After pre-conference workshops and sessions, the keynote session started at 6:30 AM at south pacific ballroom. Paul Litwin gave brief introduction of devConnections and enlighten us about the significance of this event as it lined up with the visual studio 2005 launch.
Paul Litwin Speaking at the launch.
Time Machine - Dev Connections 1985 by Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold was the next speaker with a very interesting topic “DevConnections 1985“. It was an excellent presentation!... Charles took us back in 1985 and even though he was running windows 1.0 and DOS on virtual PC, the whole speech was flawlessly aimed to discuss top view, deskview and evolution of graphical user interfaces (I was discussing this later with John and he mentioned side kick and Norton commander not being mentioned). It was a pure Charles style presentation; reminded me of a true geek whose book, Programming windows was defacto for API programming at the time when I was doing bachelors. He coined the phrases like “I know you are all accustomed to assembly and aren't comfortable with C because of performance issues“ and “I don't know about you guys but I'm going home and write me some windows programs.“
Charles Petzold, talking about horror or TSR's.
Charles Petzold, demonstrating multi-tasking with Windows 1.1
Scott Guthrie: VS 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed.
Scott started the “75 new features in 40 minutes” presentation with a little bit of background about the product and how he started the project in May 2003 with anticipation of completing it by March 2004. He made a short video explaining the development process of ASP.NET as a product. The video is a must see! It summarized what were 15 team members of ASP.NET development team were doing in between playing foosball and writing specs. Detail object model specs of ASP.NET Grid View control were 67 pages long. The entire library comprises of 8 million lines of code in 1800 files. He later showed internals of webpart class and elaborated on stress and unit testing procedures for grilling this massive product. 512,000 test cases were written and then an internal app, maddot testcase manager was used to perform stress testing on 370 machines simulating 7000 hits per second which accumulated to be 15 billion requests.
In the second part of his presentation, Scott described the functionality of the product, design view enhancements etc. The most exciting feature was unit testing within the IDE. He also showed how VS.NET provides the support for code coverage and automatically highlights the untested parts. Further feature sets described included Intellisense everywhere (configs, markup…you name it), dynamic code updates (no recompile for changes, both in C# and VB.NET, even with breakpoints), object data source, output cache, sql dependency, memberships, master detail view, personalization, security, webparts etc. He mentioned that Hilton, HMV, NHS and citigroup have been using ASP.NET since beta and have been using the cool new features which helped his team creating a stable, feature rich and sophisticated product.
And then there was also an awesome marketing video shown about HMV, which Matt Nunn showed again in the keynote this morning.
I’ve seen this in several presentations before but it’s always nice to see the extensive featureset offered by Microsoft next generation development tools.
Some other pictures of me, Jeremy and John.
Three of us at keynote.
Jeremy's cool pose.
Playing XBOX at SQL magazine stall in the expo.