Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Tech Ed 2003 - A Look Back, Part 2
Posted by Philip Colmer in "THOUGHT" @ 11:00 AM
Microsoft describes Tech Ed as "the definitive Microsoft conference for building, deploying and managing connected solutions". This article is the second of four parts looking back at the 2003 conference that was held recently in Dallas.
Registration
Before you could do anything else at Tech Ed, you had to register. If you attended the pre-conference sessions on the Sunday, this meant queuing early on a Sunday morning otherwise they wouldn’t let you in …
Another reason for queuing was if you wanted to borrow a Pocket PC with WiFi during the conference. They had Sprint Hitachi G1000s, HP iPAQ H5450s, Dell Axim X5s and Toshiba e740s - all available as a free loan and, in the case of the Sprint Pocket PCs, apparently free phone calls as well!
The keynotes
There were two keynotes - the first presented by Paul Flessner, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Server Platform division and the second by Scott Sharney, Microsoft's Chief Security Strategist.
Of the two, I found Scott's presentation more enjoyable, informative and relevant. Microsoft has had a lot of bad press in the past about poor code, easy hacking and so on. The break in coding last year for security review was well publicised and some people expressed views that it wouldn’t last. Well, I think it has - that was evident from the sessions I attended and the way new products are being deployed out of the box in a more secure manner.
The sessions
To help delegates choose which sessions they might want to attend, the conference was structured into a series of tracks:
Here is some of the information from the Mobility track. There were 20 sessions in total, pretty much all of which were targeted at the developer. That said, developers get told things ahead of the customers, primarily so that they can get a head start on writing for the new platforms, which means that we now get a glimpse of what is coming in Pocket PC 2003 …
Ozone, the current project name for the next Pocket PC OS, will be based on WinCE 4.2. Development platforms will be eVC 4.0 (with SP2) or VS.Net if you want to develop using Visual Basic. Software written in eVB will continue to work, but eVB isn't supported now. Indeed, the eVB runtime may not be included in ROM (it's up to the device manufacturer), so you may have to expend some memory on storing the eVB runtime. The .Net Compact Framework will be included in the ROM image, so it will be in the interest of developers using Basic to migrate their products to .Net ASAP.
Key improvements in Windows CE 4.2 are increased stability & reliability, resource utilisation optimisations, the benefits of the security review, file system filters (of primary interest to developers), support for IPv6 and L2TP & IPSec.
Pocket Internet Explorer has been re-architected. It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML, CSS, Jscript 5.5, WML 2.0 and IPv6. It also has an extensible image library.
For myself, I attended a lot of sessions focussed on deployment of Windows 2003, Exchange 2003, SharePoint 2003, plus miscellaneous sessions on security and disaster recovery. I'm really looking forward to being able to deploy Exchange 2003. Quite apart from the performance benefits of using Outlook 2003 with caching and RPC over HTTP, Exchange 2003 also incorporates ActiveSync and OMA - Outlook Mobile Access, so most small footprint devices are supported out of the box.
In addition, if you've got a Pocket PC device that can receive SMS messages, Ozone will also support Exchange's new up-to-date synchronisation method. Here, Exchange will send a text message to your device to tell it that there is new email. Your device will receive and act upon the message and resynchronise - all without turning on the display, thus keeping the battery consumption down.
Hands-on Labs
These were a great opportunity to work through some set scenarios, covering diverse technologies such as SharePoint, SQL, Exchange and Windows. Most of the labs were expected to take an hour or less to complete, and the rooms were open for the whole duration of a Tech Ed day … 7am until 10pm … so there was plenty of opportunity to try to fit some in around the sessions.
Coming next ...
Now that you've had the juicy Pocket PC information that everyone already knew anyway, I hope you won't abandon me, but come back for more and find out who and what I found in the exhibit hall and what goes on at night during Tech Ed.
Registration
Before you could do anything else at Tech Ed, you had to register. If you attended the pre-conference sessions on the Sunday, this meant queuing early on a Sunday morning otherwise they wouldn’t let you in …
Another reason for queuing was if you wanted to borrow a Pocket PC with WiFi during the conference. They had Sprint Hitachi G1000s, HP iPAQ H5450s, Dell Axim X5s and Toshiba e740s - all available as a free loan and, in the case of the Sprint Pocket PCs, apparently free phone calls as well!
The keynotes
There were two keynotes - the first presented by Paul Flessner, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Server Platform division and the second by Scott Sharney, Microsoft's Chief Security Strategist.
Of the two, I found Scott's presentation more enjoyable, informative and relevant. Microsoft has had a lot of bad press in the past about poor code, easy hacking and so on. The break in coding last year for security review was well publicised and some people expressed views that it wouldn’t last. Well, I think it has - that was evident from the sessions I attended and the way new products are being deployed out of the box in a more secure manner.
The sessions
To help delegates choose which sessions they might want to attend, the conference was structured into a series of tracks:
- Administration and management
- Data management
- Developer tools and technologies
- E-business
- Messaging
- Mobility
- Office productivity
- Planning and deployment
- Security
- Web services
- Windows in the enterprise
Here is some of the information from the Mobility track. There were 20 sessions in total, pretty much all of which were targeted at the developer. That said, developers get told things ahead of the customers, primarily so that they can get a head start on writing for the new platforms, which means that we now get a glimpse of what is coming in Pocket PC 2003 …
Ozone, the current project name for the next Pocket PC OS, will be based on WinCE 4.2. Development platforms will be eVC 4.0 (with SP2) or VS.Net if you want to develop using Visual Basic. Software written in eVB will continue to work, but eVB isn't supported now. Indeed, the eVB runtime may not be included in ROM (it's up to the device manufacturer), so you may have to expend some memory on storing the eVB runtime. The .Net Compact Framework will be included in the ROM image, so it will be in the interest of developers using Basic to migrate their products to .Net ASAP.
Key improvements in Windows CE 4.2 are increased stability & reliability, resource utilisation optimisations, the benefits of the security review, file system filters (of primary interest to developers), support for IPv6 and L2TP & IPSec.
Pocket Internet Explorer has been re-architected. It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML, CSS, Jscript 5.5, WML 2.0 and IPv6. It also has an extensible image library.
For myself, I attended a lot of sessions focussed on deployment of Windows 2003, Exchange 2003, SharePoint 2003, plus miscellaneous sessions on security and disaster recovery. I'm really looking forward to being able to deploy Exchange 2003. Quite apart from the performance benefits of using Outlook 2003 with caching and RPC over HTTP, Exchange 2003 also incorporates ActiveSync and OMA - Outlook Mobile Access, so most small footprint devices are supported out of the box.
In addition, if you've got a Pocket PC device that can receive SMS messages, Ozone will also support Exchange's new up-to-date synchronisation method. Here, Exchange will send a text message to your device to tell it that there is new email. Your device will receive and act upon the message and resynchronise - all without turning on the display, thus keeping the battery consumption down.
Hands-on Labs
These were a great opportunity to work through some set scenarios, covering diverse technologies such as SharePoint, SQL, Exchange and Windows. Most of the labs were expected to take an hour or less to complete, and the rooms were open for the whole duration of a Tech Ed day … 7am until 10pm … so there was plenty of opportunity to try to fit some in around the sessions.
Coming next ...
Now that you've had the juicy Pocket PC information that everyone already knew anyway, I hope you won't abandon me, but come back for more and find out who and what I found in the exhibit hall and what goes on at night during Tech Ed.
