In yesterday afternoon the MSPs from all over the world who came to this event hand a special dedicated set of sessions. These sessions helped us realizing how was the program outside Portugal.
There were some old Microsoft internees talking about their experience working in Microsoft.
In the end we had the change to ask everything we wanted to some top speakers of the event as David Plantt, Dan Fernandez and Rob Miles.
After these sessions it was bowling time! I sucked but it was fun. I had the change to meet MSPs from different countries.
Improvement in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Compact Framework 3.5 for Windows Mobile developers
Andy Wigley
Not a great session. Compact Framework (CF) is a subset of .NET Framework for windows mobile devices.
It doesn’t have server technologies as ASP.NET and .NET Remoting. Doesn’t support Reflection. Some properties, events and methods were dropped from the original framework.
In about 10% of space of the original framework, it has about 30% of the functionality.
It has support for a subset of LINQ and WCF. The CF has now an audio API.
Visual Studio 2008 has support for Unit Testing, has a new version for the emulator (version 3.0) and supports Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK out of the box. VS 2008 has a Security Manager, which enables you to test your software in various possible security configurations in Windows Mobile.
Why Software Sucks
David Platt
Excellent session, excellent speaker!
The main topics were taken from his book which has the same name as the session.
I definitely have to read it!
He talked about why “normal” people don’t like software. The old problem of making software for our own and not to the people. Software shouldn’t be an objective, but just a tool to solve a problem. But the question is “What is the problem?” We must define which problem a software is meant to solve. It is the only way to make software useful an loved by people.
He gave some brilliant examples about knowing the users. The fact that there are more women than men, but mainly programmers are men. Programmers are people with high academic preparation, but most people in the world isn’t. Facts like this must make us think. To develop software we have to put ourself it the user shoes.
Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – Synchronization Framework for Enabling Roaming, Offline, and Collaboration Across Devices, Services & Apps
Philip Vaughn
Unfortunately, after 2 hours in Barcelona public buses, we were late for the first session of the day… I was supposed to go to a XNA development session. The only one of the event… Too bad. I used the time I had before the second session to put e-mail and blogging up to date.
I attended to a session about Sync Framework. It’s pretty nice! I hadn’t heard about it before this event. The big picture is captured the sentence
Your data wherever you are, on any PC, device or service without artificial barriers
This framework is meant to provide offline working and allow data to follow the user between systems.
As an offline working example we have Outlook Cached Mode, Mobile Work and Rich Experience on Web. By the other hand it allows collaboration as in Outlook contacts, Groove and Music Everywhere.
This framework allows applications to give a fast response, be always available, being optimized on storage questions (eg. Sending to server only what is needed).
The speaker talked about 3 main reasons to use Sync Framework.
It’s Powerfull. Deals with problems for us (conflicts, connection errors, corner cases)
It’s Flexible. Allows arbitrary data storages and data types, arbitrary protocols and topologies (one-way, peer-to-peer, etc.)
It’s Productive. Visual Studio 2008 is the ideal tool for quick development.
The first demo was called Contacts Anywhere. He created a contact entry in a custom application and synchronized it with Outlook and a mobile device.
A nice feature of this framework is that in a multiple synchronization hosts, when a conflict is solved between two of them, the conflict will not occur in the following synchronizations with other hosts, since it was already solved.
To work with Sync Framework you can use the built-in providers for file system synchronization, database synchronization and Simple Sharing Extensions (over RSS feeds).
There was a demo of the file system provider with the SyncToy application.
You can also add new providers to extend to other contexts.
I’ll try this framework as soon as I can. It is under development, but if you google it you can find a Beta version to try it out.
.NET Framework 3.5 End-to-End: Putting the Pieces Together - Part 1
Matt Winkler, David Aiken
This third session was a disappointment… The two speakers used DinnerNow demo (available at Codeplex) which uses a little of all .NET framework 3.5 for things live user interface (AJAX, WPF), WCF for communications, Smart Card for authentication, LINQ for data access and so on. Their objective was to show integration instead of isolated functionalities.
It started with a power failure! All light and computers down. They took a while to setup the session software again, while they bought time by speaking about nothing.
They showed this system in a user perspective, and then started to talk a little about each technology point. After LINQ and WCF I stopped paying attention… Speakers’ sense of humor was awful. 
(They were dressed as cookers…) And by making a presentation with such a large subject It became boring and too much superficial for me.
After half session I left to the entrance where I submitted the feedback form. After a while I gathered with the MSP team and went to the Exhibition Opening. I had contact with some companies and collected some goodies inside my TechEd Bag!
Then we had dinner, went to the hotel, crashed into André and Nelson’s room, I wrote these 3 posts, and went to sleeping (1:40 a.m.)!
