Tuesday

INTRO

I am really enjoying the Tech Ed conference. It's kind of like how I always wished that college could be. Take little bits of this, little bits of that, learning a broad variety of things without having to work too hard at it and get hung up on those pesky details. Indeed it does feel a lot like a series of university lectures- except that there are no tests, no required readings, and no homework.



It's pretty ironic, then, that I'm actually taking far more notes than I ever took at school. Necessary if I'm going to remember anything to put up here after sleeping like the dead for 11 hours.




I want to capture as much as I can in blog format, to make this experience "worth it." What I'm coming to realize today is that this is a marathon and I need to be less crazed. Yes, rooms do sometimes fill to the point that you can't get into a session, but it doesn't happen that often and even if it does there is probably a session just as interesting next door. I probably don't have to be doing this rush from room to room that I've been doing. The more experienced techedders seem to know this. They move more slowly. Or maybe they are just old ;)

Session: A lap around IE9 for Developers

This was the world's longest sales pitch, but it had some information in it, too. The main points of interest was a sincere plea from Microsoft to ditch IE6 for the good of the web... "so the web can move forward" (heh), as well as a long list of HTML5/CSS3 standards that IE9 will implement. Also it was lots of comparisons between IE9 beta and chrome/firefox etc. Those became a little grating. But if you forgave the guy for that, it was possible to learn quite a lot about what the future of web programming could be like.

*IE9 will run javascript at speeds similar to other modern browsers, unlike IE8 which really really doesn't. How? It's pretty cool- if your processor has extra cycles (or extra cores!) available, it will compile the javascript to make it that much faster to execute.

*You can add SVG images just as you would any other HTML element, right in the HTML. This was actually pretty cool. An SVG image is an image written with vectors instead of a grid of pixels. Thus you can zoom in as much as you want to and lose nothing. There is freeware out there than can turn images into SVG images. Not something for photos, but great for diagrams and such.

*CSS3 Media Queries- Show different content based on what device the person is coming in from- or even how many pixels wide the person's browser is. Pretty slick and easy syntax.

*Opacity Controls in the HTML

*Lots of developer tools, including built in Fiddler (did you know? Fiddler was built by a microsoft employee. Microsoft knows! They will tell you everytime they use it or mention it for anything in a demo)

*Hardware acceleration- IE9 will press your GPU into service to help out, if it doesn't seem to be too busy and can spare a moment from its push ups.

*You can download and test out IE9 preview from here: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
Windows vista/7 only of course. It won't kill whatever IE you currently have. Also you can run lots of tests on that site and see the new features for yourself.

Session: C# in the Big World

This was one of those expert sessions where extreme mind blowing had been promised to me on Sunday. The room was really big and really full. It was pretty cool, because the Program Manager for the C# language was telling us not only about new C# stuff but also why did things in a certain way, and how they came to that decision. This was very cool because that's insight you can't often get.

The session was largely about dynamic objects. You can do things like this:

dynamic calculator = GetCalculator();
int sum = calculator.Add(1,1)

The idea being that the calculator object is coming from some crazy javascript, or maybe ruby, or the COM, or something insane. In past versions of C# you would have had to assign it to an object. Then you would have to painstakingly cast it and sub-objects before you used its methods.

He gave a lot of examples which I didn't have time to write down- I will definitely link slides as soon as they come out. Basically, if you use reserved word dynamic to declare an object, the compiler gives that a break and wont typecheck. It's sweet for interacting with COM objects and javascript objects. Another example given was code that interacts with bing. A lot of developers write a lot of javascript to interact with bing, because the javascript-bing world is dynamically typed, and its just so much easier to manipulate in that same world. But who wants to write javascript? Come on, really no one does. Unless you have a strong need for that to be client-side, it can be done very easily in C#, now, too. Very cool demo on this.

Plus, the guy was effing hilarious. As in, really, really, really funny. For example, declaring a new javascript class from C# can be a little cumbersome, and so he said this, this is an exact quote: "We toyed for a long time with giving this a better syntax, but to be honest we just couldn't figure it out." It's just so refreshing to hear microsoft talk that way. And the way he said it was so funny. It looks a little less funny this morning. But it was very funny.

Session: What you need to know for IE6 to IE8 conversation.

This was a decent session. The main point was: If your apps look terrible in IE8, don't panic! A lot of the time the fix is really simple! There were probably a handful of takeaways from this, so I will just go ahead and list them.

*Most important: Make sure IE8 knows this app is in the intranet, not the internet. That way it won't throw you a million messages warning you that dangerous things are afoot.

*Don't turn off protected mode!!! Add this app to sites protected mode ignores.

*Check for code that says, for versions of IE that are LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO IE6... change it to greater than or equal to. (I've never seen this in NextGen)

*Just released this week! The IE Compatibility Test Tool! This is pretty cool. This should definitely be a part of our effort to bring NextGen to IE8. From what I can tell, it scans the source and spits out potential issues.

*Want to test a fix in .aspx pages without without having to do a build/deployment, but for some reason a local change can't be done / is hard? You can do this with fiddler. Since fiddler is a middleman tool that sits between browser and remote server, you can tell fiddler to display X if it ever receives Y, and thus test fixes pretty easily. This goes beyond just IE6/8 issues, I am going to use this all the time now, if I can remember to...

OUTRO

Another day of TechEd strewn before you! Thanks for reading, and remember, a piece of TechEd swag can be yours if you come to my desk next week and tell me something that you learned.