I came to TechEd 2009 with the intention of identifying what happened with Dynamic Data since last year. For those of you who don’t know; Dynamic Data is Microsoft’s answer to Ruby on Rails. It’s a means of quickly scaffolding your application with validated text boxes, date pickers and images based on the metadata included within your data source. So a database data type of VARCHAR(50) would automatically transform into a textbox with a size limitation of fifty characters say.
Continue reading ‘What’s Happened to Dynamic Data?’
Author Archive for anthony geoghegan
I just saw Stephen Walther deliver the session I came to TechEd to see, what’s new in the client-side scripting side for delivering Asp.Net content. I have been waiting to find out how the Asp.Net team hoped to integrate jQuery into Asp.Net for some time. Like a lot of you, I’ve come to the conclusion the only smart way to deliver data-heavy pages is via client-side scripting. The trick is to confine bandwidth only to readily consumed data as much as possible, as the large amount of mark-up associated with a normal ASP.NET page is often just bloat.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft Ajax Bares new Client-Side Goodies’
Devastatingly smart Rafal Lukawiecki, that virtuoso of technical presentation, gave yet another brilliant presentation on how the seemingly “ivory tower” techniques of Artificial Intelligence can be used in present day applications for unusual data validation scenarios.
Continue reading ‘Predictive Reasoning’
I’m just not feelin’ the Microsoft love here any more.
I’m a Developer and I think Microsoft may have short-changed us developers a bit this year. They’ve rolled the IT Professional part of TechEd into the same week as the developerment section.
As a result, no more than two sessions per time-slot hold any interest for me as a general developer. Of those two, my preferred choice is nearly always full to capacity. Which means you have to turn up at least ten minutes early. This is a wildly less groovy than last year. I had a much less tame rant prepared, but wisely I refrained from venting :-).
Also, because the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) is on next week in the US, some of the more senior Microsoft presenters are understandably holding off coming here to TechEd (in balmy Berlin). Lesson learned, next year I’ll move heaven and earth to go to PDC instead 
Recently, while developing a Web Application with a large development team, we initially encountered problems with keeping the many WCF interfaces consistent between the Client and Server applications. Because of parallel development, both Client and Server applications developed a sort of race condition. Client Application’s were typically built against older generations of the WCF interface. It was difficult to ensure that each locally developed Client Interface matched the current, deployed Service Interface.
Continue reading ‘Problems with Consuming many WCF Services in One Application’
This is the penultimate day of Tech Ed and I’m beginning to feel the burn. Long hours slaving over a hot notebook (not a metaphor) combined with early mornings have finally worn down the chiselled figure that is me.
Well all lies aside, this morning I found it difficult to identify exactly which seminars appealed to me. I finally settled on an initially intriguing session on tracking User Experience (UX to the cognoscenti). Why track User Experience, well assuming you care, the idea is to incrementally improve the usability of applications by monitoring unbiased user behaviour within a statistically significant number of user actions.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Four’
I had intended to start today with a brisk, rousing discussion on threads, but had to settle for the “Future of Unit Testing”, as the talk was cancelled. I usually prefer very technical talks, in fact the more impenetrable the better. The talk actually turned out to be interesting though and not as fluffy as it might have appeared at first glance. It was given by TypeMock’s, Roy Osherove. TypeMock currently make the best .NET Isolation Framework in my humble opinion, pity it’s a commercial product. It’s hard to justify purchasing software when so many effective, free alternatives are available.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Three’
Five seminars viewed today. The somewhat misnamed “Developing Data-Centric Web Applications” turned out to be a fascinating discussion on the relatively new ASP.NET “Dynamic Data” feature. This is sort of a belated response from Microsoft to the Ruby on Rails hype from a few years ago. You know, generate a web site based on your data in under ten minutes flat. But unlike Ruby on Rails, elements from “Dynamic Data” can be plucked out and added to a more traditional ASP.NET control based application thereby significantly simplifying and decoupling them.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Two’
The keynote speech delivered by the ever-enthusiastic Jason Zander, as usual, promised and delivered peeks into forthcoming Microsoft products. In this case, pre-alpha versions of both Visual Studio 2010 and the much awaited Windows 7.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day One’
The System.Diagnostics.EventLogTraceListener class, when set up log WCF traffic, can cause a memory leak when attempting to Log Service traffic, if the Event Log Source (specified in the “initializeData” attribute of the Event Log Listener configuration element) doesn’t previously exist and the Service is running under a User, without sufficient privileges to create a new Event Log source.
Continue reading ‘Possible WCF Memory leak with Event Log Trace Listener Class’