Scott Hanselman

Here's the last of the pictures of TechEd.  I need to head home to work on our SDK.  Sorry I didn't blog a lot of technical stuff this year.  I do however have a lot of thoughts about what I've seen and will try to put some commentary up this week.

Here's Aussie Adam Cogan who gave a talk on reporting in Exchange with SQL Reporting Services to a packed room.  I'm wincing as he's sitting on me.

It's Bob Reselman, author of Coding Slave!  If you buy a copy, buy it from his website so he gets more $.

It's James Newkirk signing a book for Benjamin.  James was the primary on NUnit!

Carl Franklin and Rory hosting the .NET Rocks BoF.  Note that there were a few people walking around with T-Shirts that said "Rory was invited." ;)

The whole Cabana session concept was a FABULOUS one.  It really built a sense of community and gave a formal place to hang out.  This really was one of the best TechEd's ever for me, and I wasn't even speaking! (other than an informal Cabana on CodeRush and the CodeGen BoF).  (Note that Scott Golightly is the only one actually looking at the camera! :) )

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hey, look at this!  An article in the Wall Street Journal with "RSS," "Scoble," "SPOT Watch," "Diabetic," "Corillian," "Hanselman," and "Blog" all in the same paragraph.  That's a hell of a thing, eh?

Regarding RSS:  The technology also has helped some enterprises keep in touch with customers. Scott Hanselman, an executive at Corillian Corp., a provider of financial-services software, bought a SpotWatch -- a wristwatch that receives radio waves to alert him whenever there's a company meeting coming up, and when he needs an insulin boost. (He is a diabetic.) But a bug in his watch, which uses Microsoft technology, halted the flow of messages, and Mr. Hanselman wrote about it on his Web log. Robert Scoble, who holds the title of technology evangelist at Microsoft and who scans 1,400 sites daily with RSS, spotted the blog posting and forwarded the complaints to Chris Schneider, senior program manager at Microsoft's Spot team, who was able to transmit a fix for the bug less than eight hours after Mr. Hanselman first encountered it. [WSJ on RSS]

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Having a fine time.  RD Bingo is a hit, and the current high score on the Apprentice.NET quiz is 7 out of 20 (and the guy who holds the high score actually was a successful contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire!).  Maybe the quiz is too hard? :)

Having fun, and networking with lots of folks.  I'm surprised how many banks are here.  I've got a number of nice leads in my space.

I also spent a lot of time with Mark Miller from DevExpress (CodeRush) and let me tell you this - the Rush is on.  It's hot baby.  Mark's wandering around demoing CodeRush.  Get a Trial Copy and seriously, take a hour of your time and walk through the Users Guide.  You'll make up that hour within your first day of use.  I plan to start writing plugins immediately.

I also went to a party at the top of the W Hotel, and met a lot of fun people.  Here's a few pics:

John Lam and I.  We had a number of arguments.  Highlights were John's use of "Angle-Bracket Tax" and "Buzzword Compliant."

Mary Jo Foley (yes, THAT Mary Jo Foley!)

Right to Left: Bill Evjen (Reuters and countless books, including one on WSE and ASP.NET 2.0 Beta), Ari Bixhorn, the Adam Sandler of Group Program Management, and Dan Fernandez.  One day we will all co-host Saturday Night Live together.

Rebecca Dias (Manages WSE and Web Services Strategy) and stood on stage with Balmer at the Keynote!  Turns out that was the FIRST time - that moment on stage - that she'd met him.  I'd say she did a fine job!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Surprise.  WSE 2.0 is released.  Everyone saw this announcement coming, but it's nice to get it out and move on.  Rebecca is onstage right now, doing a demo on WSE and the new Office Information Bridge Framework with Ballmer. 

Wizzy Thoughts

The release of WSE (for me) brings up a number of different questions around Web Services on the .NET Framework. 

• It's great that these standards are being followed so closely and that Microsoft is so quick to support the WS*.* specs.  However, how long will we have WSE to use while we wait for Indigo and the rest of the specs?  Is it something that will be supported for the next five years?
  Question: Would you go live in production with WSE 2.0?  Or, would you find an out-of-band solution for security? (Certs, IP-SEC, Networks)
  My Personal Answer (today): I would use WSE when required for Interop but with caution.  
  Question: Is WSE the COM-Interop of Web Services (an interim bridging technology that will ALWAYS be with us, but interim none the less) and is that a bad thing?
  My Personal Answer (today): Kinda feels like it!    
  I've been thinking more and more about simpler solutions.  When you don't need routing and intermediaries, why not go move to a more REST-ful solution?  They are certainly easy to write, but there's not a lot of "framework" around it.  Perhaps that's a good thing, but while I could write a REST-ful proxy generator, it'd be nice to see formalized support for simpler architectures.  If you know me, you know I'm ALL about Web Services, but at the same time, the more I read the WS*.* specs and talk to Joe Programmer, I worry that we're freaking him out. 
  Question: The Basic Profile is great, but are the other specs getting too complicated?
  My Personal Answer (today): Kinda feels like it!  WS-Security will be more useful when there is a more support on the Java side.  As far as WS-Policy, it seems that Dynamic Policy is where the money's at and it's a bummer WSE doesn't support it.    

What are your answers?

New .NET Tools vs. Existing Open Source Tools

Now Prashant is showing the Visual Studio Team System (Whitehorse).  It includes Unit Testing and Code Coverage support.  The Code Coverage stuff is pretty sexy; it highlights the code that wasn't tested in Red and the tested code in Green.  I need to learn more about theis new Unit Testing before I feel good about it.

It's easy to justify using NUnit when there are no Unit Testing tools included with Visual Studio.  When VSS came out (actually when it was purchased from OneTree) Microsoft was bringing Source Control to the masses.  While lots of folks don't use an SCC at all, many folks use VSS simply because it's free.  However, often folks have to suffer with VSS for a few years before they justify a change over to CVS or something else.  I'm going to dig into this Unit testing stuff to see how to relates to NUnit (which we use with much happiness) and the up-and-coming MBUnit.  There's a lot of interesting stuff going on.  I don't know if these qualify as "smackdowns," but it sure seems like a few wheels are being re-invented.  I need to get my thoughts straight and think about:

• MSBuild vs. NAnt
• Team System Test vs. NUnit and NUnitAddin
• Team System Coverage vs. nCover, etc.

As an aside, wouldn't it be nice to include Lutz's Reflector with VS.NET?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.  It cracked me up though - today in my Inbox:

Hi, I am a Portuguese virus, but because of the poor technology and lack of money in my country I am not able to do anything with your computer. So, please be kind and delete an important file on your system and then forward me to other users. Thank you.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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