SD Expo: Its over (again)
Now that SD Expo ‘06 is over, I’d better take the time to finish writing up some experiences 
Wednesday, Day 1 of Classes:
I started off Wednesday by hearing Scott Ambler’s talk on Database Refactoring. Scott’s worked out a series of refactoring tasks, similar to Martin Fowler’s code refactoring that Martin covered in his book by the same name. Like Martin, Scott now has a book on the topic. I’d already pre-ordered the book (it should be waiting for me at home as I write this), so I didn’t take a lot of notes; I”m planning on reading the book when I get back.
During the second part of the morning, I went to a roundtable discussion on the future of Web application development run by Christian Gross. I know I’ve heard Christian before, his accent is unmistakable, but I can’t remember when. I’m sure it was a previous SD Expo. Christian mainly wanted to talk about REST, with a little side trip to AJAX. Nothing substantive came from the session, but I did get interested in REST. Since Christian had two sessions on AJAX and REST on Thursday, I made a note to attend those and get updated on this stuff.
During lunch, I attended a panel discussion on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Model Driven Design (MDD). The MDA concept has been floating around for at least 3 years now. It’s OMG’s next big thing after UML, and they’ve been pushing it hard. Until now, It’s been mainly smoke and mirrors. I’ve been skeptical about it, but I figured that I’d give them another chance to make their case. Besides, Scott Ambler was on the panel (definitely anti-MDA), so it looked like it would be entertaining at least.I couldn’t have been more wrong. At the panel, Scott pointed out several issues with MDA (for instance, most teams don’t all have modelling skills), but the rest of the panel just ignored him. The other panelists were obviously there simply to push the technologies that their companies were selling, not to really discuss the pros and cons of MDA. In fact, the Microsoft guy (who said he really wasn’t an MDA guy, though he cur knew how to talk the talk) went so far to say that anyone who didn’t know how to model should be looking for new work at Home Depot. I couldn’t help wondering how many developers Microsoft has laid off because they didn’t know how to model. I also wondered just how much of Office 12 existed in a model. This was a major waste of my time. The one good thing that came from this was that, as far as I’m concerned this was the last straw. MDA is, in my humble opinion, just a scam to sell consulting at high prices, the old Schlaer-Mellor scam of building dedicated translators for each company. It’s no longer worth my time.
After lunch, I went to a couple of ASP.NET 2.0 sessions. Once on Personalization and one on Web Parts. My study group has been dabbling in ASP.NET 2.0 with very little success, so I though I’d see if the experts could shed any light on the subject. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were. The Personalization feature in ASP.NET seems to be pretty darned good. By making use of the web.config file and a back-end provider (the default is SQL Server 2005 Express), the system makes it easy to add type-safe properties to the system. I’m all set to share this with the study group! Web Parts turned out to be the reverse. It turned out to not be what I thought it was. It’s similar to the “web parts” in Sharepoint (yuck); I’d thought that it was more of a way to build specialized HTML emitters, like is done in custom controls in 1.1. By the way, the web parts built with ASP.NET 2.0 is incompatible with the web parts in Sharepoint. It won’t be until the next version of Sharepoint when Microsoft unifies them. Nevertheless, I’m feeling a little better about ASP.NET 2.0 than I’d felt earlier. I wish I’d gone to the previous presentation on the security features in ASP.NET 2.0, since that was what we had such a hard time with in my study group. Live and learn.
Wednesday night was the annual Jolt awards. I wasn’t able to take notes on the runners up, but I was able to note down the winners when I got back to my room:
Book, General: Prefactoring by Ken Pugh
I’ve known Ken for a while. He’s a veteran of SD. I remember sitting with him in a Birds of a Feather session back in 1997 on whether Java was going to go anywhere or not . I actually bought the book at the conference. Any other books, I just ordered online from BN.COM (boo Amazon! boo!). That way, I saved the California sales tax and the hassle of carting the books home.
Books, Technical: Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et al
Ruby on Rails is hot right now, and it showed here. This is sure a different attitude toward Ruby than when I first read about it back in the late ‘90s. In those days, no one cared; they were too enamored with Python. Rails changed all that. I just might have to revisit Ruby, though (apparently) Rails doesn’t play well with IIS (I’m sure it’s all Microsoft’s fault ).
Enterprise Project Management: WelcomRisk 2.6 from Welcom
I forgot what went here. Had to do some research on the web. I think it’s interesting that no one has posted the winners yet, other than that the individual winners have posted blurbs announcing their own award. I wonder why not. Anyway, the winner is some sort of risk management tool. I don’t know why we have two project management categories. By the way, this is the only category that Microsoft was nominated in where they didn’t take home the jolt award.
Database Engines and Data Tools: SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft (you remember them)
This was the start of a trend. Can you think of anything else that Microsoft released over the past year? Yes, they’re coming up .
Defect Tracking, Change, & Configuration Mgt: Perforce SCM from Perforce
I know absolutely nothing about Perforce, except that they’ve gone on the record, saying that commercial tools are superior to open source tools. One interesting sidelight: last year, FogBugz 3.1 won the Defect Tracking award (that was rolled into this new category). This year, FogBugz 4.0 was a runner up.
Design Tools & Modelling: Lattix LDM from Lattix
This is another tool I’d never heard of before. They beat out Borland’s Together 2006 for Eclipse (Borland’s walking dead anyway) and Altova’s UModel 2005. Altova’s product looks interesting to me (they just added C# support). It’s a lot cheaper than the others, which I think should be the trend here. Hopefully, they’ll do better next year.
