TechEd 2001, Atlanta

Tech·Ed 2001 - Atlanta

Welcome to TechEd

TechEd 2001 has arrived in Atlanta, and with it the hordes of sandaled programmers and besieged support staff. The attendees are spread over numerous hotels around the downtown area, with the conference itself being held at the Georgia World Conference Center

Atlanta at night

The first thing I noticed about Atlanta is that it's warm. Maybe this has something to do with the whole 'Summer' thing, and maybe it's got to do with my body still getting over the fact that a week ago it was busy adding layers of fat in preparation for another Australian winter.

Arriving at the airport I was told that it was very easy to find your way around - which it is. I just wasn't told how big the place is. I got off the plane and sneered at the train that went between the concourses, then sneered even more ambitiously at the moving walkways that stretch the length of the long corridors. I figured that I'm still reasonably young and fit and that a casual stroll would be good for me. From the arrival gate to the luggage claim area was a 20 minute walk. I figured this is about 2km (1.25 mile)! 

The exhibitors hall

It was an amazing sight to watch the attendees slowly but inexorably take over the hotel foyers, bars and amenities. On Saturday afternoon the pool area was full of intensely bronzed and fit (and intensely bronzed and not-so-fit) holiday makers in tiny bathing suits, and one very pale, very skinny developer in long shorts and a T-shirt. By Sunday afternoon the view was altogether different, and a lot more disturbing.

The Conference Center and Hotels

The Georgia World Conference Center

The conference center itself is pretty much like most conference centers. Large rooms, small rooms, lots of escalators. Sunday afternoons activities were restricted to registration (quick and painless especially when you get to go to the Press Pass booth), the hands on labs (booked out) and the exhibitors hall. The exhibitors hall is always good the first couple of days because they are all in a good mood, all keen to be as helpful as possible, but most of all, all stocked up with the good stuff. You know what I mean: bouncing flashing balls, teddy bears with parachutes and laser pointer key chains. The Hilton hotel has an open core so you can look from the top floor down to the lobby. I'm guessing the will be drop-zone central for the teddy-bears. I think it's totally cool that not only are we provided with teddy bears with parachutes, but also with balconies that look down 17 floors. Pity the laser pointers weren't a little more powerful, otherwise things could get very interesting. I guess it's all fun and games till someone loses an eye.

The attendees are spread over (I think) about 23 hotels and there is a steady stream of coaches provided to shuttle us to and from the conference centre. The strangest site is seeing the armed policeman standing guard at our pickup point each morning. I guess with most attendees carrying several thousand dollars worth of gadgets there could be some easy pickings. As developers we are not renowned for our commanding physical prowess in the face of danger.

         
Commando teddy-bear test drop from the 17th floor of the Hilton.

Out and About in Atlanta

The choices for dining in downtown Atlanta around the hotels - as far as I can determine - boil down to Steak, Fajitas and Sushi. After an episode last year involving Sushi and Tequila that best remain forgotten, the choice is pretty much Sushi or Steak - but the later can be subclassified into Steak and Lager, Steak and Ale, and Steak. The adventurous can also try the burgers.

We're a sad bunch

Dinner time saw the area around the hotels hotels a-swarm with badged, bag carrying developers flowing between the eating establishments like ants, streaming between the establishments in visible lines, bumping into one another, forming clots at intersections, with each individual working toward the common goal of getting fed. It was a sight to behold. I was standing next to a guy who obviously was not an attendee and he looked at the hordes then shook his head and said "you know something is terribly wrong when downtown Atlanta is packed with pale skinned guys carrying laptops".

Monday

Microsoft certainly knows how to put on a decent meal. Breakfast and lunch were all you can eat affairs, and in between sessions there was a constant supply of potato chips, muffins, Krispy Kream donuts, diet coke and the second best chocolate chip cookies I have ever tasted. For the health conscious (or merely guilty at heart) there was fruit, muesli bars, juice and TechEd brand water. 

This table was once piled with donuts, potato crisps, chocolate and fruit. It was interesting to see which food group was left at the end of the day.

The first days sessions were mainly introductory talks. During each break out session there were 13 different seminars that could be attended. Everything from XML and Web Services to VSA. Monday night was the exhibition hall reception, plus there were a number of private receptions scattered around various locations. If none of these took your fancy then there were the jam sessions at the Tabernacle.

David Cunningham flew in yesterday morning and promptly found the world longest escalator. He promised to show me tomorrow. I'm tingling with anticipation.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning saw some very subdued developers quaffing serious amounts of water and coffee. No doubt the exertions of the night before (late night coding sessions? hearty debates about the new features in .NET? The Tabernacle?) took their toll.

