Tudor Vlad’s Blog

a.k.a. the fun part.

Friday 10 November 2006

After TechEd close, we decided to visit the city. Our first objective was Plaça Espagna. It was a very beautiful place with lots of fountains, two towers – The Venetian Towers – and a palace. In front of that palace there were another series of fountains that sprayed the water on the rhythms of symphonic music.

Although we waited more than an hour, the spectacle did not start. So we decided to head towards the harbor to eat.

Beside the 8 of us, Christian mayer with a colleague and Adi Stoian joined us. We found a nice restaurant for dinner. Pretty much everybody ordered fish specialties, myself ordering a plateau of calamari, squids and shark. The shark was the best!

Saturday 11 November 2006

This was to be the last day in Barcelona. We all agreed to visit the City. unfortunately for Todi, he had work to do. I joined Alex G and decided to take the Red Tour through the city and the rest decided to head towards La Rambla.

We went to Sagrada Familia to take the bus. The first stop was in a park and then we went to Park Guell. Again, it was extraordinary!

Next we decided to stay in the bus until the FC Barcelona Stadium stop. On the way we passed a couple of monasteries. the Royal Palace and the Campus.

When we reached Camp Nou, we learned it was closed because the team was practicing. So we entered the store and bought some official equipment

After that we switched the Red Tour with the Blue Tour.Some photos:

Our last stop was La Rambla were we met the others.
You can find the photos here

TechEd-Developers TechEd-Developers

a.k.a the real stuff.

These two days are the actual reason I was in Barcelona. But let’s start with a little TechEd info for start:

Tech·Ed: Developers is Microsoft’s premier EMEA conference designed to provide developers with deep dive technical training, information and community resources focusing on building software solutions with Microsoft development tools for current and soon-to-be-released products and technologies.

That means valuable information for a software developer.

Each day has a number of 5 session slots, at prefixed hours. For each of these session slots, a delegate could select 1 of ~15 presentations that were taking place in parallel. Because it was physically impossible to attend more presentations, I had to be very careful to select the most valuable session for me.

Thursday 9 November 2006

DEV306 Using the .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework with Relational Data

Anders Hejlsberg

Thu Nov 9 09:00 – 10:15

Database-centric applications have traditionally had to rely on two distinct programming languages: one for the database and one for the application. In this talk Hejlsberg, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of the C# language will introduce LINQ to SQL, a component of the LINQ project designed to help integrate relational data and queries with C# and Visual Basic. LINQ to SQL enables developers to express queries and updates in terms of their local programming language without sacrificing the server-side execution model of today’s high-performance SQL-based approaches. Using these advances, database queries that previously were stored as opaque strings now benefit from static type checking, CLR metadata, design-time type inference, and of course IntelliSense. LINQ to SQL also supports a rich update capability that lets you save changes to an object graph back to the database using optimistic concurrency or transactions.

Anders is one the designers of the C# language and currently he is working on LINQ. He had a great presentation. If you can find the ppt on the site, read it!
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DEV301 Microsoft .NET Micro Framework

Chad Hower

Thu Nov 9 10:45 – 12:00

Using only a few hundred kilobytes of RAM and an inexpensive processor, the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework platform allows developers to build applications for the smallest of devices. These devices are typically constrained by cost, memory, processor, and/or power consumption. This platform is currently used in Smart Watches for MSN Direct, and is planned for Windows Vista SideShow displays, as well as an upcoming version of Microsoft TV Foundation Edition.

I was particularly interested about the .NET Micro Framework because it is a project that is meant to give programmers the power of .NET on embedded devices. Unfortunately the Chad was unable to bring the SumoBot with him because it had suffered an accident. Non the less, every engineer who likes .NET should read about this.
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DEV320 What’s new in Visual C++ ‘Orcas’

Steve Teixeira

Thu Nov 9 13:30 – 14:45

Visual C++ Orcas enables developers to easily create applications that look great and run optimally on Windows Vista. Come and learn the full scope of new features and functionality in Visual C++ Orcas and how you can leverage Visual C++ Orcas to build the next generation of great applications.

This was a relaxing presentation, also interesting and I had the chance to see Steve in person. He’s in my blogroll.
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DEV326 Not Faster Processors, but MORE Processors

Carl Franklin

Thu Nov 9 15:45 – 17:00

The trend in PC performance is no longer to make revolutionary advances in CPU speed, but to add more processors to a single CPU, which means multi-threaded programming skills will continue to be highly valued. .NET 2.0 simplifies making asynchronous calls in Windows applications to the point where mere mortals can handle multi-threaded calls with only a few lines of code. In this session, we will write asynchronous code both inside a Windows application and also in a Component.

This was the last session I could attend that day. Carl was another person I wanted to meet (I listen to his podcasts), but I was a little disappointed because he used VB instead of C#. Even though I never wrote a line of code in VB, it was relatively easy to understand, but being so late in the day I was tired and was unable to fully digest the facts. Non the less, this guy is cool.
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After that all the Student-Partners headed to a special SP meeting where Caroline Phillips, some SPs and Devs held some special presentations for us. We were 100+ persons from all over Europe and maybe Africa and Middle East.

Then we went to a gaming arena where we were split into teams and played real life “Counter Strike”. It was awesome. The team was composed of us , Christian Mayer – a Romanian that lives in Germany who is a Student Ambassador – and an attractive Greek lady called Felvi. Good job, Todi

We also took some group photos and returned to the hotel.

