Delving into Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

This session did a thorough walk through about VSTESD. It wasn't that much new stuff... I've used it for a while. But sometimes it's good to know that there isn't more to know.

Smart Client: Offline Caching and Synchronization with a New ADO.NET Sync Framework

The title sound interesting and the session was a really good one. I look forward to try the CTP that will be released before the end of the year. This framework lets me write an "Occasionally Connected Client" in just a few lines of code... well we'll see about that when the CTP comes.

Connected Systems - Part 6: The Future of the Microsoft Application Server Platform

Time for Laurel and Hardy, sorry Steve and Clemens, again. 

As the title suggest, the talk was about what will be released and when. They couldn't of course give us the exact information, but some initiated guesses how the products will evolve and how existing (server) product will adopt to WF and WCF.

.NET Hidden Treasures

After, again, sitting through a session without code I choose this one.

I regret not going to David Chappell on comparing C# with Java. But this is how it is on conferences, sometimes better than your expectations and sometimes below. This was the first below this week...

But as a comfort my colleague visited an even worse session that ended prematurely because most of the audience left the room.

Unit Testing Best Practices With Visual Studio Team System

Quite funny to listen to a guy who is not an XP/TDD extremist talk about unit tests. One could say that Mark Seeman had a more relaxed position about what to test and how, than most of the other I've heard on the topic. It was interesting but I disagreed with him a few times.

It was a good session but a little bit too shallow.

Test Driven Development: Myths and Misconceptions

The day started off with a, for me, new type of session – a white board discussion or a chalk talk. It was an informal discussion in a smaller forum. This particular WBD was lead by my new idol Roy Osherove on the topic TDD: Myths and Misconceptions.

It started with an open question about which topics to discuss and after having a collection of about 10 we started to talk and sometime discussion turned far away from the original topic.

This was a very fruitful session and unfortunately the 75 minutes ended way to fast.

Connected Systems - Part 3: Data and Transaction Management

Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters did a well rehearsed dialogue (for some reason Plato's dialogues comes to mind...). This dialog was certainly not without humor and they made their points. Luckily I had found, and put on, my architect hat, the one with a propeller on top, because the level was abstract and philosophical. Not a single code example and it wasn't even given that all was about relational databases...

The theme was that data is different and is accessed in different ways depending on different scenarios, but all boils down to a number of patterns of use.

Demo Extravaganza: Adopting ClickOnce for Real World Applications

Demo Extravaganza! Demo Extravaganza! Demo Extravaganza!

This form of lecture appealed to me more than any other form here, including the White Board Discussion". It could be correlated with the previous session not showing any code at all...

There was a great number of examples with opportunities to ask direct questions and some digression by the lecturer. All this in a mid sized group (100), bigger than WBD but smaller and hence more "question friendly" than the regular sessions.

Sometimes the information comes to late... I could have used the information in this session a month ago... :(

But on the other hand, I know it now and if (when) I'm in another ClickOnce project I can show off some tricks... :)

Extending ASP.NET 2.0 with Custom Providers

One of my "old" idols, Jeff Prosise... kept his place up there!

Again, one of those sessions. I want to rewrite a big part of what I've done in this area the last year. Not because it's particularly bad, but because now I know how it is supposed to be.

The information in this session is mort certainly a candidate for a lunch session back home.

C# 3.0: Future Directions in Language Innovation

A rerun... I couldn't resist going to this one despite the fact that I saw it last year at PDC.

And I was lucky, it had happened quite a lot on the subject. Anders Hejlsberg showed LINQ (again) but the underlying techniques, and the changed to the language as well.

This is a session that makes you think and when I left the room I felt like another person than when I went in, all in a positive way.