TechEd 2006 Start

The first two days of TechEd 2006 Barcelona are over.

• In Day two, I focused more on .NET, and enjoyed very much the presentation on C# 3.0 (or is it 3.5?) and the innovations brought by Linq, Lambda expressions, Extension methods. To me, Linq raises the abstraction level of the language, giving first class support for queries in .NET. With it, it's possible to very easily query a DB (in a strongly typed fashion), join with a XML source or any other that implements the interfaces (Vista search is expected in the future).
  
  Also very good were the sessions about debugging outside VS 2005 and the tools available(Ingo Rammer is a very good presenter and his demos are really on topic, not some toy example, that doesn't hold a connection with reality).
  
  Not so good were the presentations about Using VS Team System - nothing new, just a rehash of last year's examples, and very "toyish" and about Windows Vista - Catherine Heller, knows the subject, but the notion that to get the Vista native feel in the Open File Dialog one has to tinker with COM+ and it's inner stuff, makes me want to run away from it. Another annoyance comes with the security increase of Vista. From now on, applications can't programmatically determine if a user is an administrator (the security token is stripped from that info). And to run with ellevated privilleges, guess what, it's necessary to invoke a process and the user has to confirm it. I can see, what's coming, every user pressing the yes button every time that annoyance pops up. Even debugging with VS2005, has to be run with ellevated privileges.
  
  When does MS gets the balance between security and usability right? Why doesn't Vista Home ship with a VM to surf the Net and read mail? And to try out the installation of applications, what best than installing in a VM, and after evaluating or testing, throw it away (if it's a virus or trojan), or installing in the main OS?
  
  
• From the first day, the highlights for me were the sessions by Kimberly Tripp. She really knows what she talks about, and makes it sound easy, explaining stuff in non technical ways. On the downside was the session on VSTO SE (Second edition). Basically it was explained that the missing stuff in VSTO 2005 have made it in the 2nd edition, and some stuff that has to be done to get around Word and Office quirks (mainly about closing windows events).
  
  The keynote, was divided in two parts. The first part, was about education, and was in a partenalist tone, ending up with a presentation of 10 year old girl from India that has been certified in C#. The second part was more in the spirit of TechEd, and had some cool demos with SharePoint, Excel, Workflow, Expression Designer and Visual Studio.