Dallas, June 1, 2003 – Microsoft’s TechEd began with a pre-conference day with a few long, in-depth presentations and classes. A very cool presentation, interesting and fun filled was the Software Legends session. A number of well known authors and .NET guru’s talked about their own expertise. David Chappell was the first speaker to hit the floor. Chappell used the song My favourite things from “The Sound of Music” to find analogies between music and software development. Being a good pianist Chappell illustrated his talk with different selections from this and other songs. Chappell started his talk by stating that all modern software architectures don’t allow building immediately on operating systems any longer. All large companies like IBM, SUN and Microsoft use the same basic architectural model. According to Chappell it is a good thing that languages like Java and C# are available now, because C++ is really a language for people who enjoy pain. The remarkable similarities between Java and C# are not coincidental, even large software vendors inspire each other and sometimes borrow great idea’s from others. One of Chappel’s most favourite things in .NET is .NET My Services (aka Hailstorm). That is remarkable, since this whole initiative was not very successful. According to Chappell the same will happen what happened to The Sound of Music. At first, all critics turned it down, but in the end the audiences all over the world loved it. Something similar will happen to .NET My Services. The idea’s itself are great, an attempt to build an Internet Operating System. The approach was wrong but the idea is too good to die. Another very good thing in the eyes of Chappell is Project Mono. This open source implementation of the .NET Framework is remarkably good and will eventually mean that managed .NET software can run everywhere.

The next speaker in the lineup was Jeffrey Richter. He talked about some controversial .NET topics like managed code protection and performance. According to Richter for some intellectual properties it might be a problem that Intermediate Language is readable and can even be decompiled. A good way to solve this problem is to make use of obfuscation. Properly applied obfuscation can not only increase the protection against decompilation, according to Richter it can also increase execution speed because during obfuscation code is also compressed, meaning less code to be JITted. Richter concluded his presentation by stating that eventually managed code will outperform unmanaged code and that in the end garbage collection can be more efficient than C++ like new and delete operations.

David Platt had a complete different approach. He started his talk explaining that .NET solves lots of our current problems, but that it will introduce lots of new problems as well. According to one of Platt’s laws the amount of crap in the Universe must remain constant. He was especially critical towards COM Interop, hoping that eventually all code will become managed.

Billy Hollis showed some cool user interface possibilities with WinForms. Being a true VB developer, Hollis explained the audience that he has been working with managed code since 1991. He took his explanation even further, telling everybody that the new VB runtime (aka CLR) has a better performance than the previous one. As a special courtesy to the non VB developers Microsoft was so nice to share the new runtime with all kinds of other languages. The way Hollis uses web application user experiences into client applications is absolutely nice. His TextBox validator is absolutely worldclass.