TechEd 2004, Reminiscing the v1.0 design, blogging paparazzi

TechEd 2004 has started in San Diego.  Unlike the LA PDC, there were no forrest fires to deal with so travel was nice.  Sunday night Kit George set up dinner for a small group of us at Sally's near the Hyatt.  A guy wearing a “I'm blogging this“ t-shirt took a photo of himself with Anders Hejlsberg in our party before being seated.  I'll have to go look for that photo out there on google.  It probably has the back of my “One Runtime to Run Them All“ shirt (the ring on the shirt is made up of all the source depot projects using the CLR in Microsoft, from VS to SQL to Longhorn).

Over dinner we were reminiscing over how difficult some of the early decisions we made in the framework were to nail down.  We had some rather deviscive debates over things like API shape (abstract interfaces vs inherited implementation, attribute collection return types, etc).  Life has actually been made a bit easier now that we've shipped, because we can keep following a lot of successful decisions.  Brad asked for opinions of any that belonged in the “API Hall of Shame”.  The winner was the late addition of System.Environment.HasShutdownStarted that accidentally started out life as an instance method.  It became the poster child for why static classes were a good thing.

SteveB's keynote went well.  The most exciting part here was the formal announcement of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, a collection of high end development tools including workflow, group development, a new source control system, integrated testing, and deployment.  Pieces of this you saw at the PDC with the White Horse demo's for modeling.  A lot of the rest is new and will be shown for the first time here.  I watched the Keynote from the overflow room which is kind of like the crying room at my church:  with 4 kids and 3 adults, you generally don't bother showing how badly you sing.  But when Steve made the Team System announcements and the demo's were run, even this smaller crowd broke out into applause.  Looks like a hit in the making...

I'm off for a set of customer meetings.  If you are at TechEd and would like to visit with myself, Brad Abrams, Adam Nathan, Jan Gray, and the rest of our (not yet) blogging crew, please let any of us know.  We're always happy to meet with folks!