Unify 2007 Tour: Vancouver

Apr 20

Yesterday the Unify 2007 Tour presented by Microsoft Canada came to Vancouver. There were four sessions divided into two tracks – developers and IT Pros. The presentations that I attended (developers track) were informative and interesting. I have summarized the points from the presentations that I found interesting.

Session 1: Designing Architecture
John Bristowe & Damir Bersinic

The initial part of this session was an introduction to the main theme of the day – the different challenges facing developers and IT Pros in the development and deployment of enterprise applications. The main point being that developers are eager to use new technological advances to improve productivity and meet difficult deadlines while IT Pros are more conservative. Their concern is having more uptime, requiring testing and controlled releases on new technological products.

There was a demo on using the System Definition Model (SDM) within Visual Studio for Architects where the application dependencies were compared to the environment’s logical design and differences were brought to the front, e.g. the application being dependent on a service pack which was not present on the environment.

Session 2: Building, Deploying and Maintaining the ApplicationDesigning Architecture
John Bristowe & Ruth Morton

This session focused on the deployment and monitoring of applications.

Documentation – developers hate writing it and IT Pros expect it, especially when an application is developed with multiple dependencies.
System Access – developers require it in data-centric applications and IT Pros hate giving access. The rule of thumb is to code with least privileged accounts to get the required access.
Monitoring Tools – developers are always keen to code new tools to monitor their applications, IT Pros prefer using existing tools thereby not requiring new applications being installed and supported. While I could agree with the first two points, I find this one a little hard to believe – who wants to code a new application that monitors your latest application? It sounds a little like rework to me.

Session 3: Developing Web Applications on the Microsoft Application Platform
John Bristowe

The main topic in this session was IIS 7.0. It was my first look at IIS 7.0 and I was pretty impressed. My favourite enhancement shown was the ability to view the web.config from IIS in the form of a console. There are icon for all web.config tags, e.g. Application Settings, Connection Strings, Sessions State, SMTP Email, etc. When changing the settings in IIS the underlying web.config is updated and should you alter the web.config the console updates.

IIS 7.0 has two modes for ASP.Net integration. The first mode, Classic, is the same as the current version of IIS. The second mode, Integrated, removes the calls to the ISAPI filter and IIS controls the entire process.

Another new feature of IIS 7.0 was the support for PHP 5 through Fast CGI for IIS. Fast CGI increases performance by reusing existing Common Gateway Interface (CGI) processes. PHP 5 can be supported on older versions of IIS (5.x and 6) by downloading the latest Technical Preview. For more information see Fast CGI for IIS.

Session 4: Building a Strong Data Foundation to Your Application
John Bristowe

The two main points of value from this session for me were:

Visual Studio 2005 for Database Professionals – this is a great tool for database development in any application. The demo showed some of it’s useful features including

Integration with Team Foundation Server
Rename Refactoring – previewing changes prior to execution
Schema and Data comparison tools
Leverage of the Test Project Infrastructure
Data generation functionality

Language INtegrated Query (LINQ)

The ability to query and transform relational and XML objects
Provides SQL and XQuery like functionality in C# and VB.Net
Supports type checking, IntelliSense and query refactoring
It has an extensible model for languages and APIs

The LINQ functionality for SQL and XML will form part of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 and will be released in .Net 3.5. Why version 3.5? I have no idea…

All in all the day was informative, although my overall memory will be about the multiple rants I heard regarding the pricing structure of Visual Studio Team Suite and its versions. Nice tools although most of the people I spoke to would not be able to use any of the features shown in the demos as they had Visual Studio 2005 Professional and their employers could not afford the full blown version.

Links:
Unify 2007 Tour for Developers
Unify 2007 Tour for IT Pros
IIS
The LINQ Project

Microsoft, Unify 2007 Tour, IIS 7.0, LINQ, Visual Studio 2005