TechEd - All about the Experience!

Author: Dennis Skantz After spending a couple of days on TechEd in Barcelona it is clear to me that Microsoft now is all about the Experience... User experience for system users (Vistas awesome UI) and deleveloper experience for developers (geat designer tools)... and also... conference experience for delegates to the TechEd Conference... and here I'm thinking about the well planned and executed conference. Microsoft has thought about everything... If you feel thirsty, there are cold drinks everywhere. If you feel cold, they give you a warm nice sweater and to top it all off there are over 250 sessions to choose from! Thats really the only problem here right now. How to select 18 out of 250 all (almost all.. anyway) compelling sessions. Here is what I've learnt so far... Sitecore is way way way ahead! We've been XAMLing now for about a year. Now MS is releasing Windows Presentation Foundation wich is really XAML for windows apps. So for us to adopt WPF is not a hard thing to do. Thank you for that Sitecore! AJAX, AJAX, AJAX! I think I counted 11 sessions about AJAX, that means you could basically spend the whole week just listening to AJAX seminars... This is nothing new to Sitecore partner. Sitecore's been using AJAX for ages. What new now is Microsoft standard framework för AJAX. Comes with a nifty library of clientside scripts guaranteed to work on IE, Mozilla, Firefox and soon Opera (wich can be used stand alone from the Asp.Net Framework) and a lot of AJAX controls to be dragged onto your standard aspx and ascx controls. AJAX is exciting, yes... But is it worth 11 sessions? No. Can we even speak about a AJAX hype? Yes... But still AJAX is cool, and the AJAX library is a good start. For pattern freaks I have good news in the patterns for logics department. You only have to learn three patterns; Call, Queue and Sub/Pub... All other patterns are just variations of these. Of course this is my highly simplified intrepretation of Steve Swarts and Clemens Vasters presentation about Communication, Flow and Logic. For SOA preachers... SOA is not the solutions to all future system design. SOA should be used only in those places in the system where it doesn't relly really slow down the user interface... because... we don't want to spoil the user experience... ;-) For security concerned (arent we all?) I've recently irritated myself on the fact that Sitecore doesnt lock out accounts after x number of failed login attempts. Turns out, thats actually just what the experts suggests. If you have a lock-out function in place, it is really easy to stage a DNS attack against the system. All you have to do is try to login to all accounts and fail doing so and you have soon locked out all editors and administrators from ever reaching the system. So hats of to you Sitecore for that... However, there is still an area where Sitecore (in my opinion) must change and thats in the auditing. It is bad practice not to log failed login attempts. How should you otherwise be able to detect attempted attacks? Sitecore could easily add a bundle of Auditing, and they should, for sake of traceability! Well, thats it for now. My beer is going flat... and there are 50 sessions left to choose between.... /Dennis