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Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Conference
Trip Report, Revision 1


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4-8 June 2000

Contents

This report has been reviewed by Microsoft Legal, and its release and publication have been approved. Portions are copyright by Microsoft Corporation. CLICK HERE to view a copy of the approval message.

Overview of Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 was a significant educational opportunity for those in the software development community who are interested in and using Microsoft products and technologies. Its 250+ technical sessions were attended by over 11,000 software developers and information technology professionals. The event was hosted at the Orange County Convention Center near Orlando, Florida, supported by a collaboration of 39 hotels in the area and a set of 12 bus routes to move the attendees from their hotels to the conference and to the special events. The overall theme of the conference is on building the Business Internet, and most of the technologies discussed support this theme. Registration and exhibits opened on 4 June, and the technical sessions and exhibits ran from 5-8 June 2000.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Click on Image to Enlarge

The conference included:

The vendors and Microsoft gave away an enormous amount of free software, literature, and trinkets at the conference, and the post-conference CDROM (to be mailed about 5 weeks after the close of the conference) contains:

Virtually all the software tools and technologies described in all the sessions can be found in the Microsoft Developer's Network (MSDN) Universal Subscription and the MSDN Library, so attendees can return to their homes and dive into depth on the material of particular interest to them. There were a few exceptions not yet available in the MSDN Universal Subscription, and I was able to bring back preliminary copies of some of them that were of particular interest:

Detailed information can be found at the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Website. From this site:

Microsoft Tech·Ed has sold out for the 8th consecutive year, drawing more than 11,000 developers and IT professionals. In addition, Microsoft Tech·Ed US combines with fifteen other Tech·Ed events worldwide for a combined total attendance of 35,000 which makes it the largest Microsoft worldwide technical education event ever!

Technical Overview


From the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Website:

There's been plenty of talk about what the Web and Internet-based technologies can do for your company. What you're looking for is a complete understanding of what you can take advantage of TODAY to build The Business Internet. That's why Microsoft Tech·Ed 2000 is focused specifically on products and technologies that can be used TODAY for building solutions to empower your knowledge workers, link to your business partners, or do virtually anything that meets your distinct needs in the new business age.

At Microsoft Tech·Ed 2000 you'll get an in-depth look at The Business Internet from four primary perspectives:

Tracks


From the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Website:

The key tracks from the conference are:

Sponsors

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 was sponsored by:
  • Platinum Sponsors
    • BindView
    • Compaq
    • Dell
    • IBM
    • NetIQ
    • Veritas
  • Media Sponsors
    • SQL Server Magazine
    • Windows 2000 Magazine
  • Other Sponsors
    • American Power Conversion
    • BrainBuzz.com
    • CommVault Systems
    • Computer Associates
    • Data Return Corporation
    • Decision Support Panel
    • EDS
    • Hewlett-Packard
    • LINQ
    • MERANT
    • Microsoft Visio Pavilion
    • Network Appliance, Inc.
    • PowerQuest
    • Programmer's Paradise, Inc.
    • Proxim, Inc.
    • Research in Motion Ltd.
    • Seagate Software
    • Wrox Press

Role of Bill Gates as a Software Industry Spokesman

Over the years, Bill Gates has emerged as a spokesman for the software industry, and by viewing his recent speeches (such as the speech at Tech-Ed 2000), one can get a feeling for both the direction of Microsoft and the direction of the software industry. Several of his recent speeches have been presented to corporate officers and government officials, and they are presented in a very understandable way (suitable for the non-software professional). For this reason, it is worth offering copies (with the permission of Microsoft) of the following speeches:

Business @ The Speed of Thought

Business @ The Speed of Thought by Bill Gates, Warner Books, 1999, ISBN 0-446-52568-5, is a well-written management-oriented presentation on the philosophy behind key elements of the design of Windows 2000. It was developed through a collaboration with many major corporations, working very much in a symbiotic relationship. Bill Gates collaborated with Collins Hemingway (who helped synthesize and develop the material in the book and managed the project overall). Gates also bounced the book drafts off of:

Their comments and insight were incorporated into the book. Many, many others also contributed, resulting in an understandable, well-written book aimed at CEOs, other organizational leaders, and managers at all levels. Insight into many companies besides Microsoft is included.

From the Introduction to Business @ The Speed of Thought:

"Business is going to change more in the next ten years than it has in the last fifty.

"As I was preparing my speech for our first CEO summit in the spring of 1997, I was pondering how the digital age will fundamentally alter business. I wanted to go beyond a speech on dazzling technology advances and address questions that business leaders wrestle with all the time. How can technology help you run your business better? How will technology transform business? How can technology help make you a winner five or ten years from now?

"If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of business will change. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes. A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at hear a product company, but a service company that has a product offering."

