned a lot about other countries with each others. The second night was with all the Portugueses there and I met very interesting people and even from Coimbra!

I really want to thank Microsoft for giving us this opportunity to improve both technical and personal experience. There aren’t that many companies offering this trips!

Opening up Windows Live Data & Protocols

Windows live is now releasing some APIs, for now IM control and Presence messenger, Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Spaces Photos. They are also offering developers free Silverlight Streaming at 1.4 TB per second. Wow!

They also revealed some more numbers, as the 2 billions of photos there are in Windows Live Spaces, and they want people to start to move from Flickr to there. Yeah, right…

There is a WebDAV support for Photos that is very cool for desktop applications, but when it comes to webservers, you must stream what you get from the API. It sucks in terms of memory and bandwidth limits! I wish a REST approach was also used…

Windows Live Photo Gallery had both Windows Live Spaces and Flickr support that is a really nice thing, it shows that they-re not afraid of the competition and I haven’t found the trick that is making them so confident in their product!

There is also a API for getting (and modifying) Windows Live Contacts in a way that social networks like Hi5 and so stop asking for our live credentials to import our friends contacts. However they made the allow panel with such an hard security (like warnings and stuff) that makes users suspicious about services (and forget if you have no SSL!). I believe this is a issue they should think of, but not as much as they did! It will make people not to do mashups as they want them to do!

There are also weird Terms of Service that you should check up, one of the things is that if you allow sign up you must have a revoke link! Pretty good hein?

The next release of ASP.NET

This session sucked pretty much. Matt Gibs just announced stuff that already had been spoken of in other presentations. First, Astoria, the new project that serves webservices as a RESTful API. Pretty thing, but should already be done for a long time, just like MVC framework! There have been others for years and only now Microsoft got in this web2.0 thing following Rail’s innovation. At least it supports both static and dynamic languages, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see a “IronRails” coming up really soon. Another thing they copied from it was the Scaffolding. Yes, now ASP.NET also has dynamic data controls, the Scaffold from Rails.

There are also real new stuff: you can interact Silverlight controls, that is pretty hard in Flash+other language. Another good thing is the history control so that users don’t blow everything up when using the back button on the browser.

Blogging Panel

Tom Mertens gathered up Clemens Vasters, Patrick Lowendahl, Patrick Tisseghem and Tom Raftery on stage to talk about blogs.

Well, I have been to a few discussion panels about blogs and I don’t ever see the point on discussing it. In the end I don’t learn anything new and everyone agrees on pretty much the same thing. This one was no exception… Maybe their target were developers who don’t blog, but those wouldn’t be there in the first place.

Building Applications using the Identity Metasystem Security Model

Vittorio really knows about this stuff. It was a Q&A session where the audience asked about some problems implementing this kind of security model (and using CardSpace) and some issues it might raise. I really learned a lot about security models on this session. If you ever have the opportunity to attend one of his presentations, don’t miss it!

SOAP/WS-* and REST: Complementary Communication Styles

First there were the WS-* over the SOAP Protocol, and everyone was happy. Then, the RESTafarians came up presenting this new simple way of using webservices over the web using its standard. The beauty of REST stands in the syntax used, that is the HTTP itself. Using HEAD, POST, PUT, GET and DELETE associated with the URI and everything is in place.

Well David Chappel believes that the battle between the two should end and they should be both used when needed. REST guys are more younger and inexperienced in corporate business than he is, and so he defends that a corporate level it’s pretty hard to implement everything in REST, specially synchronization between various services, and SOAP will still be used for more complex systems.

Improving Software Safety and Reliability – Applying Ergonomics to the User Interface

Chad Hower made this traditional usability presentation where he went through a lot of examples where bad design has lead to some minor and major problems. One thing that he focused is that one simple click every hour in a large company, when summed all up together, the time/money thrown away is too big.

