TechEd 2006 Boston--The Keynote
I made two mistakes last night. First, I didn’t stand in line to get into the TechEd 2006 (Boston) keynote early enough to get a seat near the aisle. The second mistake was attending in the first place. Earlier in the day we had an MVP meeting where we heard from MVPs that Microsoft’s focus seemed to be toward the “Enterprise” and away from smaller companies. This message was pretty clear in the keynote address. Virtually all of the features demonstrated and “promised” (except Avalon) were clearly for the largest of companies. What I did hear (that was worthwhile) was the new technology that promises to encrypt the contents of a laptop’s hard drive so a nefarious thief’s only option is to reformat the drive or toss it in the East river. Unfortunately, this technology comes far too late for the veterans and active-duty military whose data was lost. Keep reading...
Another “interesting” demo illustrated refactoring data in the Team edition—they showed how to change the name of a column in a database and propagate this change to all T SQL (not CLR) stored procedures, Views and (possibly) indexes. This operation was done on a live database (hopefully pre-release) but it took quite awhile to complete—flashing and repainting for way too long. And what about the other external dependencies? What about the other applications being developed or deployed that reference this table’s column by name? Did the dependencies tree show how this change would impact those applications? What about the TableAdapter and DataSet objects referencing this table column by name? What if there were CLR executables bound to this column? While this feature might be interesting in specific cases and make a flashy demo, leaving these questions unanswered can lead customers to think that the Team Systems folks at Microsoft don’t really understand how development shops (especially smaller ones) really work.
I think there are a wealth of interesting and useful features in Visual Studio that could have been shown—focusing on a feature and a product that only appeals to the largest enterprise customers means that Microsoft really does not know from whence its revenue comes...
And what’s with the blonde? Having an actress (albeit popular) come out on stage and try to show how dumb someone can be did not make me feel that comfortable—the response she got from the crowd should have been a clue that this was perhaps not particularly on target. We need to encourage women in this industry—not make them look incompetent.
Microsoft missed a golden opportunity to show their developer base that they really understand them and their needs. These customers are mostly ordinary developers from a wide breadth of skill levels and abilities. While some might work for an “enterprise” organization, these folks often work in smaller, more focused IT departments with less grandiose requirements.
I won’t get into the way the busses were handled. That I’m sure will be the fodder for other blogs.
They’re having me give a chalk-talk tomorrow morning. Too bad it’s not advertised anywhere. None of the chalk talks are in the schedule or where someone could find them. The sessions are in the schedule, but the name of the speaker is not… I guess we’re supposed to hunt up people to attend on our own.
Comments
"Unfortunately, this technology comes far too late for the veterans and active-duty military whose data was lost." I hate disagreeing with you (other than on the environment ;-) ) b/c I'm almost always wrong, but I don't think this would have helped. I work for a DOD contractor who works exclusively with the VA and we aren't even allowed to have floppy drives and have to have special permission to use USB or cd burners. We've signed our lives away if we walk out of here with data and there's no friggin way it could happen undetected. I don't buy this story from the get go. It took them a few days to report it. This was b/c they needed to come up with a story. You don't walk out of the office accidentally with 24 million records and there's no way you'd have any reason to take all that data out - no legitimate reason anyway. This was intentional and they are covering their butts. But I digress.
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I'm one of those enterprise snobs so I like the direction, but I don't dispute what you're saying. Making cool stuff for me to play with doesn't justify anything. Many people aren't prepared for enterprise apps and will only make a mess if they try - we have enough trouble trying to get people to parameterize sql statements to this day after all the effort put into it. So enterprise scenarios only complicate things and if you can't get the simple stuff right, how are you going to do the harder stuff.
I hadn't much thought about it until you posted this but you raise a good point. I'm going to have to rethink my position and come up with something a little more compelling than "Enterprise apps increase my billable rate and keep me entertained."
Posted by: Bill | June 13, 2006 2:58 PM