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Ok, so tonight's keynote with Scott Hanselman was interesting to say the least. Hanselman is always fun to listen to, and I would consider him a pretty brilliant presenter. Today, while waiting for his keynote to start, he showed a bunch of interesting things on the projectors. As I sat down, he had legacy machines booting, or at least showed the boot sequence of old Mac OSs, Amiga, Commodore and Windows. Quite funny…and after that, he just browsed around the web showing off a bunch of really funny websites. Sites like http://sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ and http://isitchristmas.com/. He also showed off a video with Steve Ballmer singing, an org-chart of Microsoft with each unit pointing guns at the other. And yes, he also covered in depth his relationship to Scott Gu… And the some!

And however ridiculously funny it was to hear him talk, and hear him joke at the expense of Microsoft and boost a few open source projects, it was not the main attraction. The main attraction was when he found a missing feature in ASP.NET MVC, said that he wanted it fixed but that they were too busy. So he open sourced ASP.NET and asked one of the Mono guys to fix it by getting it off Codeplex using Git… Very funky!

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I just attended an interesting keynote with Jason Zander. It didn’t really include a lot of new stuff as it was mostly focused around VS11, but it did bring up some things I hadn’t seen before, and I must say it is looking good.

It seems like the ALM stuff is taking another step in the right direction, adding in a lot of cool feedback stuff. Unfortunately, with the people I meet in the industry, it won’t be used as widely as it should. Everyone seems to have their reasons for not using TFS, but I keep coming back to the same point. If you look at the individual pieces of the TFS, like for example the source control, you will find better solutions out there. But if you start looking at the whole offering, you will see that it all integrates nicely giving you a very powerful suite of tools. I just wish I had more time to play with it and see what it can do…

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The second day of the Software Passion Summit started with an inspiring talk by Gojko Adzic. He talked about a lot of different areas including software developments and requirements gathering. A few of his points were very interesting and lingered in my mind…

Gojko said that absence of bugs is not a guarantee for software quality, and good software quality doesn’t mean that the software is bug free. I find this very interesting, and true. I love that someone stands up and says it out loud. Perceived quality, which is the most important thing, is not dependent on the software being bug free. I think that if you deliver an awesome experience and a good set of features, most user are willing to ignore a lot of bugs as long as they aren’t showstoppers.

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Today I got to do my smooth streaming presentation here at Software Passion Summit. It is a presentation I personally love to present, but apparently there aren’t a lot of people who are interested in the topic…at least not here. The room wasn’t really full, but for those who were there, I promised to put a little code on my blog for download. So here it is: MyMediaPlayer.zip (21.93 kb).

If there are any questions don’t hesitate to contact me. Unfortunately the setup for the Microsoft Media Platform Video Editor is a bit complicated, so I can’t just zip it up and give it to you. But if you are really keen to have that as well, and find the information about it a little confusing, let me know and I will help out. I might even do a blog post about it as well…

As for the excellent tool I used for looking at my Azure storage, it is called Cloud Storage Studio, and is HIGHLY recommended. I wouldn’t consider working with Azure storage without it.

Today I presented an introduction to the Azure Service bus here at Software Passion Summit. As a part of that presentation, I promised to upload the code and PPT to the blog, which is what I am doing here. I am pretty sure that the PPT is pretty useless as it contains very little useful information, but I thought I would put it here anyway.

One little note though. To be able to test the code, you have to get your own Service bus namespace as I have removed my details from the code. Reason? Well, I only have limited free usage of the bus, and I really don’t feel like getting a big bill because someone wrote some code that hammered my namespace with requests… I hope that is understandable…

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So…the conference has started, and first up to talk was Jan Bosch, who spoke about software development from a business point of view, sort of. Jan is a professor of software engineering at Chalmers University of Technology here in Gothenburg.

His talk was quite interesting and entertaining, and focused on one really important point. A point that seems to be re-occurring in a lot of IT talks today. And that point is speed. Speed is key in software development today.

There are a lot of players out there, and being first or at least early, and staying there, is really important. And unless you are moving as fast as the rest of the industry, or faster, you are already dead, you just don’t know it yet.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have the best product, or be first to succeed, but as long as you have an adequate product and you are up at the front with the others, or ahead, you have a great chance of winning. If you on the other hand have a great product, but release it to late, you are screwed…

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I have just arrived in Gothenburg to speak at the Software Passion Summit conference. It is an interesting conference with a very “wide” selection of content, covering everything from testing to cloud and methodology to mobile as well as from JavaScript and C# to RegEx and Java.

I’m really looking forward to attending a bunch of the sessions, and I will try to add some of my comments here on the blog at the end of the day.

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Ok, so the first day of the TT has passed, and I guess it is time to sum it all up… Well, my impressions of the first day is that I feel that both VS11 and Windows 8 has matured a lot between the releases. It feels a lot more solid, and I am actually going to switch my private laptop, and maybe even my work one over to Windows 8 as soon as I get back.

It is hard to pinpoint what exactly make me say this, but it just feels a lot more solid. It seems to have a lot less “quirks” and the errors you get while coding against it seems a WHOLE lot better. Having that said, we haven’t actually coded a whole lot today. It has mostly been walkthroughs of features and design and so on. Basically covering the same thing that was covered during BUILD last year…

So unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot to sum up. Nothing really new at all…

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I barely managed to get back from this years MVP Summit before I am on my way again. I landed in Stockholm yesterday at 11:30, and it is now 15:30 and I am back on the train to the airport…

This time I am headed to Amsterdam for a “Train the Trainer” for Windows 8. For those of you who do not know what TTT events are, they are basically a way for Microsoft to educate trainers on their new platforms, making sure that there are trainers out there ready to educate people when their new platforms launches. I personally think this TTT is going to be extra interesting as it is covering the next version of Microsoft’s biggest product (Windows…duh), which just a couple of days ago was released as a “consumer preview” version. And this time, Microsoft is handling the whole thing a bit differently than normal, so it is quite exciting…

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When working with Silverlight, we often end up communicating with some form of services. They might be SOAP-based WCF services, which Silverlight handles fine, but lately REST-like services have become a lot more popular, and Silverlight doesn’t always handle them as nicely… They often rely on headers and HTTP verbs other than GET and POST, which Silverlight doesn’t handle very well by default.

In my world, I am currently spending a lot of time working with a Silverlight client that is used in a situation where we use federated security. This requires the client to carry around a token that tells the service who he/she is, and what claims are being made.

In this case, we are using the thinktecture IdentityServer, which after a bit of configuration works very well. It makes it very easy to integrate with using Silverlight, which is nice. All you need to do is do is to make an HTTP GET call to the identity server, passing along the credentials in the form of a basic authentication header. The identity server in turn replies with a token that identifies the client (at least if the credentials are valid). The client can then POST that token to the the service (relying party) who will then use that token to authenticate the client. And after that, everyone is happy, and the service can trust the client being who he/she says he/she is…

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