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FrameXML support in AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft v2

RGabo — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:11:49 GMT

After the first release of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft in last December (and a subsequent minor release in January), ideas were immediately flying around how to improve the overall experience of seasoned AddOn developers and those who were just starting to get their feet wet with customizing their World of Warcraft interface. Add to that the feedback that was posted to the Codeplex site and the forum threads that were praising AddOn Studio while pointing out some of its shortcomings and the plan for a v2 was born that Dan Fernandez - the man behind the idea of AddOn Studio - just posted about today.

One of the main areas where AddOn Studio could definitely improve was the FrameXML designer experience. V1 allowed addon developers to put together simple user interfaces by simply dragging an dropping buttons, fontstrings and other visual elements onto the design surface and then writing some Lua code to implement their behavior, FrameXML ninjas were understandably missing features like true support for the built-in virtual frames that you can inherit from, BLP texture support, font support and an overall WYSIWYG experience that didn't require them to fire up WoW or type /script ReloadUI() every time they made some small change and hoped the FrameXML was still valid and showed up.

With its upcoming release, AddOn Studio v2 will have a much better support for FrameXML files that was designed with the single goal of trying to resemble World of Warcraft as possible from the ground up.

The FrameXML support will have the following features (all subject to change):

Support for MPQ archives, BLP and TGA textures and fonts
Loading of resources from the MPQ files as well as the filesystem
Loading and saving of FrameXML files (optionally with validation)
Full inheritance support (virtual="true", inherits="...") for any FrameXML, including the built-in ones (GameFontNormal, DialogBoxFrame, UIPanelCloseButton, etc.)
Complete FrameXML layout engine (Anchors, relativeto, explicit and implicit sizes, AbsDimension, RelDimension)
WoW naming support for $parent (including inherited controls named using $parent)
Design-time rendering of WoW visual elements, including Texture, FontString as well as high-level elements such as Button, CheckButton, Frame Backdrop), adhering to correct order (Framestrata, Framelevel and layer ordering)
Toolbox items for all elements and property grid support for all attributes
... :)

Our team at EPAM is now working on finishing up the design-time experience to be as smooth as possible. While we're working on this, I'll be posting some technical details on how the FrameXML support was implemented. While our primary goal was to support the best FrameXML designer experience with it, it could certainly be used for working with FrameXML outside AddOn Studio. Stay tuned!

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft goes public!

RGabo — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:04:14 GMT

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft has been released to CodePlex yesterday and it is available for download!

I worked on this project for the past couple months and I'm very excited to see it go public and see people interested in it. I can't wait to hear your feedback over at the project's CodePlex page.

Dan has an exhaustive post full of screenshots that can give you a basic idea of what AddOn Studio is and he also uploaded part of the TechEd 2007 Keynote (presented by Soma) where he demonstrates it in action. Both are a fun read/watch so I recommend heading over to his blog. You can watch the video here. I especially love the Jackass intro (which is Minutemen - Corona) in the beginning, at first I thought I was watching the wrong video ;)

I worked out the overall architecture of AddOn Studio and implemented the Lua language service that gives you word completion, member completion and method tips. My next blog post will go into detail about the language service. If words like lexer, parser, parser generation, abstract syntax tree make you interested, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed or check back in a few days!

Make sure you digg Dan's post if we got you excited:

Long weekend in London

RGabo — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:29:54 GMT

What a great couple of days in London! The highlight of the four days I spent in London was Friday night's geek dinner with such luminaries as Scoble, Dave Sifry, Dave Winer and Steve Clayton, among others. It was great to meet some of our peers as well and be surrounded by really smart and fun people (may I mention the Resolver team ;)

There was a photowalk after we left the pub where the guys took some amazing shots. Check them out on Flickr: Dave's photos, Tim Watt's photos, Steve Clayton's photos

Steve also included a photo of my MacBook with the infamous Blue Monster as the wallpaper:

As much as he was shocked to see it, I know quite a few Microsoft enthusiasts and .NET developers who use Apple hardware daily (and I'm not talking about iPods ;)

Parallel FX & Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for VS2008 RTM

RGabo — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:50:12 GMT

I'm delighted to see that the first CTP of Parallel Extensions (a.k.a Parallel FX) is out. Check Joe Duffy's post for the details, I have been waiting for this for some time now! Also in the news is that Silverlight 1.1 (which will be named Silverlight 2.0, what a surprise) Tools Alpha has been refreshed for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Scott Guthrie has the details (well, he always does). Certain proof of that is he also announced ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which will be release next week. This will mark the first public release of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

Now only if we could get that ADO.NET Entity Framework refreshed for VS2008 RTM.. Pablo? :)

London Geek Dinner, December 7

RGabo — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:17:43 GMT

The usual suspects of the geek celebrity community are all showing up in London next Friday and for the occasion, Hugh Macleod is hosting a geek dinner in Soho, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and Steve Clayton will all be there. Dinner starts at 7pm, but unfortunately there's only room for 50 people or so.. You can still join the Photowalk around London at 9:30pm.

