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

Sitecore 5.3

Well, seems it's released now (at least on SDN5). For those of you (like me) that have been eagerly waiting i hope you've already installed it.. seeing i'm currently in barcelona right now i however have a few obstacles to tackle prior to installing it (like getting a hold of a decent bandwith for starters).. oh well... way to go Sitecore! P.

TechEd: middle of day 2

So far so damn awesome it's sick.. this messes with your mind a lot and you'll surely notice it later when i finish up this post.. right now it's back to the sessions. P.

TechEd

Well, tomorrow I'm off for Barcelona where we're going to attend the TechEd conf. It's going to be 5 days of brainmelting-ideainspiring-codecrazy madness, but that's why we're going there :) More posts to come i'm sure once we've arrived and all. P.

waiting / writing

It's friday so I'll keep this short: I really like the new package designer in Sitecore 5.3. It's heaps better than the old one, and even tho this is pretty much identical to a solution a collegue of mine wrote last spring (so he's probably gonna have to come up with something even better yet again) I like the way things are moving forward.. Haven't had a chance to do all the things I hoped to accomplish this week since a middle-hand has been keeping me from completing a milestone in one of my current projects. Oh well, guess that's life. Not much to do there but hope that next week will be better. However, since I've been waiting a lot this week I've kept myself busy testing out the new release of ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions (or "Atlas" if you're like me and still use that name since it's -heaps- easier to say). First thing that still strikes me when working with it is how easy it is to implement. I'm really impressed at the dedication and level of development that has gone into this project. Good stuff! My next post will probably be a tutorial on the new release of ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, but more on that when I do so.. Good stuff, bring on the beers (and the final release of Sitecore 5.3, please?). Take care, P.

Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta

Yesterday Microsoft made the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta (previously known under codename "atlas") available to the public, it's up for grabs at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=90E0CCDF-D246-4929-A027-D5EE6F806851&displaylang=en Also, alongside the release of that beta version, the new ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (previously known as Atlas Control Toolkit) was also made public, and you'll find it at http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=AtlasControlToolkit Have fun! P.

IE7 roll-out

Well, actually it seems that some people -still- get the same errors (KB918899 related), even if they install the update. Wierd. For these people (and for the rest of you/us all) the perhaps good news is that a majority of clients will get Internet Explorer 7 as an automatic update - today. To read more about this see the excellent IEBlog, including posts IE7 to be distributed via Automatic Updates and IE7 Is Coming This Month...Are you Ready?) Now, there's -always- a catch (I feel like a broken record, but there usually is): This automatic update is only available for the users running on english/american locale. Seems the swedish version will be ready for roll-out as an automatic update sometime during december. Oh well. (You could always change your/your clients/whomever's locale to english in the system since that'll tell IE to use the same, and then it'll get updated..) Personally I like the idea that IE7 has been made an "update" since it's a lot better and it gives more to the people developing websites. That's all folks - Take care, P.