Morning Doughnuts 11

Harry will be back on Monday so I will returning to blogging on my website, while I will let the expert return to his normal posts here (not that he really took a break). I agree with Harry's post in that I really want to get something built so that we can talk about more than theoretical models. Like last time I appreciate the opportunity to sub for the master this last week. I hope that you found some of my entries interesting.

• Sam Gentile wrote the other day why it's great to be a Microsoft developer. I enjoyed that post because I just celebrated the end of my first year here at Microsoft. At this point I am not sure what I have contributed, but I have learned a great deal and want to apply that knowledge over the next year to help the company to succeed. We really do have great people and great technologies.
• The Seattle/Oklahoma City Sonics hired a GM who is only 30 years old. You know you must be getting old when the people running the sports teams are younger than you. He comes from the Spurs organization though so at least he has a background from a successful franchise.
• Ben Pearce listed out his top 5 questions about PowerShell this week at TechEd. He also recommends the book "PowerShell in Action" by Bruce Payette. I heartedly agree with this endorsement as the book is excellent.
• It looks like there are going to be more family friendly games for the XBOX360. I for one am glad to hear that. The other day as I was trying to find some games my 4 year old with the broken leg could play I realized how many games I have that wouldn't be appropriate for him. This is very good news in my opinion.

TechEd 2007 - Heading Home

TechEd isn't technically over, but it is for me. I'm on a flight home in about four hours. Frankly, I am very excited to be going home. It's been almost a year since my last public presentation, and the only work travel I've done in the last 12 months was that Gartner EA conference last June, the Thomas Erl SOA workshop back in September and TechEd 07. I am simply out of practice being gone from home this long.

It doesn't look like I'll be going dark another 12 months before my next public presentation. People must have noticed me stick my head up to do TechEd, I've been asked about presenting at seven conferences that all happen in the next six months. I'll do a few - I hope to gravitate to the ones close to campus and don't require me to be gone very long - but my problem with presenting right now is that I'm still talking theory. I left evangelism because I wanted to build something. We're still getting started on that "build something" thing, so I don't have anything to show, just stuff we're thinking about building. Hopefully, by conference season next year, I'll actually have something to show.

My session yesterday went ok - I think it could have been better, but the audience seemed to get a lot out of it. It was a larger crowd Monday, but only one customer came up afterwards to discuss the talk with me. Yesterday, I had a half a dozen or so. I'd post slides for you dear reader, but I didn't do any. However, I think on of the sessions I will be doing in the next few months is basically a breakout version of this talk, so I'll need slides for that.

The attendee party was almost a bust due to rainstorm. When I got there around 8pm, the word was that all the rides but Spiderman were closed. So I rode Spiderman with a bunch of UK blokes I ended up hanging out with, and by the time we got out the rain had passed and almost everything was open again. Unfortunately, the one thing that didn't reopen was Hulk, which I was really looking to ride again. I got to ride it two years ago at TechEd 2005 as part of a special trip the TechEd core team took. But I did get to ride Spiderman, Dueling Dragons, Jurassic Park and Ripsaw Falls (I got drenched) which is pretty much all the big rides but Hulk.

I did take a little time out yesterday before the expo closed to go on a Swag Hunt, mostly to get little trinkets for my kids. I picked up my Sourcegear Evil Mastermind shirt on Monday (the only piece of swag I actually wanted). Mostly, it was the usual assortment of little flashlights, yo-yo's, and the like. I do want to give a shout out to the /n software folks, who were giving away a custom painted Xbox 360 with the Powershell logo. That was cool. Seemed almost every booth had some type of hi-tech gadget giveaway, but that was the coolest by far. They also gave me a copy of their new NetCmdlets product, which Dale has apparently been playing with. The question is, which will Dale be more jealous of: my copy of NetCmdlets or the cool PowerShell sticker I got for my laptop?