The details:

The Coach & Horses
29 Greek Street,
Soho
London, W1V 5LL, UK
7.00pm
(Google Maps)

See you there!

Visual Studio 2008 RTM - A new era (again)

RGabo — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:13:34 GMT

Unless you were living under a rock, you are happy to know that Visual Studio 2008 RTMed. You can read what our beloved prominent bloggers have to say about this release:

Soma: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 shipped!
Scott Guthrie: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released
Brad Abrams: VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 RTM

Brad's another post is worth mentioning: The ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit has been refreshed for Visual Studio 2008. Check it out here.

As for myself, I am extremely excited about this release. I have been working with the public Beta2 drop since its release and recently used RC drops for one of our projects. VS2008 being RTM means that:

LINQ to X and LINQ to SQL in particular RTM'ed. It's there for all projects.
I have an RTM C# 3.0 compiler that I can work with.
I can soon press F11 and trace into .NET Framework code as well as examine the call stack with source and MSFT comments. (this is HUGE)
and much much more...

Probably these three are what excite me the most and will undoubtedly change the way I (and my peers) will work on upcoming projects. I am expecting a rapid adoption of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 for a multitude of reasons:

The CLR is still the same 2.0 CLR that is under .NET FW 2.0 and 3.0.
Visual Studio 2008 can multitarget .NET FW 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5
C# 3.0 features one-by-one and LINQ to X are typical examples of 'how could I live without these before?'.

There are two things that I think should be also included in this post when I think of the next few years of the MSFT .NET platform offerings:

ADO.NET Entity Framework (LINQ to Entities)
ASP.NET MVC Framework (One of those few products the Scott builds for Microsoft)

I think both technologies are particularly powerful when it fits the type of project you want to apply it to. The Entity FW will be the standard for any mid-sized or bigger project where having a conceptual model is useful and/or you want Astoria services (ADO.NET Data Services is the official name, I think) running on top of it. For smaller projects, the one-to-one mapping of LINQ to SQL will be sufficient. Let's not also forget that LINQ to SQL is RTM today and we still have to wait for the Entity FW a couple of months.

The MVC Framework is particularly interesting whenever you were drooling over Ruby on Rails and hoped .NET would have something similar. I love the extensibility and pluggability of the platform. Let's not also forget that the loosely coupled architecture and contract-driven design allows for great test-first and controller-first scenarios and the separation of concerns is something that should be included in the United States Consistution or at least the Bill of Rights.

Back from TechEd, back in Budapest

RGabo — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:07:43 GMT

Yo, I'm back from Barcelona. Arrived last night, immediately after dropping my stuff at my crib (still not unpacked ;), went out with my friend to celebrate my return after the extremely long hiatus from the budapest party scene ;)

I am still coming through coverage of the keynote / TechEd that haven't seen, here are a few of them worth mentioning:

..and somebody who actually tries to correct the big newsportals, although I think a WYSIWYG FrameXML editor, decent Intellisense support for Lua and whole other bunch of stuff will improve your Notepad++ experience ;)

How to play World of Warcraft in Visual Studio. Not.

There's also some activity in WoW forums:

Of course, there is a lot of confusion as to whether WoW was running in Visual Studio (no), was this only just support for the Lua language (not) or is this an environment where you can do end-to-end addon development from FrameXML to Lua (yes). I ommitted the coverage of the InfoWorld article as that spans couple Google pages ;)

LINQ to X: Take Two

RGabo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:45:23 GMT

After James Lau's Visual Studio Shell session, I ended up attending the LINQ to X interactive session again, full of interesting questions. One particular subject came up which actually made both Pablo and Mike thinking:

Would it make sense to be able to query sub-object graphs stored in XML columns using LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities?

For instance, if you have a Product table that has a single XML column called Other but that XML column contains an object graph, would it make sense to do:

var q = from p in Context.Products select p;

where the Product class wouldn't just have an XDocument or XElement property calledOther but it would actually be of type class Other and would represent an object graph, deserialized from the XML contained in the column.

