Coverage of PDC 2002 in Brasil

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Coverage of PDC 2002 in Brasil

Claudio Lassala, June 1, 2002

PDC 2002 - Brazil - On the vision of Claudio Lassala For the first time, Brazil hosted the Personal Developers’ Conference (PDC), the major Microsoft technologies developers’ conference. The event took place on May 6th and 7th, at the Meliá Hotel in São Paulo. Over 700 professionals attended ...

PDC 2002 - Brazil - On the vision of Claudio Lassala

For the first time, Brazil hosted the Personal Developers’ Conference (PDC), the major Microsoft technologies developers’ conference. The event took place on May 6th and 7th, at the Meliá Hotel in São Paulo. Over 700 professionals attended the conference.

Day 1

The rain was pouring since early morning, and I couldn’t use my motorbike to go to the event. So, I took a taxi and, as people who are used to the São Paulo traffic on rainy days know, it took me more than 1 hour to get there. The taxi cost me the amazing amount of almost 30 dollars (for just a couple of miles) and when I finally entered the ballroom, the opening ceremony had already started. Fortunately I was able catch part of Rich Kaplan’s keynote.

In the middle of his presentation, Rich asked the audience which programming language they use (among Visual Basic, C, C++, and Delphi). When he asked: "Which is the best one?" nobody replied. So, Rich replied in a laugh: "It’s the one you are using!"

Robert Green during his Keynote

During his speech, Rich Kaplan showed us some statistics comparing the popular PetStore application, written in Java, with the PetShop application written in .NET. According to these statistics, .NET was first in almost every category. When it got to the issue referring to the number of code lines, .NET was also way ahead, proving to carry a significantly smaller amount of code lines.

After Rich’s speech, Robert Green stepped on the stage to speak about RAD. He showed us how easy it is to create a Web Service showing that is only necessary to add WEBMETHOD to the method. He also showed the intelligence embedded in the code editor VS.NET. For example, when a Web Reference is used, the editor validates the methods and the parameters. Robert showed an error-trapping scheme in an ASP.NET application, demonstrating that debugging Web applications has become a very simple task.

Some WinForms were also shown. A mostly interesting feature was the "Anchor". Do you remember those endless classes and code lines that were necessary to "resize" the Form controls? Well, by using the "Anchor" property, all this has become automatic, and not a single line of code needs to be written.

The attendees (by Robert Green!)

Rich Kaplan got back on stage to talk about some interesting success storied based on .NET. First of them was L’Oreal. A video was shown where the company gives a statement on the productivity gains with .NET, and how L’Oreal’s team created Web applications using ASP.NET and Web Services. Other success stories were on Merrill Lynch and AutoDesk. Afterwards, Robert Green took over and spoke about development for mobile devices. A small demo application was created on the fly, but, as usual, when it was most needed, it refused to run. I know what a challenge it is to develop a new tool in front of 700 curious faces, and the last place I would like to be at that very moment was in Robert’s shoes. < Laughter >

During the explanations that were given on the Mobile Toolkit, the spokesman emphasized that it is possible to develop an application that can run on devices like the iPaq handheld as well as on cell phones. The good news is that the application does not need additional programming to run on a different device: the .NET Framework itself does all the work of rendering the application to run properly on the other device.

Rich Kaplan stepped back on the stage to add some remarks on the .NET strategy, giving Robert Green a second chance to run his Mobile application demo, which worked fine this time.

Robert also did his best to bring some good news to faithful VB programmers, who are still a little anxious about rumors that they could throw away all their efforts with VB 6 because traditional VB applications would not be compatible with VB.NET. Robert demonstrated that a simple credit card authentication COM component, written in VB 6, would run normally under VB.NET.

Then, Robert copied the VB 6 source code and dropped it on VB.NET, without making any changes to the code and it worked perfectly well. I, particularly, still find this whole affair a little difficult. There is no doubt that developers who write applications on an n-tier architecture have nothing to fear; it is also true that developers who only have to write small routines like the one for the credit card authentication code, have nothing to fear. But it is my belief that programmers who have never created any component-based applications, or developers who have to program complex routines, will have some trouble to migrate, due to the major differences in the language model. I might be wrong, but this is a simple view of a VFP addict. < laughter >

The conference also dedicated a whole slot on security issues. According to the security level configured on the framework, some local applications, applications on intranets or on the Internet, could have some restrictions in order to run properly.

Another interesting feature was the "role-based security" topic that proved, for example, that it is very easy to show or not to show some controls in a Form, according to the authentication rights attributed to the user by the Windows operating system.