The keynote speech buildup was a sound and light spectacle. Even the soundtrack was kinda cool.

The big event was Bill Gate's keynote speech and the announcement of the availability of the .NET beta 2, and the news that the final release of .NET will be this calendar year.

We all get Beta 2 CD's on Wednesday, but in the meantime is available for download from Microsoft. System requirements are far more modest than the original requirements for the PDC bits: a 450MHz CPU, W2K, 192Mb RAM, a 800 x 600, 256 color screen and 3Gb HDD space in total. A CD would also be handy if you plan on installing from the disks.

The hordes attempting to leave the keynote speech.

Beta 2 is significantly different from Beta 1. Many of the namespaces have changed, and even some basic naming conventions (For example, WinForms are now Windows Forms). Everything from the System.Data namespace, delegates, keywords, and the IDE itself have all changed in degrees ranging from wide ranging API changes to more innocuous changes such as the addition or removal of underscores in names.

The beta 2 IDE is much improved, both in terms of usability and stability, and companies can now create shipping applications (with a few limitations) using the ASP.NET Go Live license. Also announced at the keynote presentation was the availability of the UDDI developer tools, the Mobile Internet toolkit, and a peer-to-peer code snippet sharing service.

Easily amused.

Integrated within the IDE is a new peer-to-peer code snippet sharing service that allows a developer to enter a set of keywords in a dialog box and locate code snippets from other developer's machines. These code snippets can then be accessed across the 'net and pasted into the developers source code directly. It's essentially a Napster-style code sharing initiative.

Once the keynote was over it was back to hands-on sessions and seminars. Today's talks built on yesterday's introductory talks. Breakfast and lunch were again a nice affair (mmm - cheesecake!) and after the break-out sessions there we had an 'ask the experts' open peer forum where we had the chance to speak directly to the MS guys and ask them anything from the smallest niggling question on CE SQL to questions on design and implementation of full e-commerce applications.

I saw what David and I consider to be the worlds longest (and I think steepest) escalator. We rode it up and down with stupid grins on our faces. We also spent an entertaining few minutes throwing parachuted teddy bears off the top balcony at the hotel. Action photos will be posted soon.

I've finally worked out the difference between "y'all" and "all y'all".

Wednesday

Wednesday started with the usual breakfast of back bacon, eggs, fruit and something brown and unidentifiable. After that was more hands-on labs, more break-out sessions and more of the exhibitors trying everything they could to get their hands on your swipe card.

The announcement of the Mobile Information Server (and related toolkit) means that developers can now write mobile applications in a device independent fashion. Extending the idea that ASP.NET applications no longer need to worry about handling the idiosyncrasies of various browsers, the Mobile Information Server releases developers from worrying about the capabilities of individual devices. If you are brave and have lots of spare time to wade through lots of marketing fluff you can read more here.

Two things have really been evident in these last 2 days: Firstly, there are some seriously overweight developers, and secondly, the mood is really subdued. People aren't depressed, just, well, quiet. Maybe it's because .NET has been out for a year, so most of the attendees at least have an idea of what it's all about. This time last year we were all learning that C# was Cool and finding about about the amazing advances in ASP.NET. This years it's more about the fine tuning that has been going on, and a continuation of the evangelical message. Maybe it was also due to some of the higher profile guys not being in attendance. Chris Sells, Jeff Prosise and Jeff Richter weren't around, Tony Goodhew and Chris Anderson weren't there, and most disappointingly: no Kent Sharkey.

A well-attended ASP.NET session.

The weather has been perfect, which is a huge disappointment. I was hoping for a tornado or two, or at least the remnants of a tropical cyclone. Obviously this statement is spoken with the brash bravado of someone who has never actually been near either of these two pieces of excitement. I was talking to a guy about Tornadoes and he told me a story about waiting for a flight in an airport in the south east of the States. He was waiting at the departure gate when two tornadoes were spotted. Everyone in the airport was moved into the center of the airport while the storms moved by, and when they were allowed back the plane that he had been about to board had been turned around 30 degrees. whoa.

The Visual Basic 10th Year Anniversary Party

It was a Visual Basic thing - you're not really interested are you? 

It was pretty big, and took up the entire stadium at the conference center. I was a little worried when we entered the doors to find a whole bunch of mimes, but these were soon replaced by Blues Brothers look-alikes, jugglers, monocyclists and other performance artists. There was a ton of food and drink and a live bands, but unfortunately the accoustics were terrible, so you couldn't really hear them.

Feeding 10,000 people takes some organisation.