One concern that is a fair point that has been made during the session was that conversions while the objects are streaming from the database to the upper layer should never fail. This is the reason why System.Boolean cannot be mapped to an int column in a database, for instance. Now any XML deserialization could easily fail, except if you have an XSD that enforces the very same object model on the DB side that you have on your CLR side. This is something that the Entity Framework cannot validate or in any way assume.

So today, you can use that XElement to traverse the XML fragment, use System.Xml.XPath and its extension methods to query using XPath but its still an interesting thing. I'll whip up a proof of concept in the next few days and try to find a real-world scenario where this might come handy in the mean time ;)

LINQ to X: What's up with all these Data Access Technologies?

RGabo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:23:17 GMT

I'm waiting for this exciting interactive session to start. I'm sitting in the third row and all the speakers are already here. It's great to have all these people here at the same time. We've been handed out papers, most likely they do that for every interactive session. Not sure why but we'll see I guess :) I will fill in the answers after the session or if there's is some idle time.

1:30PM: Everybody's settling in, time to start!

How the technologies stack up performance-wise to more direct technologies like DataReaders? Followed up with: How does LINQ to SQL compares to Type DataSets and DataAdapters?

Will DataReader and DataSet dissapear?

No. :)

Are LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities entities serializable?

Yes. :)

What is state on caching in LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities?

There is no caching done today in those technologies but it is a request they hear often.

Why do you have LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities as well as two separate technologies?

The million dollar question :) They are two separate technologies developed at Microsoft parallel. They either release both or spend another 1-2-3 years unifying them. They chose to give the developers an OR/M solution that is coming out of Microsoft earlier than later. The target audience and the feature set is slightly different with LINQ to SQL being a closer to 1:1 mapping to the database and LINQ to Entities with its translation layer, the Entitiy Data Model (EDM) and no lazy loading (on purpose).

Why is there LINQ to Entities and ESQL as well? What is the reason behind ESQL?

ESQL allows for all the types of dynamic SQL that people exploited with SQL. It is a complete dialect of SQL with all the notions of the EDM. It can be more performant (an EntityClient exists which is really an ADO.NET Data Provider) or better suited for particular scenarios.

Do LINQ expression trees get translated to ESQL or SQL? (my question ;))

Both expression trees and ESQL queries (that express the query itself) get 'compiled' into CQT (Concise Query Tree) and the stacks underneath work with those only. CQT are first hierarchical and then get flattened out in the translation layers.

What are the main differences with regards to features between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities?

1:1 mapping vs conceptual model (EDM)
Implicit lazy loading vs explicit behavior
LINQ as a way to query vs LINQ and ESQL as well
LINQ to SQL available as part of .NET FW 3.5 vs LINQ to Entities only next year (Beta2 today).

There are some interim questions as well that I'll try to summarize later.

Will LINQ will be supported in SQLCLR at some point?

Luca is begging Pablo to say YES before answering the question ;)) It's something that they are looking at. LINQ to Object and LINQ to XML (something that you'd be using in any layer basically anywhere in C# code) are more likely to first appear in SQLCLR than LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities (or LINQ to X).

What are the advantages and limitations with using stored procedures with LINQ?

Stored procedures give full control to the DBA which is the important part about them. Both technologies support them but they are opaque and result in non-composable queries. As a intermediate solution, Table-valued functions work well and remain composable.

UPDATE Nov 10: Updated with some of the answers. Comment if something is unclear.

Entity Framework: Application Patterns

RGabo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:52:11 GMT

I've been a little late with posting about the sessions, so here I am again! Yesterday I attended one of the coolest sessions presented by Pablo Castro: Entity Framework: Application Patterns. I didn't like the session because of the wealth of information I've learned from it but because Pablo is a very entertaining presenter and I really enjoy his talks (may that be on Channel9 or Mix or here at TechEd). He walked through different application architectures (mostly different in layering) and demonstrated how the Entity Framework (or the EDM) fits there and what are the very basic tips and tricks that everyone should know. He'll be at the Ask The Experts booth where I'm sure I'll ask him a bunch of questions (I already touched on persistence ignorance and other interesting topics right after the session). He also has an interactive session today which I'll be sure to attend. All the hotshots will be there: Pablo Castro, Carl Perry, Mike Taulty, Luca Bolognese, Elisa Flasko. Will be very interesting, given the session will be an interactive one (questions drive it).

