Tim Jeanes: Microsoft TechEd (Monday)

Microsoft Tech.Ed Developers 2006 is considered the conference for computer geeks worldwide. The day before I flew out here, my house mate expressed his jealousy and asked if I had any space for him to stow away in my suitcase. I told him he'd have to share with the two others who had already asked.

Billed as "four days to get you months ahead of the game", it's actually five days if you include the pre-conference sessions on the Monday. Enthusiastic as we are, we turned up on site first thing Monday morning - only to find that though our flights had been booked a day early, no one had remembered to book our places on the pre-conference itself. We weren't the only ones disappointed to be turned away by the surly security guard.

*Sigh*

Oh well - registering still got us the conference pack, including a rather impressive DVD stuffed full of demo videos, white papers and hands-on labs: everything the keen geek needs to get his hands dirty. So, after a whistle-stop tour of the local tourist attractions, it was back to the oldest hotel in Barcelona to review the newest developments in IT.

And it's impressive stuff! There's a lot to be covered in the coming week, and we can't wait. Microsoft is splitting into three main areas, though of course they overlap and there's plenty more on the sidelines.

1. Office 2007
2. AJAX
3. Windows Vista

We haven't seen much of Office 2007 yet (what kind of geeks care that much about PowerPoint?), but I'm sure we will through the rest of the week.

AJAX is the tool used to make web sites more intuitively interactive - basically allowing you to do much more within the web page without the whole screen refreshing. It's the useful third of the much-hyped but little-understood Web 2.0 (the other two being rounded corners and a penchant for remaining constantly in beta testing). We're pretty excited about getting to see what Microsoft has to say about this and what ready-made tools they're supplying to use out-of-the-box.

Windows Vista is going to be a major step forward. It includes

• WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) - what makes Vista a (much, much) prettier face than XP
• WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) - enabling communications using web services to make true SOAs (Service Oriented Applications) either over the internet or all on the same box
• WF (Workflow Foundation) - a way of tracing objects through real-life business processes (with, naturally, a pretty front-end). Incidentally, it seems they had to avoid using the word Windows in that last acronym to avoid confusion both with the WWF and the WWF.

From a programmer's perspective, all the Vista stuff is handled by the .NET Framework 3.0: a misnomer in my mind as it's an addition to Framework 2.0 - it doesn't replace anything at all. It does, however, enable us to write applications that use WPF, WCF, WF and Windows CardSpace.

This last one's interesting: on the surface it just looks like Microsoft having another bash at their abortive .NET passport idea, but under the hood it's a different kettle of fish altogether. This time it's using proper encryption - separately for the company hosting the site, the user and the provider of the user's identity. Crucially though, Card Space is only Microsoft's implementation of the Identity Selector Machanism: there's also an open source version that's backed by Apache and contributed to by Red Hat. Dishing out IDs in a compatible way is already in place from Sun, IBM and Novell.