Beny Rubinstein during his Keynote

Shortly before lunch, Beny Rubinstein (Product Manager) addressed his keynote to the audience. After saying some sentences in English, he started speaking the most perfect Portuguese. The audience was astounded, and I wondered if he was Brazilian. Later he explained that he was Brazilian born, has been in America for 4 years and is presently active at Microsoft Corporation.

Beny demonstrated the Policy Reminder - Best Practices, which is an interesting feature. Many companies have internal policies, and we are aware of some of the "best practices". With this resource, we are able to inform VS.NET what the policies and best practices are, and VS.NET will help us follow these policies. Should we, at some stage, disregard these policies, VS.NET will give us an alert, without blocking the system (because the idea is to inform and not to punish the user).

Beny also showed us some Visio features that enable people with no technical expertise to create a relational database model. All these professionals have to know is, for example, that there is a relation between client 1 and N orders.

This presentation was followed by a short break for lunch. There was I, sitting in a corner, amidst so many strangers, writing this article on my Palmtop, and trying to make sure I wouldn’t forget a single detail. I didn’t expect to meet anyone on that conference, but all of a sudden Grego (the "Greek") discovered me in the crowd. He is a member of the FoxBrasil Group. Shortly after I met Henry, a new colleague, a Java programmer, who admitted to be absolutely carried away with C#. After lunch, the huge ballroom has already been divided into 4 smaller auditoriums (there was a fifth lecture hall), for the different tracks that occurred simultaneously. I attended the track "Did someone see the Recordset around?"), coordinated by Miguel Ferreira. He showed the traditional ADO object model, and, subsequently, the ADO.NET. As I was in charge of a presentation on a session immediately after, I left 20 minutes early and don’t know the end of Miguel’s story.

As I said, there were 5 simultaneous tracks, so it was impossible to attend them all. So, I shall only write about those that I could attend, and I will add to this report some impressions of friends who took part in other sessions.

On the second slot of sessions, I had the opportunity to present "Developing Web Applications with Visual FoxPro 7.0 and ASP.NET". Fábio Vazquez, who attended this presentation, will give you a report on my presentation later on in this article.

On the third slot of conferences I presented "Creating and Consuming XML Web Services using Visual FoxPro 7.0". Unfortunately the PDC audience was not available to listen to this presentation, since there was a simultaneous presentation on Visual Studio .NET that galvanized all attentions. So, I talked to one single listener, who had the privilege of having an exclusive one-to-one presentation. (). Anyway, on this session, I tried to show how to create a VFP 7.0-based Web Service, and how this or any other Web Service can be used on VFP. I also showed a WindForm written in C#, that consumed the Web Service created in VFP.

From left to right: Robert Green, Claudio Lassala and Beny Rubinstein

When I was just about ready to go home, and took my cell phone to call a taxi, I saw Robert Green and Beny Rubinstein in the hallway. I ended up spending more than an hour talking to them and Leonardo Tolomelli - MSDN Program Manager for Microsoft Brazil - joined us for this conversation.

Robert was very glad to know that someone in Brazil was doing something he was putting so much effort in - working with VFP together with ASP.NET. He asked me how my VFP sessions at the Conference had been, and he was very surprised when I mentioned the total audience at PDC. "You mean 700 people are attending PDC? Where have they all gone?!" I gave him a brief explanation of the VFP market in Brazil, and he said he would talk to Ken Levy (VFP Product Manager at Microsoft Corp) to get in touch with me (in fact, less than 24 hours later Robert had informed Ken about our meeting).

Then, my taxi arrived and I went home.

Day 2

Unfortunately other commitments prevented me from attending the PDC next morning. The first session in the afternoon was about "How to learn .NET and get a certification in this platform" which was presented by José Antonio das Neves Neto, from a local Microsoft Partner, Brás & Figueiredo Informática Ltda. José Antonio talked about how learning must be split into different layers: Web interface design, Web Application development, Mobile Web Application Design, etc. He gave a good explanation about the differences between the traditional MCSD and the new MCAD. While a MCAD is an application and component developer, MCSD is a solution architect, who, apart from having to know everything a MCAD knows, he or she must also know how to design a solution.

Moving further, I attended the "Tips and Tricks in C#" session, presented by Fábio Razzo Gallupo. Fábio showed us some of the .NET Framework classes, like the Environment collection, process, globalization, IO, StringBuilder, etc., and some simple examples on how to apply them.