Last night & DevConnections

RGabo — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:28:01 GMT

Last night we were invited by the VSX Team to have dinner at the beautiful restaurant Torre d'alta Mar. The view from 75 metres above is very impressive and all courses were top notch. It was great to get to know the people in person we worked with for a while now.

Dinner with the VSX Team

Waking up today and checking out the news, we came to realize that AddOn Studio was also featured in the DevConnections keynote by no other than the man with the plan: Scott Guthrie. Moreover, the announcements as well as WowAddonStudio was covered by Infoworld and picked up by numerous blogs and news outlets. My second 15 minutes of fame and fortune in a single week! I especially like this blog post from Monday's TechEd keynote.

Silverlight, C# 3.0 and an Introduction to the Entity Framework

RGabo — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:21:29 GMT

The afternoon's three sessions covered Silverlight, C# 3.0 and the Entity Framework. The Silverlight session was a disappointment because it failed to really show how powerful the next version of Silverlight with be with support for managed languages. The C# 3.0 session was professional and almost the whole time coding. Every single new C# 3.0 feature was demonstrated in a practical way. Finally someone can walk through them and show how it improves productivity, syntax or how it allows new and interesting things. I guess you could expect that from a C# Compiler PM but I was still more than satisfied.

I would consider the Entity Framework session to be informative for someone who has not looked at this new way of data access, using a conceptual model. ESQL was also demonstrated as well as a full metadata and low-level query model on top of the conceptual model. that was fairly interesting as it demonstrated an ADO.NET Data Provider (IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDbDataReader, etc.) on top of EDM which in part had another data provider (System.Data.Sql) underneath. Still, the fact that you can get a highly performant reader that still understands entity concepts and can use ESQL can be powerful in some scenarios where this is required.

The most important new information I didn't realize yet was that this version of EDM is NOT peristence ignorant. Well, that just sucks.

Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – WIN202

RGabo — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:48:10 GMT

Today morning's second session I attended was about the Sync Framework (ADO.NET Sync Services and the Compact Framework's related improvements) that was announced during the keynote. As you might know, a CTP is available. Visit the Sync Framework Developer Center if you want to learn more. In a nutshell, both disconnected, offline experiences (the canonical example being Exchange / Outlook) and collaboration are covered and the feature set is pretty impressive. I wonder if this means we can either forget the Offline Application Block from patterns & practices or more likely: we'll get a Sync Framework based Application Block in the next Smart Client Software Factory. I see this as a potential lifesaver for rich client applications (and others as well) where this had to be done in-house before. Learning about the high-level architecture of the framework, I am also pretty sure that the provider model the framework follows for abstracting data stores and how change tracking and conflict resolution is architected is sound and will allow for a broad range of uses.

The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview of SQL Server 2008 - DAT202

RGabo — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:43:29 GMT

Unfortunately being a little a late, I totally missed the SQL Server 2008 part but at least I'm here to hear the summary of the session. Not exactly new information but I definitely hoped I'd see geospatial information in action ;) I was able to ask my million dollar question at the end of the demo of ADO.NET Entity Framework (not sure how that ended up in this session): What is the difference between LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET Entity Framework and what are the main differences that can help me make informed decision when picking the technology. LINQ to SQL woud be the 'get you started quickly', 'one-to-one mapping to the database', etc. whereas the Entity Framework would be able to do table splitting, more complex mappings. The more interesting point the presenter made was around lazy loading. LINQ to SQL uses a more implicit approach (just get the data somehow) whereas the Entity FW is more explicit and tries to reduce the number of roundtrips to your database.

UPDATE: In the mean time, the presenter started talking about Location Intelligence and GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data type. Perfect! DEMO TIME!!!!! (There's also going to be a whole session on spatial features in SQL Server 2008 tomorrow 9am)

The demo queries all the coffee shops along the highways that Microsofties use to get to the campus. Fairly simple query that returns just that. Do that without geospatial features, smarty pants! :) A mashup is shown pinning the coffee shops on top of a Virtual Earth map of Greater Seattle. Cool stuff.