Friday 10 November 2006

ARCWD04 Introducing the Service Factory

Don Smith

Thu Nov 9 15:45 – 17:00 , Fri Nov 10 09:00 – 10:15

The Service Factory is a cohesive collection of various forms of guidance that have been build with the primary goal of helping you build high quality connected solutions in a more consistent way with less effort. In addition to the forms of guidance you may have already seen from the patterns & practices team, a new form of guidance called a Guidance Package is used to allow guidance to be automated from inside Visual Studio 2005 through the use of a wizard-based dialogs. This guidance can also be modified to fit the needs of a specific solution. This session will present the Service Factory, walk you through some common usage patterns, and discuss the development process and future of the Service Factory.

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DEV302 Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development

Rob Miles

Fri Nov 10 10:45 – 12:00

XNA represents a major milestone in the field of game development, bringing game creators a unified platform and the safety of managed code. It also greatly reduces the difficulties faced when starting out in game development, closing the gap between idea and working implementation. The recent release of XNA Express gives programmers a chance to get to grips with the XNA framework and use it to create content for both the PC and the XBOX 360.Beginning with an overview of the XNA platform and the XNA Express development tools, this demo packed presentation then moves into the ‘nitty gritty’ of game development using XNA, leading to a fully realised casual game running on an XBOX 360. Whether you are a seasoned games coder, or a programmer thinking of moving into game development this session will give you plenty of food for thought and information to get you started.

This session was of particular interest to me. I was always attracted by games, actually games brought me close to computers, and I heard about XNA. The presenter was Rob Miles, a British fellow with a British humor. I first saw him the previous day at the SP meeting and he “bribed” us to go to his presentation so we can hear his favorite joke.
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Between 13:30 and 14:45 I headed towards the Speakers Corner and saw some interesting stuff. The coolest thing was Powershell, the new cmd.exe. After that, I really would have wanted to attend his session.

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DEV358 New Cryptography: Algorithms, APIs and Architecture

Rafal Lukawiecki

Fri Nov 10 15:15 – 16:30

Are you still using DES, RSA, MD5 or SHA-1? Do you know how this might expose your company to a loss? Why is CAPI 1.0 being retired? Is the architecture of the new Open Cryptographic API for Windows (CNG) any better than CAPI 2? What is Suite-B? Do you realise that the next few years will see a dramatic replacement of those security fundamentals we used to silently rely on? These are some of the question we will answer in this information-packed and fast-paced level 300 session aimed Developers and Architects who are already familiar with basic cryptographic and security concepts. While we are not going to explain the inner workings of any of the covered algorithms, we will give you a good background to all the new ones, so that you can make better choices while designing security for your systems. Microsoft Windows Vista will be the first commercial operating system to include a full support for all of those innovations, closely followed by the “Longhorn” Server, so consider this as an opportunity to incorporate the awesome power of the recent developments in your software. For the curious, we may even tell you why we cannot tell you about Suite-A…

TechEd ended for me with this excellent presentation. Although I don’t know too much about crypto, Rafal made it very clear that there is no perfectly safe computer system. By the way, he and Anders were fighting for first place in the Speakers “marathon”, i.e. each delegate gave 3 marks to each presenter and based on that the top was made.
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Some other photos:

The link to this set of photos.

The rest of the evening and the last day: tomorrow.

I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend the TechEd 2006 Developers Conference, hosted in Barcelona, Spain. I say “incredible” because it was an invitation from Microsoft Romania to me and 6 other Student-Partners from across the country. So I’d like to thank Todi and all the other people that made this possible (you know who you are).

My Student-Partners were Alex Ghiondea, Alex Savu, Sorin Damian, Lucian Baciu, Mihai Tataran and Tudor Damian. Also Todi, the Microsoft Academic Program Manager for Romania was with us.

Because only Alex, Alex and Todi were from Bucharest, the rest of us had to travel to the capital. We all chose the train. It was a pleasant trip, during which I took these photos:

The scenery was extraordinary.

Tudy and I rallied with Lucian and Sorin, went to the hotel and then went out. The next day we all met at the airport and left for Barcelona. This was going to be my first flight. But it was excellent. We traveled with Lufthansa, the plane was a small one and it had quite a sprint when it started the take-off. We landed in Munchen and took a different flight to Barca.

This time, Alex Savu offered me the window seat and I took these photos:

This flight wasn’t that interesting at take-off because we were flying with a larger plane. I was fine, no flight sickness. We took our bags, split in 2 groups, took cabs and went to the conference to register and receive our badges. Some photos:

We arrived just in time for lunch, so..

In the first photo, from left to right: Ionut Balan (CHIP.ro), Mihai T, Alex S, Alex G.

In the next one: Alex, Alex, me, Lucian B and Todi.

Then we went to the hotel and checked in. Me, Alex S, Alex G and Sorin D went to visit the city, Sagrada Familia to be more specific. This is a temple designed by Gaudi. It was incredible! We stayed around 2 hours inside + 30 minutes in the museum and we probably saw 1/3 of the details.

After that we went to the conference, met up with other Romanians and went out for dinner:

Todi and Sorin D, Ciprian Jichici which was one of the TechEd Speakers (by the way, he did a great job, he’s one of the best speakers I know).

In the bottom pictures: Tudy, Alex g, Mihai T, Alex S, Aurelian Popa,… and in the next photo Adi Stoian, Zoli H, Bogdan M, …

So this was our first day in Barcelona. The rest …later.

Oh, by the way. The photos so far are here.