On September 26th, Entrance Software attended the Houston TechFest 2009 event. Despite taking place on a Saturday, some 850+ tech-hungry participants met at the University of Houston campus to learn more about diverse topics such as understanding the SharePoint object model, Windows 7 for developers and Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5.
The keynote presentation by Sam Gazitt, a product manager in Microsoft’s Developer Tools Group, was a special treat as it is rare to see such a figure from Redmond in Houston. He previewed some of the significant new features coming in Visual Studio 2010 and Team System including the historical debugger, gated check-in and branch visualization.
The presentation on Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5, presented by Ryan Andrus, was particularly insightful. Ryan gave an overview of how WWF 3.5 works, including the significant amount of instrumentation required to use it as well as the notable lack of any built-in support for versioning of workflows. Ryan also pointed out the perception among businesspeople that WWF allows them to design workflows themselves via a graphical user interface and how this is a misperception because implementing WWF is still “writing code.” Additionally, Ryan mentioned that State Machine workflows will not be supported in the 4.0 version of Windows Workflow Foundation.
During the breakout sessions over lunch, members of the local Houston SharePoint users’ group met to discuss the SharePoint-focused sessions that morning. Eric O’Connor’s presentation on preparing organizations for SharePoint received very high marks.
Houston TechFest 2009 was a resounding success and has set a high bar for 2010’s event to beat.