Photos from the first day of TechEd 2007

RGabo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:55:56 GMT

I have uploaded the photos I took since I'm in Barcelona to Flickr so if you're interested, take a peek. The coolest one is most likely this one though:

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft featured in TechEd 2007 Keynote

Agile Development with Team System - ARC202

RGabo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:06:12 GMT

Roy Osherove is a funny guy. He performed a song of its own at the end of the session which he composed with Sting & The Police: Every Build You Break ;) The subject of the session was of course continuous integration, agile methodologies (including XP and Scrum), test-driven-development and how all this fits within Team Foundation Server, VS2008, et al. Although the session offered not too much new information (we knew about eScrum and MFS Agile and also about new features in TFS and VS2008), he pretty much covered everything that I would consider important. He didn't shy away from pointing out where Microsoft's solutions failed (he particularly enjoyed condescending MSFT for considering a continous build that even though it compiles its tests fail as: Partially Successful). The comparison of MS Test to NUnit and MbUnit was on spot and he made the point. If you care about integration with TFS (CI, associations of work items, policies, etc), it's a great platform to work with. Roy Osherove clearly never saw PMC ;)

UPDATE: Video uploaded to YouTube, enjoy!
UPDATE2: Replaced with full version!

What is Next for the .NET Framework and Distributed Applications? SBP207

RGabo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:17:45 GMT

Not being a BizTalk guy and honestly, not having much of a clue about business processes, WS-*, federated service such as identity and others or Axapta (or modeling languages :) this session was interesting for two reasons. First, I now know what are the names of the products and abbreviations I should look up in Wikipedia to at least learn what this domain is about, second the speaker had excellent presentation skills. We'll see how the other sessions go but I do think that all the great content aside, it is really improtant to have a great speaker. So high five, Steve Martin :)

Oh and most importantly, he also used the term first-class citizen and he wasn't talking about LINQ!! Was there an internal MSFT bulletin that advocates the use of this famous phrase popularized by the great Anders Hejlsberg? :) FW please, so I can adhere and this term can become a first-class citizen in my dictionary :)

Live from the TechEd 2007 Keynote!

RGabo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:36:59 GMT

Hi there! I am sitting in CCIB's auditorium, waiting for TechEd 2007 to kick off with Soma's keynote. We got seated in the third row, extremely close to the stage and almost in the middle. Turns out, the Super Early Bird seats are worse, so I don't exactly see the point. We were Super Late Birds and have great seats!

Our keynote seats

Live coverage:

1:39PM: Two graffiti artists are going at it, a DJ is mixing trance, definitely enjoyable. There's also a VJ somewhere. I am getting dizzy from the smell of sprayed paint.

1:48PM: Graffiti artists finishing up, looks great. DJ mixing Alanis Morissette - Uninvited (City of Angels OST), gotta love it.

1:56PM Graffiti pulled up, nobody's on the stage now except for the DJ.

2:00PM Soma is on stage, LOTS of people in the auditorium. Thanks the developers who have given feedback to make VS2008 a better product.

2:03PM Soma is promoting a restaurant in Barcelona.. (Moo Restaurant) That's some marketing ;) Draws an analogy between his experience and that developers and designers should work great products hand-in-hand.

2:06PM Visual Studio 2005: Over 1 million professional developers, Visual Studio Express: Over 17 million downloads (25% of developers using Visual Studio team System)

2:15PM Soma talks about different the types of developers and how the tools bridge all audiences. .NET as the consistent programming model.

2:18PM Platform advances, .NET Framework Data Support (LINQ, MS Sync Framework), .NET Framework (new WPF controls, WCF: REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON (cool!), Silverlight). Soma just used Anders Hejlsberg's favorite expression: first-class citizen ;)

2:23PM Visual Studio Tools for Office is now part of Visual Studio 2008 Profesional. Built-in support for AJAX, other web development improvements. Soma just said first-class citizen again.

2:30PM Microsoft Sync Framework CTP is announced, helps improve offline experience and to build p2p-based solutions. Software + Service Blueprints also announced. Ready to use building blocks and add-in for Visual Studio.

2 :39PM Visual Studio 2008 new features demoed on-stage. Split view for ASP.NET pages, CSS support. LINQ to SQL, O/R Designer shown and bound to controls.

3:04PM Demo is over, funny video about Visual Studio 2008 development. Soma is back with inspiring words. Although he didn't say first-class citizen for at least half an hour now.

3:06PM VS Ecosystem is now the subject. This might be our time. 200+ partners, 2000+ products. VS Premier Partners now get access to the Visual Studio IDE source code (this would come handy).

3:46PM. Damn. My battery died on me during the keynote so I couldn't blog live that Dan Fernandez walked up to the stage and demoed AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft which we developed. Our bottom line was two laughs and a heartwarming applause at the end of the demo. Felt good ;)

I've taken a good deal of photos during the keynote which I'll be uploading to Flickr soon. I might also share the better ones here.

