Day 1 was packed! 2 hour keynote with Ray Ozzie announcing Azure (www.azure.com), Panel Discussion with Microsoft Canada and the press (see other post) and then two sessions on Visual Studio (1) VSTS 2010 cool new features (2) Agile & Visual Studio.

First key thing to mention is that many (all?) of the sessions are available on-line here: www.microsoftpdc.com (which links you over to channel9)

Keynote:

In the interest if time, skipping the summary of Azure as I'm assuming that's available from many other sources. Here were some of the thoughts and impressions that I walked away from the session with:

  • Azure's Fabric Controller - the statement was made that you would have the ability to upgrade your app in real-time. The app and OS are managed separately using the Fabric Controller - during an upgrade developers would specify end state and the FC will carefully make changes. No details in the demo, but the promise is a very interesting one and I look forward to seeing how this will play out. 
  • A new Language: the Azure team demo'd "modelling your service" which incorporated a whole new set of terminology and concepts (example: roles (code); channels (networks) and end points) - very cool new set of challenges for developers to take on. 
  • New Patterns and Practices: The MS Team did a good job of drawing out the fact that as a developer all your .net skills are transferrable, but I think the real challenge will be the new kinds of solutions that will need to be pioneered in this new S+S hybrid model
  • Bluehoo example (www.bluehoo.com) - this grabbed me from the perspective that now small startups with ideas that require massive scale or reliability right out of the gate, have access to infrastructure that would typically be reservce for established enterprises (or very well funded startups)
  • Testing: It's interesitng to start to think about how cloud-based apps will be performance/load tested.

If you're going to watch the session, check out mid-way thru where they publish up a new service to the cloud - couldn't believe how easy it was to deploy. (Yes - I'm sure I sure I have koolaid dripping from my face....)

Session: Lap around VSTS 2010

Disappointed that I missed this one, but Alex said it was a good one - here's the direct link: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL47/

Session: TFS 2010 Cool new Features

OK - after having spent the last year mucking around in VSTS 2008 (and having a good time), I definitely started to feel the pain on certain fronts. This session was like waking up on Christmas Morning and finding out that your parents got you everything on your wish list (with some minor exceptions). Definitely recommend watching this session if/when it comes on-line. Where to begin...

  1. Parallel Dev - we've had so much pain at one client over our merging and branching strategy - they've rewritten it and it's a huge step forward - the graphical representations of branches and change-set tracking was a beautiful thing
  2. Work Item Usability - support for rich text, you can now make work items heirarchical, support for your own Query folders, permissions on those folders, robust new query tool enhancements. Sadly, still no support for Copy & Paste of images into work items. 
  3. Sharepoint Web Parts - they refactored Web Access into Sharepoint Web parts

This just scratches the surface. Check it out if you can.

Session: Agile and VS 2010

  1. better support for TDD - enhancements to allow you to stay in your initial test case without having to switch in/out to stub things out
  2. Gated check-in - reverses the typical order of check-in-then-build-then-test so that you can't check in without passing the build&test gate first
  3. Sexier, easier build reports
  4. Better, smoother integration with Excel
  5. Very cool 3rd party product from Conchange for teams using post-it-notes (will try to update post to embed link/name later)

Looking forward to Day 2