Opening Summon - Rolling post

Here we go, it just started. The opening summon.

The opening clips just run on the big screen and everyone's excited.

I'm going to write a rolling post, for the summon, as much as I can. This is my first time doing so, I hope it will go well.

Galit Shachaf is on the stage now, describing the next few days.
This year's tech-ed is followed by the lunch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and the already lunched Visual Studio 2008.

13:00, Danny Yamin, Microsoft's CEO is on stage saying his greetings.

Galit is back on. This year there are new paths, for developer leaders.
Many of the fields are special for developers, on top of the other paths.

Currently there's a movie describing the next few days in Tech-Ed.

This year's there are 3500 people on tech-ed. The most so far.
This is the most attendees since the first tech-ed which took place at 2001.

Another movie now, describing the different path in this year's tech-ed.

I have to admit that so far the movies are nice. the atmosphere is great. But I'm waiting for the real-deal to begin. After all, I'm still a technology freak

Live break from the business center, Yossi and Lior are broadcasting live.
I like those guys, they have this light weight manner on their broadcasts.

Shpigler is now on another clip, giving tips on how to tell your wife that you're going to Eilat, for tech-ed. Lucky for me I don't need to fool my princess. I just told her that I'm going, and she was fine with that. It is a bit difficult, missing home, and so on, but she didn't make a big deal out of that, and it passed on.

IT STARTED!!!

Yochay is on the stage and the artistic technical part is now started!
He is making quite an entrance, dressed as a Jedi knight. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to catch that with my camera, the light was too bad.

Yochay is describing now the road that dot net framework has done since the last tech-ed. Dot.Net 3.5, which was released recently. This framework allows you to develop in which ever language you currently know (above the 1.1 version).

This summer Microsoft is going to release the service release for dot net 3.5.
With extensions to LINQ, to ADO.Net, and so on.

And here goes an explanation for LINQ. With some coding examples.
This is the part I like in those conventions. I like to see examples of what you CAN do. It gives me the urge to go home and just try it (which I'm actually doing).

Great live example of LINQ. Yochay has a nice way of showing why these lines of code are better then what you use to do. If you haven't tried LINQ yet, something like that, like this demo, will be very impressive for you. If you're like me, it will make you go home and read what ever you'd put your hand on about LINQ (that's what happen after the first time I saw it in action).

Yochay is demonstrating Parallel Computing, using a computer with 8 cores!!! (Yap, that was the number 8 and the noun "core" after).
Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same LINQ queries, only using multiply cores. These days, any laptop has at least 2 cores. Maybe even 4. So a production server probably has more.
Using PLINQ will cut running time dramatically.

A Brain Teaser game is now on.
The first question is being presented by Sasha Goldstain.
the question is about a timer thread and what will happen. I can't copy the code from the screen, so you'll have to excuse me.

Yochay explains what happened at the small game. He describes the system that was used to get the SMS and analyze it.
The system uses WCF and WF. There's an explanation of WCF and WF now. Nothing's new here.

The code for the teaser game is now on screen and being explained. The new thing in 2008, is WF Services, which was used to implement the small game.
Workflow Services is sort of a combination between WCF and WF, which allows easy implementation of WCF inside a workflow.

A cool demo of speech server over media center.
The demo presents a call from Yochai's media center which reports an error in one of the schedules. Media center is fixing the error and being activated using voice only! Very cool!
The demo was written using extended workflow, which was extended with speech server's activities and capabilities.

A success-story-video is no on-line. Time for me to take a break of writing and just listen...
See you in a bit...

Another brain teaser by Sasha: What is the better way to go: "For" or "Foreach"?
And I didn't manage to copy the question and answers, sorry

Next subject is IIS7 Integrated Pipeline.
There are many advantages in the new IIS 7. The ability to use dot net to deploy sites, is one of them, which to me looks very appealing. I was working in a bank which create it's on deployment kit, using XCopy, some setup programs and so on. Very massy. The ability to use Visual Studio to write a complete installation, is a very nice feature.
There are many other advantages. The scalability is much greater. The ability to interrupt the pipeline in real time, instead of writing  ASAPI filters and such.
And so on...

Yochay is demonstrating Visual Studio 2008 for Testers, to see the performances advantages of IIS 7, compared to IIS6, and Apache.

The last piece of the summon will be about the client, and WPF in particular.
There are more controls in the new version, the setup is now streamlined, and so on.
Another movie is now on. CMT's solution using WPF.

Silverlight will be the last topic, I think.
There's a movie now, describing what've happened to Silverlight in the past year.
I think this is one of the most exciting technologies from Microsoft. If not the coolest.
At least from the UI design perspective.  The amount of options, and the capabilities it brings are amazing!!!
If you want just a small example for it, go to one of the many sites using it now, such as:
The Podiom '08, or The HUB

Laurence Moroney, is now on stage. Laurence is the head of the Silverlight project, and he is now demonstrating some applications, and the abilities of the technology.
The demo is on Macintosh, and it's a great example of how this technology can run on any platform.
Yochay threatened Laurence that he will have to sing in Hebrew if one of the demos will fail, and that just happened. Not much of a singer he is.
Laurence currently demonstrate a technology that called "Deep Zoom". Yochay takes over the presentation to demonstrate this technology.

Yossi Taguari wrote about this technology here: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/yosit/archive/2008/03/05/63784.aspx

And that's it, the summon is done, and I'm off to see what's next.