There is a break now from 3:30pm to 4:00pm and afterwards the first session starts. As you know, I'll be attending a session around Distributed Applications and what the future (and the future of .NET) holds us in that domain. Until then, it's snack and refreshing soft drinks time!

TechEd 2007 kicks off tomorrow!

RGabo — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:24:26 GMT

I am in Barcelona and going to sleep soon to get up early tomorrow. I am planning to go over to CCIB early so that I can take advantage of that free WiFi they have over there (something that our hotel doesn't have). I have decided to post the session abstracts and my personal comments on the sessions I will attend next day and reflect on them fresh after the session (or maybe during.. I'll be blogging the keynote live). Here it goes:

Monday - 11/05/2007

Keynote - 14:00-15:30

The one and only keynote, presented by Soma that we are SO looking forward to. Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise, so check back tomorrow for some live blogging from the Auditorium.

SBP207 What is Next for the .NET Framework and Distributed Applications?
Mon, Nov 5 16:00 - 17:15 Room 112
Ofer Ashkenazi, Steven Martin

What is next for .NET? What is Microsoft doing to build an integrated set of new tools that addresses challenges ACROSS the software lifecycle, from designing and building to deploying and managing? How is model-driven design going to improve the way I work every day and what is Microsoft doing to make it real? How do I connect my existing applications and platforms with new composite applications or with services provided in the cloud? All of these are important questions that we will address as we look at the present and future of the platform.

ARC202 Agile Development with Team System
Mon, Nov 5 17:45 - 19:00 Room 117
Roy Osherove

In this talk we'll explore what Agile Development is, how Agile methodologies differ from "traditional" methodologies, and find out about Scrum and Extreme Programming, two Agile methodologies which we'll compare. Finally, we'll see how Team System fits into the picture with MSF Agile and Scrum for Team System, and how you can manage projects in an agile manner, while still getting the benefits of working with team system.

There's a SOA and Business Process and an Architecture session that I plan for today. I am definitely looking forward to both. I hope to get a good overview of how Mirosoft imagines SOA in the cloud in the next 5-10 years. It is interesting to see how model-driven design is mentioned here. I think that model-driven design is not only helpful in service-oriented applications but everywhere. I hope to hear about technologies that are not yet public. We all know and love the ones that are out there today (LINQ to X, ADO.NET Entity Framework).

Roy Osherove should not need an introduction, but if it doesn't ring any bells, click the link while nobody's looking. I've been introduced to agile methodologies after my first impressions with Test-Driven Development. I liked how TDD can be part of a complete methodology. At the same time, I don't think that Extreme Programming or any other agile process could be uniformly applied to projects. I think if someone familiarizes itself with the different ideas, it can mix and change those to its own liking so that it fits the team or fits into a company's existing processses. I want to hear Roy's experience with agile methodologies at Microsoft and also see the tools that they use (Team System integration is great too)

Don't foget that I'll be blogging the keynote! Tune in at Monday 2PM GMT+1 and keep your fingers on the Refresh button. For those who consider themselves bleeding edge, follow me on twitter.

Oh and Barcelona beat Betis 3-0 ;)

TechEd 2007 sessions I wouldn't want to miss

RGabo — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:01:00 GMT

What better place to collect the sessions I'm interested in than my blog? ..and the nominees for 'Most Exciting Session of the Year' are:

TLA407 Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies
Joe Duffy
Multi-core is here, posing both an opportunity and a threat to software developers and organizations. The opportunity is that increased parallelism will provide exponential increases in compute power, which can be used to build new kinds of rich and immersive data- and compute-intensive programs. The threat, however, arises because traditional year-over-year clock speed-ups have slowed to a grinding halt. Traditional sequential software will not reap the benefits and yet programming parallel computers has historically been extraordinarily difficult and costly. Those companies that manage to do it will have a unique competitive advantage over those who do not.

This talk takes a look at multi-core and the support .NET offers for programming them. This includes the Windows threading architecture, including scheduling and synchronization, as well as higher-level task management and coordination primitives in .NET. Common patterns and best practices for data- and task-parallelism are also discussed, to help you become productive with concurrency right away.
Thu Nov 8 15:45 - 17:00 Room 112

If you want to hear somebody talk enthusiastically about a very interesting subject that we all should embrace as soon as possible, Joe Duffy is your man with the plan. I secretly hope at the end of session the lights will go off and through the blinding lights, Anders Hejlsberg will enter the room while people all go crazy. Wait, was that a D12 concert with Eminem as the surprise at the end? Whatever. We. Want. Anders.

