Exceptionally Uncaught

I managed to get up and ready in enough time to have breakfast at a nice cafe this morning. Tong and Pepe weren't so lucky.

My first talk was about developing manageable web services in .NET 3.0. The talk moved very quickly, so I want to take another look through the slides and my notes, but there was some interesting stuff. It also repeated some of the stuff I'd learnt yesterday about WCF.

The talk on IIS7: Under the Hood showed me how great IIS7 is going to be for debugging and tracing. Definitely a lot of stuff we're going to have to take advantage of for the webservice. He mentioned a few things in passing that made me regret missing his IIS talk last night, but that's life at a conference!

The talk on Guerilla SOA was absolutely brilliant, and Jim Webber is now my favourite speaker of TechEd. He covered a lot of good points on the differences between SOAs and ESBs, and why SOAs are awesome and want to have your babies. Plus, he was a really funny guy, which always helps.

My first session for the afternoon was on Software as a Service. It was in the same room as the Pragmatic Architecture talk I did on Wednesday, and again the room was pretty packed. The speaker said that he didn't care what people said about his talk, as long as they said on the evaluation form that the Architecture track needs bigger rooms next year. The talk itself was a good intro into what was going on with the whole SaaS thing, the different models, when SaaS is not a good idea, etc. He also spent a lot of time carefully *not* mentioning Google, which was fun to watch.

Instead of attending more lectures, I decided to give one of the hands on labs a go. I asked about doing the XAML lab, but the guy told me it had been pulled because it was so buggy. But I was free to look through the notes if I wanted. So I did, and then flipped through the other labs and found another XAML one. It was pretty groovy stuff, but from the way it was running (ie like a dog), I'm guessing you want to be careful where you use it.

That night was the TechEd party. They'd booked out a night club, filled it with nerds and a few XBoxes and lots and lots of alcohol. There was a big sporting theme ("what's your code?"), and everyone was meant to come dressed in their team colours. Unfortunately the end result was pretty sad - the "XBox Cheer Leaders" being a good example.

Oh, and to the dick head standing behind me during the celebrity XBox boxing match. I dislike Anthony "The Man" Mundine as much as anyone (what, he has to remind us that he's actually human?). But yelling out "smash the coon!" nearly earned you a punch in the head.