TechEd 2007 Day Four

Yesterday was another day of talking primarily to people I know, inside and outside of Microsoft. Got into a long conversation with Gareth Jones and Peter Provost about combining test-driven and model-driven development. Having done evangelism for five of the last six years, I haven't been an agile practitioner. I'm getting to the point where I feel dirty when I don't write tests or don't check in, but not dirty enough to actually do anything about it (yet). But practicing or not, it was fascinating to hear Gareth and Peter brainstorm on this topic.

Speaking of storms, we had a downpour here yesterday. Thunderstorm moved right over the convention center - you could tell by how loud the thunder and rain were. I hit a seam in the storm heading back to my hotel, but I did get drenched heading to the influencer party @ Margaritaville. The party was fun, after I dried off, though I seem to remember knowing more of the influencers last time I was @ TechEd. Ended up sharing a cab back to the hotel with Ted Neward and Mark Miller. Ted's like the IT Industry's Switzerland, so I took the opportunity to pick his brain on the goings on in other communities - primarily the Ruby community.

I did get a chance to hack a little code yesterday. As a side effect of my interest in programming language design, I'm also interested in parser development. Towards that end, I've been learning about Parsing Expression Grammars. The original PEG parser was built in Haskell, but I decided to write mine in F#. Even though I had never worked in F# before, I got my parser up and running fairly easily the first time. I did hit one syntax snag that Don Syme helped me with. I'll blog this more in detail later, but I ported a simple arithmetic grammar packrat parser written in 120 lines of Haskell to about 90 lines of F#. Not bad for a first timer. (Don got it down to 25 lines, using F#'s new Active Patterns feature.)

I gearing up for my second talk, which happens right after lunch. I recorded a Virtual TechEd session this morning with the help of my friend Jon Flanders. It's an 8 minute overview of the Rome project, so it is VERY high level. But anything that helps get the word out I see as a good thing, right?

Lunchtime Doughnuts 9

• I am a few days behind on this, but Joe McKendrick writes an interesting piece on if businesspeople are begging for SOA. It is fascinating because I believe that SOA should come from the business, not because of the delivery mechanism, but because of the results. If services will truly make a business more adaptable and responsive to change shouldn't all business people desire those results? At the same time they don't care how that end is achieved, just that it is. That's where we in the IT industry need to do a better job of working out the details amongst ourselves and show the business how SOA can benefit them. Once we do that we should see more SOA adoptions go smoother and real ROI can be seen.
• Joel Dehlin has blogged on the myth of youth being the ones that use instant messaging, publish and read blogs, participate in social networks, etc. I agree that the technology has been integrated into every layer of society. If you have ever been at the airport or at a Starbucks you know what I mean. Who is it exactly that has a Crackberry addiction? It seems technology has really become a part of our culture, and that it's not just one age group that is adopting the changes.
• Visual Studio 2008 shell was announced at TechEd yesterday. Even Harry who was on-site missed the release, but it certainly looks cool.
• If you have ever met me you would quickly discover I have quite a background in Unix. That being the case I couldn't ignore the news that Sun is releasing new blades for the desktop. I had a blade on my desk for several years and it was really a nice system to use. For those that would bash me since I work at Microsoft now I will just say that when you support Solaris boxes, having one on your desk is quite helpful. I don't take sides in the Holy War. (via Scoble)

TechEd 2007 Day Three

On Monday, I primarily talked to customers and partners. Yesterday, I spent most of my time talking to other Microsofties that I hadn't seen or spoken to in a while. For example, Tim Mallalieu was there talking about the Entity Data Model. I worked with Tim a few years back - I did his first interview when he came to Microsoft. We didn't talk much EDM, but it sure was good to see him.

I finally met Gareth Jones in person. Gareth - along with Steve, Stuart and Alan - have a new book out on the DSL toolkit. Neither stealing nor cajoling worked, I'll have to go get my own copy or read it on Safari. Gareth and I talked a while about language evolution - how DSLs come to be. One of the subjects we talked about was internal DSLs - I'll be interested in Gareth's non-immediate reaction. Gareth also blogged yesterday about a TechEd announcement that I had missed: VS 2008 Shell.