TLA405 Parallel and Asynchronous Functional Programming on .NET with F#
Don Syme
Functional programming a hot topic: there is a growing awareness of functional techniques in the developer community, and people are beginning to see that imperative programming has limitations in a networked and concurrent multi-core world. This session will use the research language F# to explore how declarative and functional techniques are relevant to these new programming challenges. We'll show how to use PFX (Parallel FX) from F#, including the use of PLINQ and Futures. F# also includes constructs called asynchronous workflows that help you tame the complexity of asynchronous I/O programming. We’ll look at how to use these and discuss how they relate to LINQ and Haskell. We’ll also look at some basic programming with F#, including how you can use F# to explore functional design patterns that are highly relevant no matter which language you’re working in.
Fri Nov 9 13:30 - 14:45 Room 117

Somehow related to Joe's session as PFX and PLINQ is involved, I expect Don's session to be an eye-opener for developers who have not looked at pure functional languages like F# before. When you realize that F# will be part of the Visual Studio family and that many elements of functional languages have already made they way to C#, you'll want to be there. It must be exciting to be Don Syme. You design and come up with parts of the F# language that only a single person understands in the universe. You. Oh and he also co-authors the best F# book with my fellow colleague, Adam "F#" Granicz.

TLA09-IS The Near Future of Programming is All About Concurrency – But What do Technologies such as F# and the Joins Library Mean for Developers?
Don Syme , Claudio Russo , Robert Pickering
The rise of multi-core CPUs and multi-processor machines requires developers to exploit concurrency in their applications. And we all know, that’s anything else but easy. Along with many exciting developments from Microsoft itself, Microsoft Research is currently investigating appropriate language and framework solutions to simplify concurrent programming for all developers. Two promising research technologies in this space are F# and the Joins Concurrency Library. This session gives you a chance to raise questions and give feedback on current developments to experts from Microsoft Research. We strongly recommend you attend the sessions “Parallel and Asynchronous Functional Programming on .NET with F#” and “The Joins Concurrency Library (Cω in a Box)” before attending this interactive session on how insights from these research projects might shape our future in software development!
Fri Nov 9 15:15 - 16:30 Room 116

Oops, another F# session that follows the previous one. Gotta be there.

TLA06-IS LINQ to “X”, ADO.NET Entity Framework, DataSets & Co – What is it with all these Data Access Technologies?
Mike Taulty , Pablo Castro , Elisa Flasko , Carl Perry , Luca Bolognese
With the release 3.5 of the .NET Framework Microsoft introduced several new data access technologies based on its LINQ technology such as LINQ to SQL or LINQ to DataSets. About 6 months later we expect Microsoft to release the ADO.NET Entity framework together with LINQ to Entities. And finally we have all the existing ways for accessing data in different data storages shipping with the ADO.NET foundation such as DataSets, DataReaders and SQL-classes. Of course that raises one important question: Which data access technology is best suited for which situation? In this interactive session you get the chance to present your requirements and discuss, which technology fits best to your requirements – with members of the product teams themselves. Bring your ideas and requirements and discuss them with our experts!
Thu Nov 8 13:30 - 14:45 Room 116 , Thu Nov 8 17:30 - 18:45 Room 132

If we are weighing in enthusiasm as a reason to attend a session, Room 132 better be HUGE (isn't that a codename for Auditorium?) We'll have Pablo Castro, Mike Taulty and Luca Bolognese in the same session. This is like having Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake blasting to some Timbaland tunes. Or the cast of The Departed. Figure out your analogy while you attend this session and learn about the most interesting data access technologies that will be obiquotus in every single VS2008 project starting next month. R.I.P. NHibernate, I never really liked you.

Don't forget to consider other Pablo Castro sessions: DAT303 Entity Framework: Application Patterns and WEB313 Project Astoria: Data Services for the Web

TLA326 LINQ to Entities – Use LINQ to access ADO.NET Entity Data Models
Mike Taulty
Most .NET database applications out there use ADO.NET to access and manipulate data, and most of them have a data-access layer built on top of ADO.NET to abstract out many of the details related to data-access that can get in the way of business logic. In this session we’ll introduce the ADO.NET Entity Framework, a high-level data library that pushes up the level of abstraction application developers need to work at when dealing with data in databases. We’ll discuss how the system supports conceptual modeling, the use of the object services layer to do object-relational mapping, and how great integration with LINQ (Language Integrated Query) brings new levels of productivity to the data-access development space. It is suggested that you attend "The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework Overview" before attending this session.
Wed Nov 7 13:30 - 14:45 Room 115 , Fri Nov 9 13:30 - 14:45 Room 123

Mike's session pairs up with the other Entity Framework sessions and should be also attended. Missing any of these would be like going to Barcelona and not having tapas. Or having tapas but not having a bottle of Rioja. I can't even imagine anything like that.

