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Although TechEd 2008 Eilat (Israel) was mostly aimed towards Hebrew speakers, some of the lectures were given by English speaking Microsoft employees.

You can find additional information (as well as download links) for the following lectures here: Tech Ed Israel 2008 lectures for English speakers

1. A Lap Around Visual Studio 2008 IDE and VB 9.0
2. ADO.NET Data Services Framework - aka Project Astoria: REST data services for the Web
3. Building Composite WPF Applications Using Project Codename - Prism
4. Building Rich Internet Applications with ASP.NET AJAX and Web Client Software Factory 2.0
5. Consuming and Creating RESTful Web Services with .NET
6. Go Gold with Silverlight 2.0
7. Hyper-V Architecture and Scenarios with Demos
8. Implementing Workflow Enabled Services and Durable Services using .NET Framework 3.5
9. Introduction to F#
10. Introduction to the ADO.NET Entity Framework
11. Making Your Phones Ring With Software + Services
12. Putting The User Back Into Architecture
13. Scale out your applications with Windows Communication Foundation and Windows HPC Server 2008
14. Sharing Assets Between the .NET Compact Framework and the .NET Framework
15. SOA, S+S, and Microsoft: A Perspective
16. SOAP/WS-* and REST: Complementary Communication Styles
17. The New Windows Threadpool
18. The Perfect Pattern Storm, when TDD meets UX and MVP
19. Understanding Software + Services
20. Windows Server 2008 Kernel Architecture
21. Windows Server 2008 Overview
22. Windows Vista for Managed Developers: Besides .NET Framework 3.x

The morning began with an Israeli breakfast (bread, cheese, vegetables), and than to a discussion about how/what to implement.

The chosen idea from yesterday (suggested by Maya Klug) is a time bank application (something like Timebank.org.uk), maybe combined with videos (each member creating a short video detailing what he/she is willing to contribute).

There are about 50 people here, and the group is about equally divided between technical people (developer and similiar) and bussiness people (bizdev, etc). Many people here are entrepreneurs themselves.

The main discussion so far was about creating a web site vs. a Facebook application, and the decision was to create a web site combined with a Facebook application.

From the developers perspective, we chose using ASP.NET (majority of the coders know it), SQL server (express) as a database, and creating a 3-layered (DAL, BL, pages renderer) application (web server).

We’ll try implementing the DAL using NHibernate, connecting to Facebook using the MS Facebook toolkit, and using Youtube API for the video management.

As from today there are other bloggers, you can read the comined blog at the project’s blog page, and there is also a Twitter page.

I registered myself to this event few weeks ago, and today is the first day.

The idea: a group of IT professionals getting together for a weekend (2.5 days) to create a new startup company, based on a web product. This group is divided to sub-groups (backend, client, architects, business development, etc), each sub-group in charge of a specific section of the product. Each participant receives a certain number of “shares” based on his/her contribution (based on the number of days in attendance).

The event is hosted by Netwise, a company specializing in building web portals and selling products to build such products.

So far the event is still being organized, each participant receives upon registration few complimentary items (notebook, shirt, food), and now we are sitting around chatting among ourselves.

The first item on the agenda: Have a brainstorming and choose a product to develop.

Being a long time developer, I’m already guessing the second item: Selecting technology to use for creating this product. (Get ready for religion wars….)

I went to a “Fundamentals of WCF Security” lecture by Michele Leroux Bustamante (dasBlonde) from IDesign, which came after a full day seminar given by her at Microsoft Israel.

Michele is an IDesign Chief Architect, Microsoft Regional Director for San Diego, Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems and hold a long list of additional titles. She specializes in training, mentoring and high-end architecture consulting services focusing on scalable and secure architecture design for .NET, federated security scenarios, web services, interoperability and globalization architecture.

The event was a joint venture of 3 user groups, and attracted many participants - so many the organizers had actually to dismantle the wall separating two lecture halls and merge them into one.

The event started a bit late due to traffic, and than about an hour of WCF fundamentals due to request from half of the audience. Personally I think it was unnecessary, since I suspect this intro was too complex (too fast compared to the normal “ABC” approach) for people with no WCF knowledge, and boring for those with prior knowledge.

The main part involved covering security principles, different approaches and the cost for each of them, and many hands-on samples, and was much more interesting. It was also followed by a short Q&A session, but the audience was exhausted at this point (unlike the speaker - incredible energy), so not many questions were asked.

I recommend listening to her 15-parts webcast series, and you can find the code/slides from the lecture here.

My favourite quote: “I don’t blog very often, I’m not Scott Hanselman“.

I went to a presentation organized by SRL and delivered by Mr. Brent Carlson, CTO and co-founder of LogicLibrary, on “New methodologies and governance in SOA implementation“.

The event was well-organized, and the Mr. Carlson focused on explaining how to avoid SOA becoming ABOS (A Bunch Of Services), by managing (governing) the process of creating those services and making sure the organization re-uses it’s pre-existing resources.
Of course the presentation led to the Logidex application, with which the governing mentioned above can be done. It seems this is relevant to very large organizations, not medium and small companies.

Although he gave me some ideas to consider, I was missing two things:

1. An actual demo of the Logidex product
2. How it fits with TFS (I got the impression it takes over “higher functions”, using TFS as a plain source control solution)

I looked around, and found a webcast from 2004 explaining the product itself, an article containing some of the material he presented, and what looks like a previous version of the presentation.

I took a couple of photos, but it seems my cell’s camera can’t handle semi-lit rooms very well.

Update: Arnon’s post regarding the event reminded me one of the key ideas from the presentation - you should think of each service as a complete product, which users/customers etc.

A very impressive event. According to Yosi’s blog 2300 people conquered the Cinema city complex. But I do have some comments.

The bad:

• As it turns out, the parking lot can’t house so many cars. Here is where I had to park my car:

• Since you couldn’t specify a list of presentations on registration, there were many occasions of 500 people trying to enter a theatre containing 150 seats, causing some people to miss the presentation. As Yosi wrote, they did add more presentations because of the demand, but it wasn’t enough. You had to be standing near the door 10 minutes early to make sure you got in. I hope to catch those I missed here.
• The “Studential lunch” was a bit of a turn-down, after last year’s convention in David Intercontinental hotel.

The good:

• The Microsoft team did an impressive marketing job for the convention. They created several ‘Trailers’ for the event, featuring many MVPs, and they re-models the complex, replacing all normal movie posters with posters for these ‘movies’:
  

• Ron Jacob’s presentation was great. It covered mostly the basics, but most people tend to ignore those basics. I think many developers are now sealing security holes. He also did some ARCasts I intend to download. Here is Tal’s review on Udi Dahan’s and Ohad Israeli’s talks. (You can also download Udi’s talk here)
• This event is a great way for meeting people from the industry, I had a great time talking to peers, both old (people I used to work with) and new.
• No marketing presentations.