My vision is that PDC 2002 Brasil was extremely well organized and well structured, and I would personally like to congratulate Leonardo Tolomelli and Microsoft for having made this possible. Below is Henry Hazan’s report. Hazan had the opportunity to attend to other sessions other than the ones I attended, and brings his contribution to this article. Thank you, Henry!

Presentation on the "Case Study on ERP and CRM Solutions on the .NET platform":

It was absolutely amazing to watch the migration of a huge application written in Java to C#, and how it showed great results in a very short timeframe. It was a great idea to allow the "business objects" to work as Web Services, even if only internally, enabling them to encapsulate the NewAge application, and making them turn into a set of components (from www.newage.-software.com.br). This application has more than 10,000 database tables, and all was done in a very fast and powerful way, since there is nothing lighter than XML to go through the network. The application user interface works in a tremendously fast way when it runs on windows forms, since it is only the XML files that go through the modem.

Overview on the Presentation: "A strategic analysis of .NET"

This brilliant strategy could only stem from "the master of the business". Every aspect of the .NET strategy demonstrates that Microsoft is really focusing on the developer’s community, both internally and on a global basis. Congratulations to Bill Gates, who left behind his title as a CEO, and decided to get his "feet wet" in the development area. This shows that most of the marketing of a software corporation emerges from its own architecture, especially when we refer to .NET, which is the bottom line for so many other prospective Microsoft product. In other words: It is possible for Power and Productivity to live under the same roof. Unfortunately, most of what we see in the market is either Power, or Productivity.

A brief overview on PDC 2002 - Brasil, by Fábio Vazquez

On May 6th and 7th Brazil hosted the most important worldwide Microsoft developer’s conference, the PDC or Professional Developers’ Conference. It was the first time that this event took place in Latin America and, given the great concentration of developers in the city of São Paulo, here is where it was carried forth.

The main topics that caught my attention and led me to participate of this Conference were the two sessions about Visual FoxPro, allowing the product to be shown as a fully integrated product in the .NET world. Cláudio Lassala was responsible for both presentations. Of course, almost all other issues had something to do with .NET, but the mere fact that Visual FoxPro would have its chance to be among the most interesting themes made me very excited and happy at the same time. This only reflects that all the efforts dedicated by the VFP team, under Ken Levy’s leadership, reinforcing this tool to developers, enabling its continuity, and lending the necessary support to Microsoft developers’ programs, were not in vain. We would also like to express our gratitude to Leonardo Tolomelli who is always open to discuss all possible opportunities for Visual FoxPro in Brazil.

Day 1

I traveled almost 500 miles to the Gran Meliá Hotel, in the nervous center of the busy city of São Paulo, to attend the most important developers’ event of the year. I got to São Paulo the day before and, after a good night’s sleep, at 8:30 sharp, on the opening day, I was already in my seat, half an hour early, very excited not to miss a single detail. I was ready to absorb all the new things Microsoft had prepared for us.

Rich Kaplan, vice president of the Content, Development & Delivery Group at Microsoft Corporation opened the event with a great keynote speech. To an audience of approximately 900 people, Rich presented his strategic vision of the .NET Platform and Visual Studio .NET, as the major tools to support the whole .NET strategy. Rich gave us a broad perspective of the evolution of technology in the last two decades, and a view towards the future, showing the importance of software as a service. To demonstrate some of the potential of Visual Studio .NET, like the creation and consumption of Web Services, Rich called Beny Rubinstein on stage. Beny is the product manager of Visual Studio .NET. To my surprise, Beny, who made his entire presentation in English, ended up by confessing that he was Brazilian. Small world...

The next presentation was made by Robert Green, leading product manager for Visual Studio .NET. Robert directed his speech to some more practical issues concerning Visual Studio .NET, and proved to the audience how simple it was to create applications that can migrate to different hardware devices like cell phones and PDAs.

Beny Rubinstein closed the morning sessions. He presented issues of great interest, like all the features available to enhance developers’ productivity and to improve the quality of .NET applications. He talked about the Enterprise Templates - tools that enable less experienced developers to increase development speed; Object Role Modeling - a database modeling tool that brings some examples and facts in natural language, which is also very useful to non-technical users and business executives; Application Center Test - a routine and strategies development tool that enables to test and to assess the performance of applications. On this presentation, Beny decided to speak Portuguese, since very few people in the audience understood his jokes in English.

On the afternoon of Day 1, the audience was divided into specific tracks. There were five tracks available: ADO.NET, ASP.NET, .NET Languages, Web Services and one special track that addressed less specialized issues like performance, migration, strategic analysis and application architecture.