INF204 What's New for Developers in Windows PowerShell Version 2?
Jeffrey Snover
In this session, Jeffrey Snover will walk you through the new features for developers that will be available in Windows Powershell Version 2.
Thu Nov 8 15:45 - 17:00 Room 113

Unfortunately Jeffrey Snover's PowerShell session conflicts with Joe's session so I'll have to sacrifice this one but I wholeheartedly recommend every .NET Developer to look at PowerShell and grasp how powerful it is. I hope I'll be able to catch Jeffrey on the floor for some PowerShell v2 scoops.

Okay, people, that's it for today, still to come: Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio Shell and other interesting sessions! Namaste!

Back to blogging (the road to TechEd 2007)

RGabo — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:32:42 GMT

Finally back to blogging! I have stopped blogging some time ago, even though I enjoyed writing both personal and technical blogs but now I feel the urge to be back as we are living through very exciting times :) TechEd 2007 gives me the perfect reason to spend that 30 minute per day to post. Not only I plan to frequently blog about my experience during my stay in Barcelona, I am also happy to announce that I will be ramping it up as we are counting the days back. Just a week to go! What can you expect here, you may ask. Lately the following technologies and buzzwords kept me busy and/or excited:

Visual Studio Shell: The VSX Team is doing a great job making Visual Studio the premier tooling platform for the Microsoft ecosystem. Whereas we could leverage Visual Studio by developing add-ins before, with Visual Studio 2008 and the SDK we can now customize and tailor the experience as much as we want. Pick the packages you want msenv to load, customize the commands you want to show and much much more.

LINQ to X, ADO.NET Entity Framework: When first read about and saw LINQ in action, along with the new C# 3.0 language features, I was immediately blown away. Anders Hejlsberg pulling the strings in the back this was definitely foreseeable but the fact that the new language constructs strike just the right balance by introducing concepts borrowed by functional lanuages and mostly syntactic sugar (it's still the 2.0 CLR) and making query a first-class citizen while keeping all the benefits of strong-typing and OO-at-heart intact. I'm also happy MSFT finally gets O/R mapping right with not one but two products. Going through architecting an ASP.NET website with LINQ to SQL at the bottom and persistence ignorance and testability in mind, I can see when LINQ to SQL works perfectly and what scenarios need a more robust solution like the Entity Framework.

ASP.NET MVC Framework: Recently announced by Scott Guthrie at Alt.Net, the MVC Framework not only excites me because I drooled over Ruby on Rails screencasts and was not truly satisfied with MonoRail and Subsonic, but because it is a well-designed, loosely coupled, pluggable and extensible framework that doest a great job when it comes to seperation the concerns. I want to hear people talk about IoC frameworks, lean and simple interfaces, test-driven development more. When that framework comes from Microsoft, I now I can rely on it from an architectural and performance perspective.

MSFT opens up .NET Framework source: As Martin Luther King said: I have a dream.. ;) I had the dream of pressing F11 on a call into the framework 3 or 4 years ago while still in university. Turned out that there was an academic project that tried to do some sort of community source repository project based on Reflector where people would share their inline comments of the code they traced into and automagically uploaded. I never heard of that ever working so when I read that MSFT will gradually open up the full framework and make the experience this simple, I smiled. This was announced just before my birthday so I'll just consider it as my birthday gift from Scott and Microsoft ;)

PLINQ and Parallel FX: Parallelism and multi-threading in general is considered a complex subject but now with multi-core procesors being the clear direction in improving performance and scalability, everybody will have to befriend the concepts. Even though this shift requires us to think about our problems differently, PLINQ and PFX strive to make this super simple. After watching the latest Channel9 interview, I can't wait to spend some valuable time with these technologies. I wonder if there'll ever be a technology that somehow involves Anders and will not get me super excited. I purposedly tried to not go into any details as I'd like to dedicate my upcoming posts to specific technologies or frameworks. A code snippet is worth a thousand words, so I will not shy away from sharing some code with you ;) See you at TechEd in a week!