Building Fun, Cool Applications with Popfly

I had tried Yahoo Pipes a while ago and I didn’t find it easy enough for simple users to use it. Well, Dan Fernandez did a demo how to make widgets and gadgets (isn’t it the same thing after all?) with Popfly and integrate it in your space. I found the interface (built on silverlight) pretty cool and intuitive, but the notion of blocks and how they should connect to each other is too easy for me and too complicated for regular users. I find it however a good step in bringing the power of programming and semantics to them, but is only the beginning of a great path.

Communities? Can they really help my business, my day-to-day job, and my career?

Bart Martens has been working for a long time as a manager of a big IT community and has help several others to start and grow up. He focused the importance of sharing knowledge and taking the opportunity that communities give you to get a fast answer to some common problems.

Although I find him a great person, I guess the presentation wasn’t particularly well done in the perspective of making geek IT guys to gather more and take advantage of that. He focused a bit on managing communities, but only a few in the audience even participated on those.

A developer diary on implementing Windows CardSpace

Dominick Baier did a great presentation on a subject that matters to me: Identity 2.0 focusing (of course, this is a MS event) on cardspace technology. Cardspace works a wallet where you have your cards you need to sign in your services. He showed a bit how to make a small web application that used Cardspace as login. However, as he suggested, you can’t make this direct transition. You have to support both Cardspace and traditional login/password system. Well, I guess I already heard this one for OpenID.

At the end of the session, I talked to Vittorio Bertocci about this and as cardspace is user-centric and openID is based on independent providers. At the end he agreed that for now the best authentication for my blog, forum, website or something with a “normal” level of security is OpenID. He also mentioned something I wanted to build that is alreay done on signon.com. Another thing I think cardspace lacks is the capability of loading a card from a server location (protected of course!).

Silverlight, ASP.net and web services in IronPython and IronRuby

Following latest presentation, Mahesh this time focused the development of websites using IronPython. First we had a silverlight presentation made using IronPython to add handlers to XAML parts. Then we created a ASP.NET project but instead of C# or VB.net, we used IronPython (Ruby is now available for download) and it really makes your life simpler! C# guys, please try IronPython or Ruby for a week and then you’ll change for sure!

Understanding Software + Services

David Chappell shared with us his vision on the close future on the informatics. He believes software will leave single-tenant (where they are local and expensive) to multi-tenant (in the cloud and cheaper due to flexibility of shared resources). He also raised this question that it’s to me the main issue in this transition: What about trust?

Single-tenant has the major advantage that you develop for only one platform that you’ll manage for sure. It gives you more control of the environment where it will run and also it will be easier to change or add features. Users are in the need for fast updates of the product is this is the answer for that. The dynamic capacity is the key for this change that decreases the costs of software. For example, the Christmas shopping boom may be handled dynamically.

There are already some examples like EC2 (computing), S3 (storage), salesforce and dynamics (CRM applications) and a lot more. He focused a bit on Microsoft that is moving gradually with Dynamics being hosted on premises, partner hosted or Microsoft hosted (Dynamics Live).

He also highlighted Salesforce.com, a CRM that is now SaaS.

IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET

After spending more time in getting from the hotel to the event than getting from Lisbon to Barcelona and losing the first session slot, I attended Mahesh Prakriya’s presentation on the Dynamic Languages .NET supports, focusing IronPython (being my language of choice for now!).

He started to introduce Dynamic Languages that have no strict definition, it’s kind of a intuitive thing developers know how to distinguish, but is about types, being interactive, metaprogramming, etc… but is NOT about typed vars as many may think! Well, IronPython is the implementation of the Python language on the .NET framework, but still supporting (almost) all the standard modules. He showed us a bit of its internals and it’s based on “how do I do this?” and learns it, so it has never to research it again. That’s maybe why IronPython is the fastest implementation of Python (even over CPython and Jython)!