I also spent a long time talking to various members of the DLR team. There seems to be quite a stir brewing about how the Ruby and Microsoft community can / will come together. I will wisely keep my opinions to myself - I'm already in the REST/SOAP fray, no need to join another - though I will say that it's encouraging to hear the call for "a good, complete [Ruby language] specification" in order to support multiple implementations.

TechEd 2007 - Day Two Morning

My session yesterday went very well, especially considering I did no prep whatsoever. Drew a fairly good sized audience - people were sitting on the floor and standing in the back, though honestly the TLC "theaters" only hold about 50 chairs. Most of them stayed the for whole session - at least until I started to run over (only 15 minutes, not too bad).

After my session, I ended up talking to a customer from a large home loan firm for about two hours. Turns out we had a friend in common, a guy I used to work with a long time ago @ ModaCad named Brian. This is actually the second time I've run into someone at a major Microsoft conference who has a single degree of Brian, which is a little freaky.

For dinner, I went out with some MS field architects and some customers. We ended up having such a big group, we split up into two tables and somehow my table had four MS employees and only one customer. But that customer was from a very large retail firm and we had lots to talk about. Ate way too much, though I didn't combine that with drinking too much. And, as a bonus, I didn't tell the customer than any of their ideas were "stupid", as my friend Christoph pointed out I had done the last time I was out to dinner with one of his customers. (That customer wanted to run Java on their mainframe. I stand by my assessment.)

I was planning to head up to my room, but ran into Jon Flanders in the lobby. Hadn't seen Jon since the class I took with him last fall, so I ended up hanging out with him for several hours, chatting up the folks we knew who walked by, including Rocky, Bob and Brian. I realized I've been heads down with no speaking or travel for about a year, so it's been a while since I had seen many of these folks. For example, I hadn't seen Brian in about three years when we were both presenting at TechEd New Zealand. The downside of hanging out in the lobby is that I didn't get any code written last night, which I was sort of planning to do when I headed back to the hotel. But chatting with these folks - esp. Jon this time - helps be figure out what I want to write anyway, so I guess it's worth it! :)

I ended up sleeping in this morning (still jet lagged) and skipping the morning session. No second keynote this year, which I didn't realize until I looked at the conf guide this morning. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

TechEd 2007 - Day One Morning

Being at TechEd without thousands of things to worry about is somewhat strange. But I could get used to coming and going as I please, not tracking down speakers, ordering whiteboards and the rest of the responsibility that comes with track ownership.

My first session is right after lunch - 1:15 @ Green TLC Theater 4 if you're on site. Our Technical Learning Center (aka "the cabana") is fairly sparsely attended, at least for the moment. MSIT has never had this significant a presence at TechEd before, so I wouldn't be surprised if the attendees aren't quite sure what to make of it. I went over to the Architecture and SOA & Web Services area and ran into quite a few people I knew. I expect I'll spend more time down there than in my cabana.

I skipped the keynote this morning, apparently they did a Back to the Future parody. Had I known, I might have gotten up. But my flight got in at midnight last night, I didn't get to the hotel until 1am and an 8:30 keynote on the east coast feels like a 5:30 keynote to my still jet-lagged system. Since I skipped it, I'm not sure what was announced, but the opening press release salvo mentions the first CTP of SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 (aka the Visual Studio version formally known as "Orcas") and the Open XML SDK among other things. I've been hacking some Open XML lately, so I'll have to check that last thing out. Apparently, there was some also discussion of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, but in the press release it came across as Infrastructure Optimization. Not sure if those are one in the same or not.

BTW, for those not attending TechEd, you can check out Virtual TechEd and the TechEd Virtual Pressroom. Not the same as being here - no conversations, no swag and no roller coasters. But at least you can keep up on what's being announced, presented and spoken about.

I'm off to lunch. Missing the keynotes == missing breakfast. My session is in about an hour, so I'll probably post again afterwards. I'm hoping for more conversation and less presentation, so the only prep I've done is to iron my speaker shirt.