Tech·Ed 2008: First night

Was hot like hell. We took a two hour walk, got approached by 2 hookers (no joke), and drank (with 5 man) 2 bottles of cava.

Result: at 0810 I woke up (no hangover (fortunatly)), missed the first session (no big deal, I already saw the introduction for Silverlight 2).

In a moment I am going to follow the session ‘How IT will change the next 10 years and why you should care’. There is also another option ‘LINQ deep dive with Visual Basic’, but I really don’t like that language so that is out of the question.

In the evening we will go karting with all MSPs (Microsoft Student partners). Great!

A little impression of me:

Microsoft Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 – Developer: Arrival

As promised an update (thank god there is internet access here :P ):

I woke up @ 0445, and a friend of my father’s brought me to Zaventem at 0545. A bit early, but there is always a chance of having problems with the traffic.

I arrived at about 0645, which was good.

We met, and went for breakfast, which was good :D !

There was no problem with the flight, only a slight delay of ~15 minutes. I slept most of the flight, which was a very good time-killer.

After exiting the airport we took off to the center of Barcelona with the bus, and walked to the hotel.

We put the luggage there, and then took the metro to the CCIB. There we got our badge.

Read on in the next post…

Follow up on the Launch Event of Silverlight, and the XNA info.

I just got back from Ghent, where I attended the seminar about Silverlight and XNA.

And I was astonished about the power of Silverlight.

The main advantage is: XAML. The designer uses MS Blend for the creation of the pages/windows/controls, and the developer can just use that code, no conversion needed (it just works). He can import the project in Visual Studio 2008 (same structure), attach some eventhandlers, bla bla.

Silverlight has a very rich framework, of course not the whole .NET framework. It’s a subset, containing the most parts that you need for web development, for example there is no need for File Access.

A very interesting feature is Application Storage. A local cache for example when you want to save some settings. It’s quite the same as cookies, but a lot more powerfull.

This session was given by Gill Cleeren.

About the XNA part:
Was a bit boring in the beginning, but as we advanced it got more interesting. Afterwards Peter and I spoke to the speaker, and he gave us some demos about other stuff he made (which was actually the most interesting part about this session).

We learned how a model got constructed, with Meshes and MeshParts, around bones (parents), and collision detection, which was kind of cool.

To use a sphere to check if they collide, to use per pixel detection, or triangle detection: we discussed all the advantages and disadvantages.

I now have a (supercool) mug with the beautiful Silverlight logo :D

Learned a lot today, really a lot.

I would like to thank my friend Peter for joining me in this trip, it was great mate! ;)