The session had a lot of simple demos that showed how the language has a REAL integration with the framework. First he imported MSAgent (That little merlin 3d guy you might know from Microsoft Office) and made him wave, think and move. He also created this form and made it inkable (he was using a tablet) and a minute after it was reading what he had wrote (using Microsoft Speech). All of this in a dozen of lines and on the fly! Makes you rethink about C#, doesn’t it?

What about tools? Well it will be available a SDK for IronPython (no out-of-the-box, sorry…) for both VS2005 and VS2008. It will generate Winforms and WPF (2008 only) code, that is a great advantage! If you want more on this you can check Aaron’s blog. Another thing that is really interesting is debugging that is pretty difficult in standard python (that means you’re only using print statements). VS allows you to use breakpoints, check the stack and variable spaces! It even includes a console for your interactive plays! And guess what I am really missing when working outside VS? Intellisense! Python with everything I love!

Let’s get back to demos! This time guess what? XNA! That’s right, pretty cooler than PyGame in my humble opinion! With some short code, we added asteroids to the default demo in the SDK! Unfortunately, it will only run on Windows and not on Xbox360… Yet! Another demo was using Microsoft Robotics, that with a simples form, controlled the robot via bluetooth and all in IronPython!

In the end, we had the experience of a real developer, Michael Foord, that developed a kind of Excel software with a console and a code area where PowerUsers could develop their own stuff. Was pretty good the example that this kind of language is being really used and not only as some proof of concept or for some kids to play around. Really enjoyed the session in its whole!

Why Software Sucks?

David Platt really knows how to get you focused on his talk. For 45 minutes he talked about what it’s wrong with software development right now! People who build software are pretty different from those who use it and this tend to generate some conflicts. In general, users don’t want this or that feature, don’t want it to use the latest technology, but to just do the job! He showed a kind of examples that software didn’t helped people and may be improved to solve people’s problems.

He gave us some advices: Adding a “virgin” to the design team, based on the idea that “blindness improves your vision”; Breaking the convention, but only when its really needed; Don’t letting edge cases complicate the mainstream; Instrumenting—carefully.

Pretty astonishing presentation and I hope to hear him soon! And maybe read his book with the same title.

Improvements in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET compact Framework 3.5 for Windows Mobile developers.

This presentation was a roadmap over the new stuff Microsoft is launching right now that affects Windows Mobile development! Visual Studio 2008 is coming really soon and .Net compact framework has reached its 3.5 version! 3.5 is about distributed and data aplications! Despite not having real performance improvements, it has far more capabilities! It includes 90% of System.Net and System.Data, LINQ and WCF!

You can have a few LINQ stuff, XML and datasets, but unfortunately no Linq2SQL due to the limitation of RAM in mobile devices! Some stuff that users asked for are included in this version, just like sound APIs, compression and device security and certificate managers. From the tools point of view, it includes unit testing and the 3.0 version of the emulator that can be used together with the Managed CoreCon framework to create different emulator controlled environments! Pretty cool stuff that I liked a lot!

A traditional issue with mobile computing is the wireless connectivity. If you have a GPRS or 3G connection, each time you change your cell to another access point, the connection brokes and a new IP is given. To solve the problem connecting applications with webservices, we now have ActiveSync with a Exchange server over email (using SOAP). In my opinion this is just a work around, not a real solution that I might agree with Vitor Santos that is IPv6. But is that time now?

I found out another cool stuff is that there are already asp.net server pages running on mobile that is quite an impressive thing, but not pretty much usable. A cool website to check when I get back home is OpenNETCF.org.

Microsoft Student Partner Presentation

As a MSP I had to skip the normal presentations to attend an interesting one with all the MSPs in EMEA that were in the conference. The program managers did their usual talks that I’m not a fan of and then included some testimonials from MVPs and guys who did the internship in Redmond. I really like to learn from them!

In the second half of the session, They invited a panel of (the best) speakers in the events to answer some of our questions. It was pretty cool to listen to them about stuff that matters to us (and also joking aroung!). I got to know that Mahesh thinks that in the near future Dynamic Languages will be more and more used by .NET developers and a language with future may be the one with the best of Python and Ruby together.