For more information, see the book or visit its website at http://www.Speed-of-Thought.com/.

Tech-Ed 2000 Keynote speeches

The following are the keynote speeches by William H. (Bill) Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft Corporation, and Bob Muglia, Group Vice President of Microsoft's Business Productivity Group:

Notes from Selected Sessions

I attended the following sessions, and the notes from these follow. If further detail is desired, video and audio tapes may be purchased of the sessions, and the conference CDROM is due out in less than 5 weeks (it contains Powerpoint slides of each of the sessions). The full text of each keynote is also available from the links in the previous section of this trip report. Finally, the presentations often mentioned URLs to pertinent websites that would provide more information; these URLs are included.

  1. Opening Keynote - Bill Gates
  2. Keynote - Bob Muglia
  3. Visio Programming - Part 1: A Graphics Component for Microsoft Office Applications (4-301)
  4. Visio Programming - Part 2: In-depth Visio Automation Programming with Microsoft Office (4-406)
  5. Using the Microsoft XML Engine with Visual Studio (6-310, WebCast)
  6. Building Great Applications for the Pocket PC (8-301)
  7. Developing Second Generation Digital Dashboards (4-304, WebCast)
  8. Create Document/View Applications with XML (6-404, WebCast)
  9. Building Web Parts for Second Generation Digital Dashboards (4-313)
  10. Building COM Add-Ins for Office 2000 (4-402)
  11. Developing Windows CE-based Applications with Visual Basic (8-305)
  12. Understanding SOAP (1-201)
  13. Using Web Services and SOAP (9-331, WebCast)
  14. "Microsoft UNIX" - Migrating UNIX Applications to Windows 2000 (7-322)
  15. Other Notes from the Conference
  16. A Collection of Powerpoint Presentations from the Conference

  1. Opening Keynote - Bill Gates

  2. Keynote - Bob Muglia

  3. Visio Programming - Part 1: A Graphics Component for Microsoft Office Applications (4-301)

    4. Click on Image (on the right) to Enlarge
    • This presentation provided background information on Visio and many live demos
    • Visio is a graphics component for Office 2000
    • Visio Corporation, who makes the 4 Visio products, was purchased by Microsoft for $1.3 Billion
    • Visio is all about data visualization and data sharing
    • Visio has won several awards in 2000, including awards from PC Magazine and PC Week
    • From the Visio website: "Microsoft Visio® 2000 enables you to communicate effectively with easy-to-assemble drawings and diagrams. Create organizational charts and flowcharts; draw technical schematics and annotate CAD drawings; and manually or automatically work on network, software, and database design."
    • Visio supports six application programming interfaces, including ShapeSheets (specific to Visio), Visual Basic, and Visual C++
    • The ShapeSheet is the primary data model for Visio; all objects in a Visio diagram have an associated ShapeSheet
    • As in all Office products, ALT-F11 brings up the Visual Basic for Applications Programming Interface (try this in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, and others as well)
    • Visio is a software development tool, not just a drawing tool
    • Visio also supports website analysis, network analysis, reverse engineering of software and databases, and over 40 other functions
    • Saving Visio diagrams to the web includes their associated hyperlinks; Visio diagrams published to the web are generic (not specific to Internet Explorer)

    View the Talk



  4. Visio Programming - Part 2: In-depth Visio Automation Programming with Microsoft Office (4-406)

    5. View the Talk

  5. Using the Microsoft XML Engine with Visual Studio (6-310, WebCast)

    6. View the Talk

  6. Building Great Applications for the Pocket PC (8-301)

    7. Click on Image (on the right) to Enlarge
    • We are in the 2nd generation of Pocket PC Operating Systems - the first was code-named Wyvern and the current is named Rapier
    • The operating system is truly multi-tasking and real-time (not hard real-time)
    • Autorun is available when a Compact Flash (CF) memory card is inserted
    • The Pocket PCs run on different CPUs; to address this, Microsoft has defined the Common Executable Format (CEF) to which Visual Basic and Visual C++ can compile
    • HTML and XML support are built-in to the operating system
    • Microsoft has created Embedded Visual Tools, a scaled-down version of Visual Studio where features that do make sense for the mobile computer environment are not included; Embedded Visual Tools 3.0 was distributed at the conference and includes Visual Basic and Visual C++; Embedded Visual Tools 3.0 targets to the hand-held PC, the palm-size PC, and the Pocket PC, and plans are in the works to target to the new Table PC and Automobile PC
    • Programming support for the Pocket PC includes the standard win32 API
    • The mobile PCs are not conceptually the same as a conventional PC, and the mindset for programming them is different; single-click is everywhere (no double click - instead, tap and hold); developers were instructed to accept and ignore double-clicks; also, flat button tops only (no 3D effect) to conserve on space
    • Embedded Visual Tools will be included in the MSDN Universal subscription soon
    • Upon return from the conference, I installed Embedded Visual Tools 3.0 on my home PC (Windows 98) and successfully compiled and ran a program on my Pocket PC; remote debugging support is impressive; ease of development is impressive
    • Since the conference, the toolkit for the Automobile PC has come out
    • For more information, contact http://msdn.microsoft.com/cetools/


