The trip on JetBlue wasn't too bad, the jet had very good leg room and arm room. Of course I didn't have anyone in the middle seat so it was a pretty comfortable flight for being cross-country. Sadly however of the 36 DirectTV channels, they only had NBC and FOX of the big network channels so I missed out on the Formula 1 race, atleast until I get home. Now for the technical stuff... 

Opening Keynote:

This keynote seemed to be mostly focus on the enterprise level. Going to a higher level of implementing software that enables the enterprise’s people. “People” are the where the real value of the enterprise lies. With the right software, there is no limit to what your people can do. With that, the focus was on enterprise level services like virtualization of computing resources and the tools to balance and mange these resources. It seems that simplifying the enterprise is this year’s focus at TechEd.

Next Generation Data Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext:

This session was very interesting to see. It was disappointing in that it was of the “look at this cool stuff that won’t be released for 1 to 2 more years” variety. None the less, much work is being done to create client side views of databases. The mindset is to change the methodology of programming from thinking of the physical database schema to that of a conceptual application level schema. Each application looks at the database in a different way and often that logic is left in obscure code logic which may be understood by one programmer who may someday leave the company. Since it is the application that is tying data together between tables, that schema information is not being kept in the database. Similarly, a developer must constantly join the same tables whenever they work with a common table such as always tying back to a contact table for people entries in other tables.

The Entity Data Model (EDM) creates entities or objects around the database schema and introduces Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Now database access can be written in an object (entity), using objects instead of using a completely different language (T-SQL) and doing late binding to reference the data. The entire database is wrapped into an object (along with each table) and provides the metadata allowing Intelisense and compile time error checking. This also allows code to finally be written in a completely data store independent fashion.

Here is a sample C# LINQ query.

var orders = from so in db.SalesOrder where so.OrderDate < date select so;

And here is a sample VB.NET query showing a join of entities:

Dim q = from emp As EmployeeRow In ds.Employee, c as ContactRow In ds.Contact where emp.HireDate > new DateTime(2003, 1, 1) andalso emp.EmployeeID = c.ContactID Select emp,HireDate, c.FirstName

SharePoint Services 3.0 And Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The next two sessions I attended were on the new version of SharePoint. A lot of work has been done on just about every area of the product. Flexibility, ease of set, UI experience, document management, collaboration has all been improved. Many new types have been added including things like a PowerPoint Slide library that looks like it could really be utilized by Round Table. Another key feature that could be utilizing in our up coming projects is that Windows Workflow Foundation is built into SharePoint allowing workflows to be defined and enforced by the new version of Office.

Much of the power lies in aggregation and search, available still only in the “Portal” version of SharePoint. The amount of services and features gained with SharePoint Server however is becoming much more enticing. There is an Excel Services web part that can read data directly from an excel file and display it using a “zero-footprint” browser, support for Reporting is also very nice. The Business Data Catalog allows the integration of other data stores and business line of processing systems to expose their information to all web parts in sharepoint.

More and more SharePoint looks like a direction that can handle the needs of the projects that are coming up.