So, today was the first full day of teched, and as usual, it felt like standing underneath an information waterfall. So much to see, learn and try to remember.
I started the day with Peter Willmot’s session on BI, specifically on cubes and how to present them to the users. Couple of cool sharepoint features, including reporting service web parts and the excel services. Since I committed to learning sharepoint, it’s interesting to see just how much integrates into it.
The second session that i decided to attend was on rich interfaces in WPF. Very, very impressive what can be done in WPF wil minimal work. I think that (along with a refresher on C# 2.0) is joining sharepoint on my list of things to learn this year.
The last session before lunch was another sharepoint session, this time on creating sharepoint features in Visual Studio. Also very interesting, especially the information on creating workflows for sharepoint.
After lunch I attended a session on Blobs in SQL 2008. It wasn’t bad, but seemed a bit shallow. Gert Drapers’ presentation on Data Dude (aka Visual Studio Team System Database Edition) showed some of the fantastic uses for that tool for database developers. Effective version control over database schemas, refactoring tables and stored procedures, change generation based on two projects, two databases or two schema definitions, or any combination. Very nice. I do want to play with that tool.
The last session of the day was a quick overview of security in .net 3.5. Basically what to do and what not to do to make the application hard to hack. I’m very familiar with database security, sometimes it’s good to take a look at the other side.
I have a whole bunch of photos, I’ll probably only get them online much later this week