    View the Talk

  7. Developing Second Generation Digital Dashboards (4-304, WebCast)

    • This was just an overview with a lot of demos
    • The purpose of the Second Generation Digital Dashboard is to provide the right information at the right time and to combat information overload
    • This has been under development since before Bill Gates made a public announcement in April 1999; 770,000 Digital Dashboard kits have been distributed since then
    • Users can customize their individual Digital Dashboards
    • Need Internet Explorer 5 or Outlook 2000 as clients for the Second Generation Digital Dashboards (First Generation can run anywhere)
    • Office web components can be used with the Second Generation Digital Dashboard
    • A kit for developing Second Generation Digital Dashboards was handed out to all attendees (whether they attended this presentation or not)
    • This is the foundation for Microsoft's "Web Parts" technology
    • Microsoft is working to extend the Second Generation Digital Dashboard to work under the Netscape browser
    • More material will be in future MSDN Universal subscriptions

    Click on Image to Enlarge

    View the Talk

  8. Create Document/View Applications with XML (6-404, WebCast)

    9. View the Talk

  9. Building Web Parts for Second Generation Digital Dashboards (4-313)

    10. View the Talk - talk not available at this time

  10. Building COM Add-Ins for Office 2000 (4-402)

    11. View the Talk

  11. Developing Windows CE-based Applications with Visual Basic (8-305)

    12. View the Talk

  12. Understanding SOAP (1-201)

    13. View the Talk

  13. Using Web Services and SOAP (9-331, WebCast)

    14. View the Talk

  14. "Microsoft UNIX" - Migrating UNIX Applications to Windows 2000 (7-322)

    15. View the Talk

  15. Other Notes from the Conference

    • IBM has established the IBM Center for Microsoft Technologies about 5 miles from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington
    • Dell's website accounts for 40% of sales and 70% of order status reporting; Dell's website sells $40M/day of computers
    • IBM's investment in Windows 2000 is second only to Microsoft - IBM has 10,000 software developers and over 1,000,000 supported desktop systems backed by 40,000 servers (all running Windows 2000)
    • COMPAQ is an acronym for COMPatibility And Quality
    • String handling in Visual Basic is very slow; that's why many developers go to Visual C++ when their applications do an extensive amount of string handling; string handling may be Visual Basic's greatest weakness in the eyes of the seasoned developers
    • The Pocket PC can present Powerpoint (even though it does not have a Powerpoint viewer yet): save the Powerpoint presentation as HTML, copy it to the Pocket PC, view with Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC, and display from the Pocket PC via a VGA output card plugged into the Pocket PC
    • Microsoft Office 2000 is growing; its current composition includes these products (each with multiple editions, where Enterprise is the most complete edition):
      • Access 2000
      • Excel 2000
      • FrontPage 2000
      • MapPoint 2000
      • Outlook 2000
      • PhotoDraw 2000
      • PowerPoint 2000
      • Project 2000
      • Publisher 2000
      • Schedule+ 2000
      • Team Manager 2000
      • Visio 2000
      • Visual SourceSafe
      • Word 2000
    • A Windows Media Authoring (see picture on right) kit was distributed at the conference; support for Windows Media is based on Windows Media Player and is built into all Windows 2000 operating systems; the authoring kit allows the author to add full-motion video and stereo audio to Powerpoint presentations and the like; Internet Explorer 5 or Outlook 2000 (backed by Windows Media Player) is required to view the media files produced by the kit
    • Notes on the microsoft.com website design - this information is from a presentation by the developers/maintainers of the website; it can be easily scanned and mapped with Visio; uses scriptlets extensively (not applets); based on XML backed by the SQL 2000 Server; user data is stored locally in .js files (cookies are used only for temporary data because cookies can be disabled, lost, or destroyed)

    Click on Image to Enlarge

  16. A Collection of Powerpoint Presentations from the Conference

    17. The following lists a selected subset of the presentations given at the conference. You may click on each title to download or view the Powerpoint presentation. For a complete listing (with downloads) visit: http://commnet.us.teched.mscorpevents.com/sessions.asp.

    Note: on occasion, you will find that the title in this list (which matches/is close to the official title in the conference proceedings) does not exactly match the title on the slides. Great care has been taken to ensure that the pairing of the title to the slides is correct (the mapping is by session number, not title).