Så har jeg for første gang prøvet at være på messe som udstiller.
Vi er lige kommet hjem fra skolebogmessen i Århus hvor vi præsenterede vores 3 web-steder Fysik-Kemi-Tjek, Geografi-Tjek, og Biologi-Tjek.

Tak til alle der stoppede ved vores stand – det var skønt at hilse på rigtig mange både eksisterende og potentielle kunder, konkurrenter, mulige nye sambarbejdspartere, mv.

Det var spændende at være med, og jeg synes vi fik rigtig meget ud af det både i form af nye kontakter, feedback fra brugere, og forhåbentlig nye kunder som skynder sig hjem og bestiller :-)

 
JH Softwares stand på Skolebogmessen 2011 i Århus med Rikke og mig selv (Jesper) i “firma-uniform”.

Last week I once again attended Microsoft's TechEd conference - which for the second time was held in Berlin, Germany.

This year, the developer tracks at the conference had two main topics - Windows Phone 7 (WP7) and "cloud computing".

I drove to Berlin in my own car, so I also got to see a bit of Hamburg, some German countryside, and a whole lot of autobahn. As a prelude to the conference, practically every billboard along the way had advertisements for WP7. Microsoft is obviously quite aggressive about marketing WP7 in Germany:

As I spend much of my time programming in .NET, the WP7 platform is very interesting indeed (all apps for WP7 are .NET/Silverlight based) and the conference did inspire me enough to want to at least have a closer look.
WP7 hasn't gone on sale in Denmark yet, so in order to be able to develop and test apps, I tried to buy a WP7 phone in Berlin. This turned out to be a lot harder than you would think (considering all the  billboards). I guess the other 5000 TechEd attendees had the same idea :-). I finally did manage to get the very last "HTC 7 Mozart" phone at the Saturn store on Potsdamer Platz.

I went to a lot of interesting conference sessions, and got to meet of lot of great folks from Microsoft and other companies.
I especially enjoyed meeting Lucian Wischik, the "Spec Lead" for Visual Basic (my favorite programming language), and talking with him about his great new Visual Studio Async CTP. I will be using this framework a LOT in the upcoming version of Simple Failover.

Great conference!

This year I stayed in Berlin a few days before and after the conference and got to see a bit more of this wonderful city:

Attended a one day conference in Copenhagen today.
Great presentations of VS2010, .NET 4.0, MVC 2.0 and Silverlight 4 by Scott Guthrie. 

Attended TechEd Europe in Berlin.
Good conference – but a bit thin on developer stuff compared to earlier years (in Barcelona).
Next year I think I might go to the PDC in the USA instead – too bad there isn’t a PDC Europe.

Back from my first time at the JAOO conference in Århus (Denmark).

Great conference – a bit heavy on Java for a .NET developer like me, but otherwise a great mix of different content.
And all executed very professionally.

Thanks to Trifork and everybody else for a great time and a lot of new inspiration.

I am attending Microsoft's TechEd Developer conference in Barcelona this week (and having a great time).
One of the more interesting things (to me) that Microsoft is showcasing this year is a new product for ISVs called "Software Licensing and Protection Services" or "SLPS".
There has been 2 "breakout sessions" on SLPS, there are signs, flags, and posters advertising SLPS everywhere, and there are more "ask the experts" stands about SLPS than any other single topic here.

SLPS is a very interesting anti-cracking method involving a "unique virtual machine permutation" for each ISV or software title combined with a typical license activation server or service. For details see http://www.microsoft.com/slps

It seemed like a great product for a small ISV like us, and so I spent some time digging into this subject here at TechEd.
Microsoft sells SLPS through various resellers including PreEmptive - who combines this with their DotFuscator product.
PreEmptive also has a stand at the TechEd, and they offer a "challenge" where they add SLPS (and obfuscation) to an existing .NET executable to demonstrate how all this works.

PreEmptive gave me a very nice walk-through using one of the .NET based .EXE modules from our upcoming Simple DNS Plus v. 5.0.
The protected / license wrapped version worked very nicely during the demo on PreEmptive's computer, and following the demo they e-mailed me a copy of this to try on my own computer.
Unfortunately it did not work as well when I downloaded the file to my laptop later that evening - basically it just crashed.

This morning I attended another session about SLPS by Aidan T. Hughes (Development Manager for SLPS at Microsoft), and later in the day got a chance to talk to him personally about this - and show him the application crashing on my laptop.
It turns out that SLPS only works with 32 bit processes!
Since my laptop runs 64 bit Vista, and the .NET application was originally compiled for "Any CPU", it runs as a 64 bit process.
This worked just fine before SLPS was added. But with SLPS it crashes because it cannot load the 32-bit-only SLPS DLLs into the 64 bit process.
Quoting Aidan: "We haven't gotten many requests for 64 bit support, so this is not something we have tested a lot..."
Unfortunately he didn't give me much hope that this would be fixed in the near future - "we will look into this for future versions...".
His only suggestion was to re-compile the application for 32 bit (x86 CPUs).

Unfortunately that is a showstopper for us.
Many of our users have been asking about 64 bit for some time now.
All new CPUs from Intel and AMD are 64 bit capable (both companies have stands at TechEd and I checked with them both) and Microsoft's own flagship product Window Vista comes with both 32 and 64 bit versions in the same box.
So I am surprised that Microsoft would launch this new product without 64 bit support.

That said, I would like to thank the staff at PreEmptive and Microsoft's SLPS group here at TechEd for their great help and personal attention to this.