Day started out kind of rough-- took my bus almost an hour to get to the convention center (LA Traffic), so I missed breakfast.  Luckily I got to my seat about 30 seconds before the keynote started.

 

Keynote was good.  Big news was the announcement of Windows Azure and the Azure Services platform.  This new cloud computing platform is quite ambitious, and totally game changing.  You can probably find much more about it just searching the web, but in a nutshell, it gives a developer a way of deploying a web application onto an almost infinitely scalable platform without all that infrastructure investment.

 

First breakout I went to was on "SharePoint Online: Extending Your Service".  So basically SharePoint Online is a hosted offering of SharePoint that sits on top of the Azure stack (see previous paragraph on infinite scalability).  The focus of this session was to delineate all the kinds of extensibility that will be supported on this platform vs. the things that you'll only be able to do with an On-Premise server.  I'll blog more about this session later as there was a ton of good stuff in my notes... but one big take-away I have is this:  Server-Side Custom Code is not supported.  Customers are going to have a choice of deployment locally, in the cloud, or mixed.  Therefore, we probably want to avoid making large investments in things like Web Parts because those customers that choose to deploy in the cloud won't be able to use them.  HOWEVER, they DO support silverlight (including SL2 with custom code)... therefore, the best place for us to invest in is in SilverLight because you can do most of the same things (and in some cases more) in custom fashions with SL2 and SP webservices.

 

Next I went to the "Developing for Microsoft Surface" session.  This totally blew me away.  The idea that we've gone from CLI to GUI interfaces (which was game-changing) and now we're on the brink of going from GUI to NUI (Natural User Interfaces) opens up so many new ideas that it's dizzying.  At the core, developing for Surface is almost identical to developing for WPF with some new added API's-- but the paradigm shift in thinking is huge (360 degree canvas, ie. there's no "up", multi-touch, multi-user, physical world object interaction, etc...)  They have surface units set up all over the conference running a scavenger game (we all have these little ID cards we can drop on them).. pretty amazing.  I love their call to action "Help us change the world."  This is a technology that actually will do just that.

 

Next I went to the ASP.NET MVC session.  While it was ok, I was a bit dissapointed.  All the stuff that MVC is trying to accomplish is right on... but when I saw some of the code, I'm *SO* happy that we went with the WCSF/MVP architecture for Elanco.  While it's a bit more complicated, I think it's way better for any complex application.  I really regret no going to Scott Hansleman's session instead which apparently created an app that integrated many of these new .net technologies including some real-time audience participation hooking into Twitter to produce some sort of mega-mash-up kids game.

 

The last session of the day I went to was "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service".  This was great and I'm excited to get my hands on my Azure account so I can start playing with this.  The web stuff looks right on... but I'm still a bit confused about the cloud-based durable storage.

 

Day ended with a Partner Expo Reception (read: free food and beer).  Got to meet a bunch of folks from lots of companies and got some free swag.  Highlight was spending about 15 minutes with the dev from Microsoft Research discussing PEX.  Oh yeah, and DevExpress (the CodeRush guys) had Mini Me there.  I had no idea he was THAT small.

 

 

Sorry for the long post, but it was a long day.  If you've read all the way down to here, then you deserve a treat.  Here are two links people tweeted to me that fall into the WTF category.  Enjoy!