We started our day at 7:30 am by meeting up with Mark Dunn and heading from breakfast to the second keynote address. This time the speakers were essentially Samantha Bee and Paul Flessner – vice president of Windows Server Systems. Paul’s actually been to Atlanta recently giving a talk about SQL Server. I think he’s had a promotion since then. Anyway, we had a cool demo of the new RFID support built into Visual Studio, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL 2005 64 bit vs 32 bit. It turns out that while Microsoft has the 3rd place marketshare of Database $$ behind IBM and Oracle, they are the #1 installed database across all platforms (including Unix, Linux, and mainframe) in the world. This includes leadership in the enterprise application area. The capture fewer $$ b/c they cost so much less. The sideshow talked about a $320,000 per processor cost to install IBM’s DB2 vs Microsoft’s $25,000 per processor cost.
After the keynote it was my turn to work the CodeZone booth. CodeZone has officially launched now, so I can tell you what it is. Head over to www.codezone.com to check out the next evolution in developer web portals, this one supported by Microsoft but driven by the community at large. Sign in and create a profile which identifies your particular development interests and your location (zip code). The portal site will allow you to add your favorite blogs and news feeds to your portal desktop. As the site is based on ASP.Net 2.0 web parts, you can drag the content windows around to fit your particular needs. One of the best parts is the local events container. Since this is a community driven site, if anyone enters something (a new blog, a new event) which the system thinks you might be interested in, you get informed as the new items bubble up onto your screen. This is sort of like a MyYahoo or MySharepoint portal site, but developer focused.
Brendon and I had lunch with Todd Fine and the RDA crew. Most of the lunch conversation was dominated by RDA business, but we did occasionally discuss the conference and the sessions. The RDA people seemed to really be focusing on the BizTalk sessions.
After lunch, Brendon and I headed over to the cabanas to listen to a BizTalk session with Mark Dunn and Mark Berry. Mark Berry presented an intro to BizTalk’s context driven routing. To those of you who aren’t sure what BizTalk is, it’s a product Microsoft sells to help connect systems together by taking messages (output) from one system, performing required changes on the message, and sending the message to the next system in the chain. BizTalk is an Enterprise Application Integration program, able to connect several systems together with a single central point of orchestration. When talking about context based message routing, BizTalk is able to promote certain elements of a message to the message context or header. Then, based on the information in the context, certain operations can be done. For example, let’s say we have an order processing system taking in orders from both the US and Mexico. If we wanted to send the US messages to one shipping department and the Mexican messages to another shipping department, we could promote the origination location information to the context and programmatically decide which send port should receive which message. Logically quite simple, the extreme flexibility of the BizTalk product make this less than trivial to configure. Mark Berry was an excellent instructor and gave me a thorough understanding of the hows and whys behind context driven routing. I’m sure that I’ll have to do more research if I ever actually want to use the entire product, but I’m now aware of the high quality of training programs available at Dunn Training.
Tuesday night featured the CodeZone launch party – open bar, shrimp, sushi, alligator, potato cups filled with cheese and more. The food was great and the company was better. I saw lots of (now) familiar faces and spent some time chatting with Chris Williams from South Carolina, Trisha Lacey from Microsoft and CodeZone, Caleb Jenkins from Oklahoma, Frank La Vigne from Virginia, Rob Zelt from North Carolina, and more. If I miss names, I apologize. I’m writing this from memory and I did have a drink or two. I did want to mention the cool toys Trisha handed out to those of us on the CodeZone beta testing team. We got these neat digital compasses which will be very handy whenever we go camping or driving around in unfamiliar territory.
After the CodeZone launch party, several of us headed over to play the Mobilizer Madness game. If we won we could win a smart phone or some other fancy electronic doodad. Here’s the game: you get an internet aware Pocket PC phone connected to a website. You have to follow the prompts to answer a variety of questions and complete a variety of missions. We had to use the Pocket PC to take a creative photo, answer two questions about previously delivered mobility-based sessions, and interact with a variety of actors sprinkled around the convention center. Our character interactions involved playing Boggle, attempting to pick up a woman at a coffee bar, making a “tourist” laugh, and listening to a story for hints from a guy dressed like a Blues Brother. The entire affair was timed – 1 hour to get as much done as possible. We ended up coming in 5th place out of 15 teams, but we blame our poor performance on the two kids who joined our group. They ended up with the phone as the contest started and were fairly intent on not giving it up. They had this terrible habit of reading half of the question and then taking off running at top speed away from us. We wasted at least 10 minutes and split the group up several times trying to keep up with them. Brendon and I were sure that if we had control of the device we could have done better by fully reading the directions for each mission. Oh well – we didn’t end up in last place.
Following the Mobilizer game, Brendon and I headed over to the DotNetNuke Birds Of a Feather session where the creators of the DotNetNuke web portal software talked to us about the past, present, and future of their software. DotNetNuke runs hundreds of websites ranging from small community sites like the Devcow website to some extremely critical intranet sites. One guy at the BOF session was from a hospital equipment sales company who used DotNetNuke for 1500 users across several countries. The guys from DotNetNuke were extremely nice and were happy to talk about how they were making money on their free software, how they were looking for help from the community to build up their library of modules, and about their involvement and commitment to keep their software free for anyone who wants it. This was a great session and I received a copy of the Wrox book about developing for DotNetNuke as a result of my brilliantly probing (or extremely uninformed) questions.
We ended the day by heading over to the TechNet Jam Session at a local nightclub where who do we see playing piano during Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” but Atlanta’s own Glen Gordon! He’s good too! We hung around for several hours, having a beer or two while chatting and listening to random blues-y/folksy music before heading out for the evening.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet