Exceptionally Uncaught

At about 7:45am I realised that the convention key note actually started at 8am. So Tong and I rushed over and just made it. The opening presentation was given by a Microsoft anthropologist. Which seems like an odd thing for Microsoft to have, until to think it through properly. Anne Kirah's talk was about her very interesting experiences in contributing to the Windows XP beta, and how the stuff she'd learnt for that project had fed into the design for Vista.

The first talk we attended was an introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0 given by Payam Shodjai (who's still my favourite speaker so far). Turns out there are 5 parts to the new version of .NET:

• .NET 2.0
• CardSpace, which is MS' latest replacement for username and passwords
• Windows Communication Framework (WCF), which combines most of their previous web-communication stuff. There seemed to be some pretty interesting stuff in there for me
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF, 'cause WWF was already taken, although I'm not sure which one they were most concerned about), which did some very groovy things with workflow, including code building.
  
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is mostly about adding "bling" to your app. The coolest bit was XAML, which is basically turning a UI into XML, but it also integrates VS2005 with MS' new designer tool Expression Interaction Designer

Since Payam rocked so much, I decided to ditch the talk on Methodology for Upgrading to SQL Server 2005 and head to his talk on the Windows Communication Foundation. As you could probably imagine, it was a nice push for SOAs. It went into a fair bit of detail about all the improved and consolidated technologies that make up WF. A pretty useful talk for the future of the TRIM Webservice.

My first afternoon session was on Document and Records Management using SharePoint 2007. It had some interesting things, but most a lot of it was pretty redundant for me professionally. It did give me some fun quotes though:

"Like a document store with super powers"
"We're shooting to have millions of things in our document library!"
"So you can just send to your Hummingbird or your TRIM..."

The talk on II6: Everything you need to know about MOM was a bit interesting, but not very well done. I also had the problem of constantly dozing off (which is partly a reflection on the talk, and partly a reflection on me...). There's was a few interesting points that may make my life a bit easier when it come to the webservice.

I decided that apparently my brain was rejecting the idea of IIS, so instead of attending the talk on Building Custom Web Server Extensions in IIS7, I'd instead head to the talk on Pragmatic Architecture. There was a massive queue outside the lecture theatre which I joined the back of, but eventually convinced myself that it was actually just the crush for three different sessions. So I pushed my way up to the door, and the realised that no, apparently everyone wanted to hear this talk. Feeling a bit bad about queue jumping so massively, I slipped in and went inside, only to have the doors slam shut behind me because the theatre was full. The talk itself was well worth it, so I'm glad I didn't miss out. It gave me a lot of stuff to think about.

There's a collaborative software project happening at TechEd. They're trying to get a system written for the Smith Family that will do online surveys. The deal is you rock up to one of the machines, take a look at what needs to be done, write some code (or something), and check it in. We all decided to give it a go. Unfortunately since it was all ASP.NET-y, it took me pretty much the whole time to work out what was going on. I did find one bug in one of the test cases, but then the system would let me check in my fix. We got t-shirts out of it, and I'll have to head over and have another go later.