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Not as tired as one would have assumed after celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall yesterday night at the Brandenburger Tor, I started with a kind of session that I haven’t attended before – an interactive session. This was called:

DAT04-IS – Patterns with the Entity Framework (Mike Flasko)

and it was a pleasant experience. Small crowd, small room, demo-centric talk, plenty of time for questions and detours from the path. After that I had one of these uncomfortable moments where I have to choose between two good things, my choice became:

DEV317 – Agile Patterns: Agile Estimations (Stephen Forte)

and I wasn’t disappointed at all, even thou I heard that the session I didn’t choose was “awesome” – I have to pick it up on TechEd Online.

However, I’ve heard Forte a couple of times at dotnetrocks and he did a great job in delivering the topic – a real professional speaker. But not in the sense of speaking on routine, more in the sense of keeping the audience focused and interested the whole session .

With a good start of the day and after the lunch it was yet again time for one of the slots that didn’t had that many interesting sessions – so I followed the successful formula from yesterday, go to the architecture session. This turned, again, out to be a good choice:

ARC310 – Application Architecture Guide: The Map for Your Journey (Don Smith)

It was a walk through and an overview of the new guide from Pattern and Practice team (Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition).

A quick coffee and a donut made me ready to continue the afternoon, and now it was a complete shift in topic:

WIA403 – Tips and Tricks for Building High Performance Web Applications (Giorgio Sardo)

It turned out to be a little bit off what I currently do on daily basis, but nevertheless interesting anyway – I would say that the odds for doing a web project in the future are quite low. And the odds for having performance issues are equally low, I would say.

Last session for the day, and again a total shift of topic and back to the interactive theater for yet another interactive session:

DEV04-IS – Pumping Iron: Dynamic Languages on the MS .NET Framework (Harry Pierson)

Yet again a speaker that has appeared on dotnetrocks, is it me that picks the sessions with speaker that I’ve heard of or is it the dotnetrocks-team that have the same preferences as I do?

However, this was – by far – the best session of the day. Harry talked about the advantages with dynamic languages and he made me which that I could do this in a real project in the future. The problem is to sneak it in by stealth in the current project – for several reasons I don’t think that ever will happen. But I decided to pick up my Python book when I get home and start doing evening programming with it.

I ended the day by hanging with my colleagues from Denmark – really nice guys. I’ll make a note of bringing up the question of have more knowledge exchange with the Copenhagen office.