Development Environments: Visual Studio Team System 2005 from Microsoft (here they are again)
Yup, they did it again. VSTS is a hugely expensive product, practically a CASE tool with a built in compiler. I guess if you’re going to buy a CASE tool anyway, you might as well get a compiler and code editor with it. Again, I’m waiting for the Open Source version.
Libraries, Frameworks, and Components: .NET 2.0 from Microsoft (detecting a trend here?)
Nothing else on the list came close to the impact that .NET 2.0 will have, so this one was a no brainer. Even given my qualms about ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005, the framework is a real winner, with its superior robustness, support for generics, and support for dynamic languages.
Mobile Development Tools: Crossfire 5.6 from AppForge
I’d be using this myself if it wasn’t so darned expensive. It lets you use C#/VS for cross platform mobile development: Palm, Nokia, MS CE, Symbian, and now Blackberry. Cool stuff.
Quality Project Management: Rally 5.6 from Rally Software Development
Rally is an Agile project management system, so I was very interested in this. I’d seen their ads for quite a while. I kept wondering just how much “management” an agile project required. As it turns out (according to my recent experience), a nice management tool can help. I stopped by their booth at the show. The tool looks pretty good, but they use a hosted, subscription model. Probably too rich for my blood. Too bad. It looks like they’re onto something. I’ll just wait for the Open Source version .
Security Tools: Elemental Compliance from Elemental
Beats the heck outta me what this is. One of those new security thingies that everybody is sighing over.
Testing Tools: VMTN Subscription from VMWare
They really deserve this one. VMWare’s VM Workstation is the best addition to our test system we’ve made, and VMTN is the MSDN of VMWare. Very very cool.
Utilities: Camtasia Studio from TechSmith
This is an application recording tool, excellent for building training and marketing materials. I’ve used their screen capture product.
Web Development Tools: Rails 1.0 from rubyonrails.org
The one truly Open Source winner this year. Good thing ASP.NET 2.0 wasn’t up for the award .
So, Microsoft had a near-perfect sweep of awards this year. They even won the Hall of Fame award for VS Professional. The folks at SD were saying that this was the end of VS Pro’s reign as the IDE of choice (implying that this was going to pass to VSTS), but I’m not convinced. Frankly I don’t see a whole lot of companies paying the big price for VSTS when VS Pro plus a few open source tools gets you everything you need. We’ll see…
Anyway, that was the Jolt awards.
Thursday:
On Thursday I spent the day at several AJAX presentations. The one thing I took away from the sessions was that a lot of people wanted to know about AJAX, and a lot of people promised to talk about it, then didn’t.
There were 2 hot topics this year: Ruby on Rails and AJAX. Of the two, AJAX was the leader by far. But no one had anything original to say about it. I think there are two problems with AJAX right now:
1. The basic technique is nothing new, and the underlying technologies have been around for a loooong time
2. AJAX as a “product” is still not ready for prime time. This reminds me of the first SD where XML was being talked up. No tools existed yet and it was all “promise”. It’s still something to follow though.
Friday:
I spent Friday morning at a tour of Microsoft Research. They’ve got a lot of neat stuff going on there. I’ll have to expound on this in detail later, because it really is some nice stuff, for .NET developers…
At lunch, Bob Martin was the keynote speaker. He called his talk the Prime Directive: Always Make Progress, Never be Blocked. As usual, he was excellent. Bob has to be the best speaker out there today. He got me all fired up again. It reminded me that I don’t just come to SD to see what’s going on in the industry; I also come here to get all fired up again about software development. His talk really got me going again. Can’t wait to get back in the saddle next week
In the afternoon, I went to Ken Pugh’s talk on HTTP. You know, I thought I’d pretty much understood the HTTP protocol. Boy, was I wrong. This turned out to be another one that’s going to have to take some digesting on my part.
So, that was SD 06. I’d been on the fence whether this conference was really worth coming to again. I completely skipped it last year. It turned out that I was right to come back. I had a great time, and have some ideas on how to move my development project forward…
3/17/2006 10:10:15 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
development
SD Expo: Third Day (already)
I can’t believe that it’s Wednesday already. Time to get something posted before it all leaks out of my head!
The first day, I attended a half day tutorial on Agile Estimating that was very good. I knew a bit of what was discussed, thanks to XP and Scrum, but it was good to see it all put together, and it gave me some ideas on techniques to incorporate into my own scheduling.
I skipped the second tutorial on Monday; it was way too crowded. Hey, I thought that we had to sign up for these in advance! What’s the deal with it ending up SRO? Somebody didn’t plan well.
As an aside, that’s been one of the themes here at the expo. There are a lot more people here than in the past. It looks like SD is now on the growth curve. That’s great, although its created some “challenges” this year
Tuesday morning, I had a session with Scott Ambler on Agile Modelling. It sort of degenerated into a talk on Agile Development, since a lot of the audience seemed to be new to Agile. I enjoyed the talk anyway. It was interesting talking to others who were wrestling with the whole Agile concept.
In the afternoon, I went to a talk by Bob Martin on O-O design. Once again, the room was packed! Still, it was Bob Martin, so I shoe-horned myself into a corner to listen. A lot of what he covered was stuff that I first heard 10 years ago, but again, it was nice to get a refresher from him. Then, the real gem for me: he went over a TDD scenario. It was eye opening. He did an exercise he called the “Bowling Game”, it was a simple scoring system for bowling. It allowed you to input rolls, and then get a final score at the end. The eye opening part was that the easily apparent object model that should be used turned out to be wrong! By using the tests to drive the development, he ended up with a much simpler system that met all of the requirements easily. I was floored. I’ll be revisiting TDD in my own development work.
I’ll post more later…
3/15/2006 8:44:16 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) development