The funniest thing about the whole night was that the helium balloons were all removed and popped after some guys tied beer bottles to clumps of balloons and released them. Little beer gondolas were floating around 100 feet above our heads. It was so cool.

Apart from that it was a pretty quiet affair. It was a pity it was held indoors, since the weather was perfect. After being inside air conditioned conference halls all day it would have been nice to enjoy a southern summer evening outdoors.

Thursday

Thursday was the final day of the conference, and one that many people (me included) missed, which sucked because many of more interesting talks such as Nick Hodapp's and Ronald Laeremans' were scheduled for that day. The conference center entrance turned into a baggage warehouse. Once at the airport you could tell the attendees (I was about to say 'fellow geeks' but I figured that was harsh) by spotting the TechEd 2001 paraphernalia and VB.NET T-shirts.

Overall?

CommNet - the internal network for attendees.

Overall it was a quiet affair. I talked to lots of people to gauge the general feeling and describe the tone of the conference and invariably the word was 'subdued'. Visual C++ developers in particular felt left out (again) because the 10 year anniversary of Visual Basic overshadowed everything. I think every VC++ developer in the house was gritting their teeth when speaker after speaker waxed lyrical about how wonderful and productive and powerful and scalable VB was.

Hopefully PDC will bring VC++ back into the limelight. It doesn't seem 'sexy' to MS at the moment, which is nuts because VC++ is the most powerful of the .NET languages, and the only one that can be used to write native code. Server side .NET has a brilliant future and solves obvious problems, both in terms of code writing and management, and in application performance and deployment. Client side .NET apps may face the same uphill battle that client side Java apps are facing, so wouldn't it be prudent to push the excellent advances made in VC++ (language, compiler and IDE) to keep current developers happy and convince them that upgrading to VS.NET is a Good Thing? Maybe MS is worried this will send mixed messages about their future goals, but as a C++ developer I just want to use the best tools now, and when better tools come out I'll upgrade to them too.

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Appendix: Long haul flights

I wrote this while hanging out in LA after 20 hours of traveling with no sleep. I had a 10 hr layover followed by a 5hr red-eye to arrive in Toronto at 6am the following day. Needless to say I was not the most cheerful traveller at the airport.

 

One of the first things that long haul air travel in cattle class gives you is a realisation of what it will be like when you are old and frail and living in a retirement village. The mind numbing expanse of time that soon ceases to be a moving quantity, but rather a static position with no beginning and no ending. The dimmed lights, the unchanging surroundings, and the close proximity to your neighbours giving immediate knowledge of their habits, their hopes and their lives all fuel the feeling that you have been here forever, and that you will continue to be here until your mind slowly fades away.

Beyond the metaphysic there is also the stark reality of the hopelessness that sets in when you unwisely choose a window seat on a sold out flight. You sit. You watch. You wait. Your meals are bought to you in turn, and you watch with hopeless salivation as the surly stewards bring a meal that you know full well you will not enjoy, but which you nevertheless look forward to as a means of marking out the various segments of the journey. There have been meals before, and there will no doubt be meals ahead. You live in a world where there are only three states - either waiting for a meal, eating a meal, or suffering the after effects of a meal.

You eat what you are given, and what is given is that same that is given to everyone else cramped in with you. You even engage in mind games with the person next to you in order to secure their blueberry crumble, only to realise that you, in turn, have lost your Caesar salad.

The worst part - the very worst part - the part that makes you promise to yourself that you will never send your aging parents into a retirement home, is that once you wolf down your unpalatable meal you are forced to sit there with the decaying remains of the pasta-or-the-chicken congealing on the plate in front of you, and that the two people blocking your escape to the freedom of the isle also have the remnants of their meal similarly congealing, their tray tables down, and that you are not going anywhere until the stewards do the rounds to collect the empties. You have half an hour of concentrated bladder control to keep you occupied, and there is not a thing you can do about it. To be completely at the mercy of strangers who think of you as a seat number and not be able to do a thing about it is a sobering and mind expanding experience. If you ever feel that the time has come to put Ma and Pop in a home then you should first fly to Australia coach class - preferably using one of the cheaper, more conservative carriers - and have a good, long think about what you are about to do.

Even when the meals are finally cleared, the tray tables returned to their upright position, and the complicated ballet of legs, arms, overhead lockers and headphone wires is negotiated, you still have nowhere to go. You cannot ring up friends and say 'I'm so bored I've started making sculptures out of my fingernail clippings'. No. Sit and stay you will. Enjoy the reruns of 'Friends' you will. Sleep comfortably you will not.

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