Tech.Ed 2007 - Morning Sessions
It's been a very interesting start to Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast. This morning saw a keynote from AnimalLogic's Micahel Twigg about the process of animation and CG special effects. It was very, very cool (and kind of scary) to see how some of this stuff is done, and just how much detail and effort goes into making very small sections of footage look so fantastic. Some shots get redone 15 to 2o times before a final version is ready - and characters such as Mumble from Happy Feet were 12 months in creation - even before animation commenced.
Some of the more amazing stats: the render farm has 2,000 servers (4,000 CPU's) and about 200TB of storage. When animators desktops are added into the overnight rendering process there's about 100,000 hours of rendering time available. And even then, they could do with more :-)
Apart from the keynote I've also attended a session on Cardspaces and Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (better known as DataDude).
The Cardspaces session was a 200-level session. Nothing really new, but a good fly over the target, and it was interesting to hear Microsoft talking about the reasons for Passport being such a massive failure even though internally Microsoft considers it hugely successful. The reason - Microsoft is not a party people trust with their identity.
DataDude was a great session. Presented by Greg Low, he ran through the in's and out's of DataDude and how it can be used in versioning databases, integrating it into the build process and making it a consistent part of the development experience.
I hadn't realised before that DataDude included MSBuild tasks. It makes it something that can be very much a part of a continuous integration process. Add to that the data generation tool and support for unit testing the database (yes, that's the database you can unit test) and suddenly you have way to build a complete end to end CI solution for your product.
Oh, the other interesting thing has been the live-blogging going on. Darren and Damien have been doing it already, and I'm sure there have been many more around the show.
Some of the more amazing stats: the render farm has 2,000 servers (4,000 CPU's) and about 200TB of storage. When animators desktops are added into the overnight rendering process there's about 100,000 hours of rendering time available. And even then, they could do with more :-)
Apart from the keynote I've also attended a session on Cardspaces and Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (better known as DataDude).
The Cardspaces session was a 200-level session. Nothing really new, but a good fly over the target, and it was interesting to hear Microsoft talking about the reasons for Passport being such a massive failure even though internally Microsoft considers it hugely successful. The reason - Microsoft is not a party people trust with their identity.
DataDude was a great session. Presented by Greg Low, he ran through the in's and out's of DataDude and how it can be used in versioning databases, integrating it into the build process and making it a consistent part of the development experience.
I hadn't realised before that DataDude included MSBuild tasks. It makes it something that can be very much a part of a continuous integration process. Add to that the data generation tool and support for unit testing the database (yes, that's the database you can unit test) and suddenly you have way to build a complete end to end CI solution for your product.
Oh, the other interesting thing has been the live-blogging going on. Darren and Damien have been doing it already, and I'm sure there have been many more around the show.