Day Two At TechEd Europe

Today started off fresh with 2 Sharepoint sessions The first one was an introduction to Sharepoint 2010 for developers, and while I haven’t done any development on Sharepoint before, based on the feedback, it will be tons easier to do Sharepoint development with 2010. The second session on Sharepoint was somewhat relevant and somewhat a  miss. While it did provide some good information, there was not really anything new, if you had attended the first session.

During lunch, I had been invited to a lunch session by Microsoft Denmark on IIS 7.5. The speaker was  a real expert on the subject, Bernhard Frank. Very interesting and good  food, but had to cut the session short in order to make it to the next session.

Next was a presentation by Brian Harry about TFS 2010 and its new version control features. There are some real goodies coming ,, in 2010, and Brian demonstrated better branching and branch visualization, support for rollback and improved labeling. Very nice, and something I can really see the need for in my own organization.

I also attended a session on software architecture by Ralf Westphal. He discussed architecture at a high level, and you should not view the architecture as UML class diagram, layered architechture diagram or something like that. Instead he advocated functional  building blocks, or functional units as he called it; which recursively consists of yet another set of functional units. This way, you get a hierarchy of functional units from the one application, through synchronous components till methods in a class. While surely one of the most abstract talks today, I took some very good points with me from the talk.

Lastly today, there was an ASP .NET MVC2: “What’s new” session that I attended. It really competed with the “Pumping Iron” session (about IronRuby/Python), but as it turns out, that session was overbooked, so I made the right choice. There is some really great improvements in MVC2, which boils down to improving productivity on the framework. This means support for partial renderings based on invoking of controllers, and templated views. A cool demo was demonstrating the validation features, where you can define your validation rules in the model (as annotations out-of-the-box, but it’s extensible, so you can store your rules wherever you like). I think MVC2 might just be the release that is mature enough to be tried out on a real project – I am sure our frontend developers will love it.