Day 6 - Wrap up

Technical content of this issue - 2 out of 5

A few final observations on the trip, commentary, links to online session videos and, of course, your mail

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

After the conference ended last night I met Russ Williams for dinner at the Westin. There's a big commotion on the bottom floor of the atrium, so I headed down to check it out. Turns out in one of the bars they're filming an episode of the TV show Chuck. After watching for a while I started up to restaurant and there's a plaque next to the elevator saying it was one of the elevators filmed in the movie True Lies with Arnold Schwarz..Schwarzen...the governor. At that moment it really sank in I'm in Los Angeles. That explains the signs for the ham sandwich box lunches this noon describing them as a "Duet Sanwich of Black Forest Ham Prosciutto Cheese Romaine Hearts, Sliced Tomatoes Brie Cheese Violet Mustard Spread accompanied by Dill Potato Salad and a Lemon Bar."

Reviewing the past few days, I realize I've had a lot of fun poking fun at the geeky stereotype and my fellow attendees. This has probably been a disservice to my colleagues, very nice people with whom I enjoyed several conversations. For instance, just yesterday I had a nice chat at lunch with a gentleman about Azure. He was just an average guy in his mid forties with 2 kids wearing jeans, a golf shirt and a baseball cap saying "My other car is the Enterprise."

What did Mom Tell You?

We're getting mixed messages about how soon Azure may break out of the managed code limitation depending on to whom you talk. Earlier this week I mentioned that Microsoft has hinted about supporting native code in the future, but the rep I spoke to in the Azure booth said they really had no idea how they were going to accomplish that. Then today on the plane I'm watching the video of a session where the presenter, Steve Marx, said without equivocation "we will do native code next year" - that's a verbatim quote that I don't believe for an instant.

Seeing Beyond Vista

The one big thing this week that I spent absolutely no time on was Windows 7. This is the successor to Windows Vista and is at least 2 years away. I heard some comments, including from Microsoft folks, that the emphasis on Windows 7 was an indication that Microsoft was throwing in the towel on Vista. That will be interesting to watch over the next few years.

Commentary

The 2000 PDC in Orlando introduced .Net, an entirely new way to program Microsoft technology. It was a huge success and the basis for almost all Microsoft technology today. In 2001, Microsoft introduced My Services, an online technology to provide a single authentication method for the entire web, as well as additional consumer technology available to folks with a My Services ID and and Microsoft's partners. That was the only PDC I've missed in the past decade, which was OK because My Services ended up going absolutely nowhere, now relegated to the ash heap of forgotten technologies like the Newton. Which one is Azure and the Azure services platform? For the other two I could make a good guess at the time, but I'm mystified about this.

Pro

For a new company, buying into Azure means not worrying about how your app is going to get on the web and how you're going to manage it. You get scaling, you get fault tolerance, you get disaster recovery. Think about that - no more DR planning docs, no more hotfix worries, etc. To rid yourself of all that minutia so you can focus on architecting and building your app to meet you business needs is huge. Any new enterprise would be foolish not to jump on board.

Con

OK, where's your data backup tape? Huh? it's in "the cloud"? Show me your schema - what? There aren't any schemas? There's so much different in the whole paradigm that people are going to be hesitant. Not just with not owning the servers - FINRA already houses their servers on EDS premises and only knows them as non-touchable things somewhere out there in the ether. But think about the new data model - what are the millions of data folks that write schema and stored procedures going to do? Will data be driven by C# developers and a direct model of the business domain? I think that has been debunked as a good idea in the past. Existing apps with a more conventional approach are not going to be able to just move over without full rewrites. This just isn't going to happen, it's too big a leap.

Links to Online Videos of Selected Sessions

Video of all the sessions will be online for viewing by the public - you can get a full list at https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/timeline.aspx. The online videos are nicely done, with the slides being shown in most of the screen and a small area displaying the speaker. Here are a a couple of sessions that I found useful this week in figuring out what they are talking about, plus some first level videos about other technologies that I may not have gotten a chance to preview. If someone sent in a question about a technology I didn't cover, I tried to list a video here. These are on the Channel 9 site - you may or may not need to sign in. If you do get prompted to create a user ID, it just takes a user name not even a password and very little personal data - it's well worth it.

That ought to keep you busy! If you learn anything neat, please let me know (then I don't have to watch them all!)

Letters! We Get Letters!

Any letter introduction here

DW from MD writes - By "sessions that you missed," do you mean "babes lounging at the pool"?

DW obviously hasn't spent much time poolside at the LA Marriott Downtown. I had left out a description of the pool, not knowing if anyone would read the newsletter while they were eating, but DW forces me to elaborate. When I arrived, theres one person there - a guy in his mid-fifties or later wearing a white, long sleeve dress shirt, black pants and black dress shoes laying on a chaise lounge. After about 30 minutes he gets up and turns his chair to keep facing the sun. Then, after about an hour, a guy comes down in a bathrobe to swim. That's when Mr. Speedo came into the picture. Needless to say, I stayed pretty focused on my videos.

Tomorrow

Don't email, don't call, don't watch your mailbox, this is it. See you whenever Microsoft changes their mind and rolls out someting new.  Actually, I might send out one more email if I get the newsletter web site working on Azure.

Biff
The Guy Left Behind to Shut Off the Lights, Biff's PDC Newsletter