Tech Embassy and I took a road trip yesterday down to RealDevelopment 06.  I am “live-blogging” this event to you (a day later) via the oldest means of blogging there is: pen and paper. There is apparently no wifi at the conference so everything you’re reading has been lovingly transcribed by hand on the very pads of paper that I got as my "free gift" at this event.

Road trip and intro

Road trip to Calgary overall rating: ****1/2 (***** for Tech Embassy's mastery of the Calgary roadways, but -1/2* for Rockarts not attending today since he was either training to be a cage fighter or prepping his presentation to the Grande Prairie municipal web group, I can’t remember which reason he gave. Of course, any Albertan who has seen the first 30 minutes of X-men 1 knows these are pretty much one and the same anyway!)

Breakfast rating: *** (-** for the complete absence of any sort of protein whatsoever. How can developers like myself or JP Boodhoo maintain our 365 lbs of RIPPED MUSCLE with nothing but croissants?)

Justice hair rating: **** (***** for my hair itself, because trust me, it was screamingly hot, but -* for Mack Male giving me the eye once I left the washroom.  Ladies only buddy!)

Chair rating: **** Not the butt-numbing experiences from Code Camp, but some dude got an easy chair to sit in down on the main floor!! Where’s my easy chair, Calgary??

- We are given the option to either put a REALDevelopment temp tattoo on our face, or just carry it with us. I have a good idea which option most people will pick. 
- We begin with something like 17 different 20 second commercials for VS 2005. The guitar riff at the end is much like Igloo Coder’s attempts to score at the bar: charming at first but a little uncomfortable after the 40th time in 5 minutes.

Conference begins: Jerome Carron and AJAX/ATLAS/some other digressions

- We start the conference. It has not been more than 2 minutes and Tech Embassy and I have already heard the word ‘ubiquitous’ 10 times.
- Now 11.
- Infocard has become Windows Cardspace.
- This was the last day of the REALDevelopment Tour! Yet again Edmonton is left with that jilted lover feeling.  What does Calgary have that we don't have, aside from a decided lack of unchained masculinity?
- John Bristowe leaves for a while to watch FIFA. “He’ll be cheering for France this morning” is met by DEAFENING SILENCE. GET OFF THE STAGE
- “How many here are developers?” followed by everyone raising their hands. SMELL THE FEAR in Jerome’s voice!
- Jerome encourages us to read the O’Reilly 2.0 manifesto if we have not already
- the biggest shocker of the day is not that MySpace uses ASP.NET 2.0 to serve its pages, it’s that someone at Microsoft was actually paid to build something like Windows Live Math!
- Scratch that, biggest shocker is Jerome believing that Windows Update is a great example of user experience ;)
- Whoa, I thought we were talking about the web? Where did WPF come from?
- Ubiquituous count: 14.
- We watch a demo of a BBC app – this is impressive but I think I’m missing the “cross-platform” aspect of it. ;)
- For the pinnacle of user experience, I find it unlikely that someone would choose to shift through a slowly rotating “picture rolodex” rather than, you know, typing someone’s name to forward them a news clip.
- Jerome on the BBC demo: “This is so integrated with the web, you can hardly tell it’s a windows app!” I am surpried they let Jerome present when he is obviously “on the rock”, to use the slang Rockarts has taught me. =)
- This presentation would’ve ruled hard if they had simply kept playing “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” while Jerome was talking.
- Ouch: this slide is almost all full of text.
- We are now back to AJAX after that small digression.
- Ubiquitous count: 17
- A lot of AJAX beginner recap for those who don’t know it, including Outlook Web being the first AJAX app.
- 18.
- Another big text-reading slide.
- Jerome exercises some phenomenal patience with a “question” from an attendee that I will go into more detail on in another post.
- The ATLAS app services bridge looks like an interesting way to accomplish pseduo cross-site script.
- A lot of marketing stuff around AJAX. Whree is the code, baby?
- Okay, a spinning graphic is not going to distract me from my displeas…wait a minute, why is that graphic spinning?
- “Now you can avoid the need to master Javascript and async programming.” Why is this being made to sound like such a bad thing to learn?
- Jerome shows us some brief demos of how Atlas extenders and controls work. Very briefly shows the actual Javascript behind the controls. This I would’ve liked to see more of rather than the WPF digression.
- I have now seen at least 5 slides here that have at least 2-3 full paragraphs worth of text.
- This presentation ends with an apology – “After all, ATLAS is still just Javascript” (I’ll talk more about this in a different post) and “ATLAS doesn’t work with Sharepoint because the ATLAS team was focused on making a great web experience…” Um, what does that say about Sharepoint? =)

Jerome Overall: *** (Honestly, while the first three hours were a good intro to AJAX, I felt kind of spoiled by Kyle Baley’s presentation at Calgary Code Camp, which really showed ATLAS in the context of a working app and metaphorically powerbombed this presentation through a flaming table. -1/2* for the big text slides. This one was very much the 100-level of 100 levels – I’m sure it appealed to some in the audience but I think there was more technical content in my lunch discussions. And speaking of which…)

Lunch rating: *****+~! (5 stars just because we once again had a great lunch talking shop with some of the Calgary guys, and another additional star for my witnessing one of the lovely MSDN ladies totally reaming out some guy for trying to steal an extra can of pop!!! “I SAID IT’S ONLY ONE PER PERSON SIR!!!” I was about ten seconds away from watching a developer get his @$$ totally beat down by a woman, which admittedly is nothing unique when you hang around Donald Belcham as much as I do.*

John Bristowe on CardSpace
- “If I told you that you could have businesses connecting over HTTP using XML, you’d have me shot.” Holy cow Bristowe, is it rough where you work?
- “Because I’m using Windows, God’s operating system”
- Infocard integration takes place via a form element on the page and an object type of “application/x-infocard”
- Blacklists are managed via community that is integrated with Windows Defender.
- “What will happen to Passport?” No one has any idea.
- Infocard examples are at sts.labs.live.com.
- The most exciting moment of the conference occurs next as Tech Embassy and I attempt to sneak into a theatre playing “District B13” but get stonewalled. I debate actually turning on the patented “Justice Gray charm” (much akin to a Dragon Ball Z final attack) but realize we’ve already missed 30 minutes so it’s not worth it to expend that much energy and cause a riot at the Chinook Centre.

Overall conference: ***
Overall, the guys did a decent job presenting their material (particularly John), but I felt that for a conference called REALDevelopment, there was startlingly little “real” development and a lot of text-laden powerpoint slides.
DISCLAIMER: Tech Embassy and I did not attend the last part of the conference as we needed to get back to Edmonton, so if there actually was a whole lotta codin’ goin’ on I am definitely sorry we missed it.

My summary in poetry only covers Jerome’s presentation, because I only cover developers who are not dressed exactly the same at conferences. Seriously, MSDN, let your guys show some individuality and move away from the searing monotony of a black tucked in T-shirt and blue jeans!! C’est passé!

ahem
I like Jerome’s slides that are heavy with words
Much as I enjoy being pelted with turds.
(That is, to say, not at all!) But I did like the code
If only some more of that he would’ve showed!!

* “Did he just admit to hanging out with Donald?” NO HE DIDN’T MOVE ALONG