After that I’ve talked to David Platt and Rob Miles that I find very inspiring and shared some thoughts with me on the future of technology. I’d like to highlight that Platt believes that Computer Science and Engineering are breaking apart. As engineering not being science, but what technology can do to solve real live problems, it is strongly important to pass that idea to students.

Later we all gone to bowling, a nice way of socializing with other students, program managers and, guess what, some speakers! It was nice to meet students from all around Europe and learn stuff that is going on there. I also had the pleasure to know Jennifer, the responsible for the program all over the world and she is indeed a enthusiastic person that I loved to met! And she listened to my suggestions and thoughts on the presentation! It’s really good to know they care about what you think!

Keynote

TechEd started today with a keynote by S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division of Microsoft. He focused that in the next year, MS will focus on getting designers and developers working together. Another good thing they want to work on is the community. He wanted every developer that asks a question on the forums to have a question in matters of hours of two day maximum. Good news in this area: Microsoft is launching a wiki for users to contribute for documentation and a code gallery so you can share your code samples. Looks like Redmond has been learning from opensource’s documentation.

He also talked about technologies starting with the Visual Studio 2008 that, apart from features like LINQ, includes built-in support for AJAX and Javascript as well (intellisense!) and it is possible to debug it on both Firefox and IE. Other thing it was cool to see was WPF 3D stuff running inside Microsoft Office that might be useful for a lot of companies.

It was shown a video showing that Microsoft is using Visual Studio 2008 tools to build the release of visual Studio itself. They showed like it was some fantastic and innovating step, but perl6 and pypy are examples of that (at least!). However it was a good prove that it worked with a large company like Microsoft, so it was a kind of test.

Regarding partners (to which the event is targeting), they are allowing them to see the source code of the Visual Studio IDE (with a non disclosure agreement) and allowing them to develop using VS to non-Microsoft platforms (Mono?). I wonder when will this come to the general public…

Dan Fernandez did this awesome demos of the power of Visual Studio! First he opened the IDE with World of Warcraft inside it, then he visually added a dialog and then he coded in LUA and guess what? Visual Studio had intellisense for that language! He then played some WoW to test what he had coded. And afterwards he even opened emails and blogs inside WoW, so you don’t have to leave it!

Moments after, when targeting the enthusiastic users, he revealed the VS support for Popfly, including a special explorer that allows you to drag and drop your Popfly project and even your friends’. And by the way, Popfly is sooo mcuh cooler than Y! pipes! Mainly because it’s silverlighted.

Together Developer and Designer

The session starting by knowing the differences between the work of a developer and of a designer. Only about 5% of the audience was a designer, but it’s nice they’re coming up to this kind of events. They showed us their project: the French Euronews player that looked nice indeed! They showed us then the 5 possible scenarios for developing a simple video player concept. There were a lot of solutions to get the Expression Design design and the Visual Studio code together. The “Integrator” used was Blend and they showed us a lot of techniques. From the “quick and dirty” button on top with opacity 0, to templates and brushes they showed a lot possible solutions, the advantages and disadvantages. For me it’s pretty clear that this is a area not yet mature and I hope to see Expression 2 and VS 10 working perfectly fine!

Building Great Web Experiences with Silverlight 1.0

Silverlight 1.0 has no managed code yet, so everything must be created using declarative language XAML and event handlers with Javascript. Well the session was pretty much the basics of this. Creating a rectangle in XAML and giving it some live with transforms and mouse events. The presenter was quite nice, but the content of the session was too superficial. I also had the idea that everything he did, I could do with javascript + canvas element in HTML. The advantage of Silverlight that is the video and multimedia wasn’t shown.

