Bruno Silva

Communities? Can They really help my business, my day-to-day job, and my career?
Bart Martens

This was a session lunch (AKA one of the sessions that prevents me from having lunch :-P)
The speaker talked about what was a community many centuries ago and now.
It started as a bunch of people with common interests but now is much more than that.
From the IT and Development point of view, communities are a support and experience sharing mean.
For companies like Microsoft, is a important source of feedback and influence on the market.
Many people consult communities blogs, wikis and forums before buy some equipment, for example.

I left at the middle of this session to attend to an simultaneous session.

Building Fun, Cool Applications with Popfly
Dan Fernandez
First time I tried Popfly I didn’t like it too much. But I gave it a change by learning more about it in this session.
There was a lot of people in this session, too much people actually. I had to attend to it in another room, with an bad streaming quality…

The main idea is to democratize development over the internet. Allow people with almost no programming experience to create rich content websites. Dan used a great analogy. The difference in the number of programming experts and people that doesn’t know how programming is like difference between the size of the Sun and the size of Saturn. Actually, after seeing his demonstration, I wasn’t convinced than Popfly is really a tool that can be used by every one… Is more like a toy for programmers

In his first demo he showed how to display a bunch of Flickr photos in a carousel and in a virtual book.
He showed how mashups (small visual) can be exported to Windows Vista Side Bar, Live Spaces, Facebook, or even to an simple HTML page. These mashups are actually Silverlight applications.
He also built an popularity comparer, that with two search terms creates a comparison graphic with the number of results in a search.

Dan also showed us how to create Building Blocks, which are the components which are combined to build mashups. It uses javascript to code behaviour and XML to store metadata like the kind of input/output that the block takes, and some suggestions about compatible blocks that can be combined with our costume one.

Pretty nice, hum?

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.