This was a relatively introductory session by the very funny duo of Don Box and Chris Anderson.  The session talked a fair bit about using Entity Framework and working with databases via object models.  One interesting thing that they showed was that the tools now can enforce pluralisation and singularisation of the various parts of your model.  Of course, Don and Chris went right to those tricky ones like Goose (which pluralised to Geese) and Sheep (which stayed as Sheep for plural).

One thing they showed which was cool was that in VS2010 you can do straight T-SQL right in the IDE - that created a round of applause. 

Don also had a bit of stab at Sharepoint people.  He referred to them as being "top of the tree" and developers being merely "below the leaf cover" dwellers.  He also had a great throwaway line about Lenovo having a new Sharepoint appliance, a laptop.

It was a very straightforward session and at the end they showed a bit of "M".  I get "M", but I don't necessarily see the point.  A couple of the Incite devs at the session were also split about the usefulness.  I'm not sure if "M" will ever take off.

There's a session on Entity Framework later in the day which might be worth catching to see where the new version is headed in .Net 4.0.

The room was packed this morning... I heard someone on stage talking about 5,000 people at the conference.  It certainly was a full house.

It was interesting to listen to Ray Ozzie present about Software & Services and where cloud computing is going.  Microsoft Azure has certainly come along over the past year and is now just about production ready.  The launch date was announced as January 1, 2010 and the first billing will happen in February.  Bob Muglia filled in much of the detail around product and "on-site vs cloud" and how Microsoft will marry the two up.  In particular, they announced Project Sydney which allows you to synchronise data between your own SQL Servers and SQL Azure through IPSec and IPv6.  I think this type of thing should be a game changer for Enterprise IT and Disaster Recovery - you can run your core systems either in the cloud or on-site, but keep your core databases on-site and nightly replicate them to SQL Azure for backup.

Being PDC, this is largely about developers and the Keynote certainly didn't disappoint.  Visual Studio 2010 looks to be a typical Microsoft "increment of three" version.  The tool has been re-written in WPF and it is much more responsive, even in Beta.  The work done in the background with Oslo modelling of applications is starting to pay dividends because now in VS2010 you can drag and drop your VS solutions onto application models and the model interprets the properties of the solutions.  This lets you make changes to the application roles (like the number of instances you want to run) in the model.  Very powerful stuff.  It has also been greatly complimented by new deployment and packagin capabilities.  The VS team have done alot of work to simplify and integrate the MS Deploy tool right into the IDE.  Now, you can do one-click web deployment very, very easily to the web or to Azure.

Microsoft look like they are closing in very rapidly on their "cloud" vision and typically it targets all of their competitors.  I'm still not sold on SQL Azure, but things like the new AppFabric and the modelling tools are certainly very compelling.  The gaps that existed in the Microsoft roadmap has now been filled in, but some products (Azure AppFabric for example) are still some time off.  It will be interesting to see where they are in sixth months.

Since updating to Snow Leopard upon its release I've been struggling with my Entourage 2008 Spotlight searching.  I have two accounts and one seemed fine and the other wasn't working at all.

First port of call was to try and rebuild my index.  So within Entourage you go to Preferences and Spotlight and click the Rebuild button.  Nothing happened.  I tried turning off the Spotlight search and re-enabling that.  That didn't work either.

Next I got a little more drastic and went in and removed the index stubs that Entourage creates for Spotlight to search, then I disabled Spotlight search in Entourage (as above) and re-enabled it.  Theoretically this should have forced Entourage to recreate the stubs, but that didn't occur. 

Clearly this was some kind of crazy process issue.  I then went into the Microsoft Office 2008 folder and launched the Sync app just to make sure it was running - nothing.

Finally I put the stubs back and tried to launch the import again using mdimport -r on the ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2008 folder.  It chucked up an error which was interesting.  The error said I should force the import again using "arch -i386 mdimport".  I did that and it seemed to run successfully - I could here the Macbook disk churning like mad.

A few minutes later my Spotlight search was working on both accounts and updating itself nicely.

It would appear that there's something askew with the preferred mdimport (metadata import) in Snow Leopard defaulting to the 64-bit version and this not working well with Entourage which is of course 32-bit.  Once I forced the 32-bit version of mdimport, everything seemed good again.

If it acts up again after a reboot I'll update this post, but ensuring the 32-bit mdimport runs on your Entourage index seems to sort the issue.