I personally decided to attend the CLR session, presented by Fábio Galuppo. Fábio showed the CLR principles, the language-independent features of CLR, the IL compiler, etc. One of Fabio’s major tasks was to write a hypotenuse calculus program in IL, with the use of nothing but the Clipboard. Those were, as a matter of fact, one of the few times that Fabio ever opened Visual Studio .NET during the entire session.

Claudio Lassala, showing VFP 7 with ASP.NET

After this total immersion in CLR, the great moment has come to watch Cláudio Lassala’s presentation: "Developing Web Applications with Visual FoxPro 7.0 and ASP.NET". Under a very sharp perspective, Cláudio was able to show the audience a COM component, written in Visual FoxPro 7.0. The tool had been used to update his UTMag/RapoZine magazine articles, and could be accessed by an ASP.NET application. Lassala proved that VFP is alive and well, and can be perfectly used in the .NET world: all it requires is the "componentization2 of the application, implementing COM user interfaces for the code in VFP. These COM components can be easily accessed by any code written in .NET, using the Interop engine.

Day 2

On the second day, Leonardo Tolomelli, MSDN Manager for Microsoft Brasil, coordinated most of the general sessions. To say the least, Leonardo’s presentation on Visual Studio .NET and market perspectives for this product was absolutely impressive. During his presentation, Tolomelli demoed a Tablet PC, a revolutionary new device which is, unfortunately, still very rare in Brasil. As he mentioned, the device that his colleague was using to demo the product was the only one available in all Latin America! Leonardo also brought up some details on the ROTOR project, the source code for the C# compiler, of the recent CLI announced by Microsoft for the Windows XP version and FreeBDS. That’s it, folks, FreeBDS! Leonardo also mentioned Microsoft steps to strengthen its relationship with the academic community through some important initiatives like specific presentations at Universities and the ROTOR project itself.

At the end of his speech, Leonardo announced that two new presentations on application architecture were being opened in the afternoon sessions. At that very moment I didn’t think twice and reviewed my whole previously agenda for the afternoon. After lunch, those were the two only presentations I attended. The first presentation on architecture was slightly below my expectations. A Microsoft Brasil software partner showed some general aspects of his applications’ architecture. He underscored the use of Web Services, which didn’t seem to be at a very ripe stage yet. When his presentation focused Business Intelligence, the spokesperson gave great emphasis to ADOMD and XML for Analysis to access OLAP based multidimensional data. An interesting detail was that ADOMD does not have an equivalent standard in the .NET-managed environment. The only possible availability has to go through COM components.

Ricardo Balduíno from Rational Software was responsible for the second afternoon session. His presentation was very interesting as he spoke about XDE (extended Development Environment), an environment that is integrated to Visual Studio .NET to created UML models. Ricardo mentioned that this product would not replace the popular Rational Rose. At this stage, XDE is only available for C#, and there is no clear forecast when the product will be available for VB.NET.

The next presentation I selected was Fabio Galuppo’s "Tips and Tricks on C#". I must admit it was not very useful to me.

On the other hand, the last presentation, closing the event, was on ADO.NET. Mauro Sant’Ana was a real showman. In a very concise manner, Mauro presented the ADO.NET project’s philosophy, and the different ways through which it is possible to design an application. Mauro highlighted the importance of using ADO.NET with disconnected Datasets in all the stages that involve the application development, and its benefits in issues like contention and scalability.

Summary

The two days of PDC were really meaningful and important, because, in first place, I found out that .NET is a totally ripe technology: it does not require a lot of testing or further development. It is here, available and ready to run. I talked to many professionals who were already deep in the process of developing .NET projects and I noticed that .NET is a reality, even among Brazilian developers.

Claudio Lassala, Improving
Claudio Lassala is an independent Software Developer who currently works mostly building Ruby on Rails applications. Previously, he has worked for several years developing .NET applications, presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil, TechEd Europe, and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America, Europe and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C# ever since). He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine and CoDe Magazine. He started the Virtual Brown Bag meetings (www.virtualbrownbag.com) in 2009 and have been hosting it weekly since then. When not writing code, Claudio is probably rocking out with his band, Descent Into Madness (http://www.descentintomadness.com). In a previous life, Claudio authored and presented several training videos that can be found on the Universal Thread.

Fabio Vazquez, Microsoft
Fabio Vazquez (Redmond, WA) is a Software Engineer for the Office Online Team at Microsoft. He is a former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in C# and VFP and a frequent speaker at software development conferences in Brazil, including the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) and Tech-Ed. Fabio has two books published and has a great passion for agile development practices.