During the first day at Tech Ed 2007 I have attended a series of sessions that have been both informative and amusing. The keynote speech was delivered by American Lou Carbone, the author of 'Clued In'. His very interesting talk was about the Customer Experience. This seems to have set the theme for the rest of the conference, with other sessions focusing on the customer / user experience. It seems that people are taking an interest in what Provoke has been doing from the start. But this is not what this post is about. The penultimate session that I attended was 'IIS7 for Developers'. I was unsure about going, thinking that it might be too geeky for me, and the ‘UX – Interface Design Patterns’ nearly won out; however, I decided to brave the session and sit near the back. I have to say that I am glad that I went, and that it was probably the best session of the day.
Eric Woersching was a great presenter and provided an excellent session on the topic. As well as being introduced to PHP on Microsoft Windows Server, the best part of the talk was his implementation of an HTTP Module as a ‘footer’ to the bottom of all web pages within a site. This only took about 150 lines of C# code and worked brilliantly. Fortunately, Eric had provided all the source code and a description on his blog at www.iis.net. Within 20 minutes, I had implemented the same code within a project on the laptop. It is these little gems of information and insight that make Tech Ed what it is. So this is thanks to Eric and IIS team at Microsoft.