Cave Markings

The last day of Tech Ed is different from all the others.  Many people have left already, and all the big announcments have been made.  They do schedule some excellent presentations for Friday, so it is worth hanging around for.

I did manage to attend another session Thursday afternoon.  Steve Lasker gave a presentation about occasionally connected systems.  This talk covered the current and future technologies available from Microsoft to deal with moving data offline, then syncronizing with the server when after returning online.  Good session on a very relevant topic.

Thursday night's party was great fun.  I skipped the ball park food, and went to the upper levels where they had a buffet, and beer options beyond Budweiser products.  I met up with my buddy Jim Topp, and we took in the concert, as well as a significant number of Samual Adams Boston Lagers, together.

The opening act was fine, but not inspiring.  Train was excellent.  They are definately a party band.  Along with all their own songs, they did two Zepplin covers, and closed with Aerosmith's "Dream On".  I would definately pay to see them again.

By Friday morning, I had answered, or at least addressed all of my TFS issues.  Before leaving for the party on Thursday, I brought Randy Miller a printout of CMMi KPAs not fullfilled by the MSF Guidance that my CMMi manager put together.  Randy's response was, "You rock!"  I'm looking forward to working with Randy, and Kevin Kelly as we move forward.  One member of the team with whom I didn't get to talk to enough was Noah Coad.  Noah was at the BOF sessions on Tuesday, but we only spoke briefly Wednesday morning. 

My first session on Friday was Architecting Your Own Enterprise Framework with Brian Button.  Brian shared the lessons he learned working on the Enterprise framework in the Patterns and Practices group.  I plan to download the slides when I return to my office, so I can review the wisdom contained therein.  Brian shared what worked for his team, and what didn't.  The most prominent idea that I left with was the "Rule of 3".  If you see a solution implemented three times, then it should go into a framework, but not before.  According to Brian, frameworks are not developed in the heads of designers, but should be extracted from working code.  This guidance basically follows the YAGNI principle.

During a half-hour break, I caught up with /\/\o\/\/ again to ask him about PowerShell resources for developers.  He pointed me to  Windows PowerShell Programmer's Guide  Unfortunately, it is not currently available in a printable format, but this is an exciting find. 

My next session was Rapid Development of Data End-to-End Solutions and How They Work in an N-Tier Model given by Jay Schmelzer. This was the most code-intensive session I saw all week.  Jay dispensed with slides, and built a data access compenent and windows form to connect with Northwind.  Next he migrated his DAL to a webservice, and showed the changes required to maintain full functionality in the application.  Jay is very energetic, and this was a fantastic session.

My final session after lunch was Architecting Applications for a Service-Oriented World.  Beat Schwegler did an admirable job making SOA appear to be a real technology/architecture.  In contrast to the previous session, Beat used slides exclusively to walk us through a conceptual scenario focusing on maintaining existing IT systems investments, while adding additional value by connecting legacy systems through service contracts.  This is the first time someone has convinced me that SOA is more than just a marketing term from Microsoft.

Throughout the conference, the continuous themes were quality and value.  Microsoft is providing tools to insure quality in the software I produce, while it is up to me to insure that I am producing the right software.  If I build a quality product that doesn't meet the needs of the user, then I have not added any value.

++Alan