This sunday was spent visiting the city. Instead of a short tour in the touristic bus, we decided to walk and use Barcelona’s public transportation system (metro every 3 minutes!). In the metro ads, I found out that another event was happening here: The manga festival! And I found a Ichigo Cosplay leaving the metro! I wish I could be there!

We visited a lot of monuments like the olimpic village, industrial park, sagrada família, the “Spanish people”, park de Montjuic, and a lot of stuff. You should follow our photos (links soon). I noticed a lot of art stuff around, so if you have interest for this, you should visit this city.

We also tried to hack macdonalds wifi with no success for now while Miguel and Nelson went to FCBarcelona’s match.

Just a short note about a long day that I loved!

As I wrote before, this week I will be at Microsoft’s TechEd for developers in Barcelona for this whole week! You should expect daily updates on both the personal side and also on the topics focused on the talks I will attend.

This adventure started yesterday when Miguel and Susana caught me up at Coimbra and we drove to Alcobaça, Miguel’s hometown where we hung out in some nice small cafes and played some Chinese shadows on the Monestary. Late that night we continued our trip to the TechEd to Lisbon where we crashed at Miguel’s. This morning we woke up really early (so almost no sleep, and I slept on the floor, something I really missed and I recomend you all to try! It’s good for your spine and backs!).

We met there the other MSPs with who we will be sharing the trip: André(who drunk beer as breakfast), Bruno and Nelson. Moments later we also met the guys from the MLDC who shown to be really cool and will be sharing the flight and hotel with us. The time to fly had come and in my way to the gate I found João, who will be attending Web2.0 Berlim where I also wanted to be. Unfortunately no cool company offered me that trip…

The flight was short and okay and some minutes later we found ourselves in the hotel checking in(that appears to be in the opposite side of Barcelona where TechEd is being held). We then decided to take a random walk around the city. Barcelona’s public transportation system is pretty good and in one bus we found ourselves in the Diagonal. From there we walked to the Ramblas, a nice street where there were a lot of small shops and cultural animation. People playing statues, grinch or even famous people gathered a circle of people from the crowd (when I write crowd, you should read thousands of people walking by the streets!). One thing that I also noticed about one year and an half ago when I passed through Barcelona was the fact that the cultural variety is enormous and it makes you want to interview everyone you meet and learn their story.

After lunch we went to Starbucks, a shop where I always wanted to visit (since there aren’t any in Portugal), and there are at least three here! Unfortunately the WiFi was not free as it is in the USA and one thing I found interesting is that you need a security code to access the bathrooms that is given in your ticked only when you buy something! After that we continued walking and we saw a lot of architectonic monuments by Gaudi which I intent to revisit tomorrow together with more monuments.

One thing that made my day worth it was the books I found on this statue that I guessed to be book crossing, and they really were! I took one, in English, that I wanted to read since I was a kid, a true classic: “The Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was lucky to found a bookcrossing (we don’t find this in Coimbra) and a English book and one I wanted to read! We also found other books around town. It seems that the IV Encuentro Bookcrossing is happening here until 4th November. I find this concept interesting and I will contribute once I go back home.

It was a extasing day both the anxiety and the excitement from being here and having a great time with such cool people. I also thank Microsoft (and the Student Partner) for giving me this opportunity to visit such a nice place and be part of this great conference. Other companies should follow their example and give this kind of opportunities to students!

Thanks to the MSP program I will be attending Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 from 5 to 9 of November in Barcelona, Spain.

Microsoft’s European biggest conference will join over 4000 developers and presentations are organized in the following areas:

• Architecture


• Business Intelligence


• Database Development


• Designer


• Infrastructure for Developers


• Mobile & Embedded


• Office System


• Security


• SOA and Business Processes


• Tools & Languages


• Unified Communications


• Web Development


• Windows and Frameworks

I am very enthusiastic about this, since is the first international event I am attending and I am very interested in both the technical subjects as also the people behind it. And I will have the company of another four MSPs: Susana, Bruno, André and Nelson. I will keep you posted on TechEd ;)