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TechED 2006: Day 5

// June 16th, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, General, TechEd 2006

It’s been a long week, no doubt about it. Someone said that TechEd is a marathon and I have to agree. It’s going to take some time to process all the information that is uploaded to the brain. But, it’s been a great week!

I finally got the “basic” WCF presentation I needed and I think I have a good overview of what WinFX, sorry .NET 3.0, is all about. WCF is surely going to make all of our lifes easier. But as with everything learned here I’m going to need to try the stuff myself before I really get the grasp on the details.

Today we also booked tickets to the famous Boston “Duck Tour” and to the Premium Outlet called Wrentham Village. If we are lucky we are going to Wrentham in a limo!

TechED 2006: Day 4

// June 16th, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, General, TechEd 2006

Thursday at TechEd 2006 was a looooong day. The sessions started early and there was the big attendee party directly after the sessions ended.

The first session in the morning was yet another great performance from Scott Hanselman called “Deploying and Managing Your Own Enterprise Framework”. As always, Scott keeps coming back to “the real world” (air quotes), which really adds an extra weight to everything he says. He’s not just *talking* about things that he never built. He (and Corillian) has actually implemented stuff and run it in production.

We also made time to see Sweden *barely* win over Paraguay. We actually screamed out loud when Ljungberg (or “lungberg” as they say over here) finally got the ball in the net (and not just hitting the net on the wrong side of the goal). It was nice to let go of over 170 minutes of frustration.

Then it was time for the big party! We got to see Fenway Park in all it’s glory. We concluded that it would have been nice to have some kind of emotional attachment to baseball and/or Fenway Park before we got there, but all in all it was a nice evening with alot of free food.

TechED 2006: Day 3

// June 16th, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, General, TechEd 2006

Wednesday was kind of slow for me, I didn’t really attend any mind blowing sessions. I did a few hands on labs which was good. I also realized that I’m going to need to attend a “basic” session on WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), since some of the presentations today had been more rewarding if I had had more knowledge on that topic.

I also checked out some sessions on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which looks very promising. I guess it’s going to be some time before I can actually get to code any of this, but it’s good to know whats coming. I also found out that WPF will be available for Windows XP (I thought it was only coming for Vista).

TechED 2006: Day 2

// June 16th, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, General, TechEd 2006

Today I finally got to see and hear Scott Hanselman IRL, and he didn’t disappoint me! Scott and Patric talked about their hard core “contract first” approach. They used to have the specifications in Word documents, but now they have moved this into a contract that is described in WSDL. The use these contract to generate a lot of things (among them the Word documents they need to hand out to exec’s to make them feel comfortable). This is a great approach that I’m going to look into more when I get home.

TechED 2006: Day 1

// June 13th, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, General, TechEd 2006

So the weekend was a lot of rain but nice anyway. Saturday we walked around for quite some time and checked out some stores in down town Boston. My shoes went all wet after and hour or so, but since it wasn’t really cold it didn’t matter.

I’ll skip the other details of the weekend and jump right to todays action at TechEd. First of all I just have to mention all the food and drinks that are served all the time. Like most things in this country it way out of proportion. There is water, Pepsi, juice, cookies, ice cream, candy bars, chips etc etc available all the time. Amazing…

The main topic we had selected for todays session was the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), and I think we got what we came for. I’m going to use some of that material at an internal presentation at my local office when I get back to Sweden. The last session of the day was about pre alpha stuff concerning integrating ASP.NET and WWF and that was just not that interesting. I also attended a “SQL Server 2005 tips & tricks” session that was really good and the guy who led the session was hilarious.

We rounded of the day but snagging SWAG at the reception that was held after the sessions ended. I think I’ll probably dump half of the stuff before packing my bags (a lot of XL t-shirts won’t do me any good).

I’m going to try to catch a little bit more sleep this night since TechEd is (according to the SQL Server tips & tricks guy) “a real marathon”. Hope to give you another report tomorrow. Don’t forget to check out the photo section for some images!

Arrived!

// June 9th, 2006 // No Comments » // General

After a minor setback at the begining of our journey where Niclas discovered that he had his wife’s passport instead of his own, we had a very smooth ride all the way. At the moment I’m typing on my beloved MacBook in my Hilton Hotel room. I’m TIRED after 18 hours of travel time. The local time is 18:45, and that would be 00:45 in Sweden.

I’ll probably be back later with a few images…

Boston - Here I come!

// June 8th, 2006 // No Comments » // General

In the morning I’ll be leaving Sweden for a two week trip to Boston, USA. I’ll be attending Microsoft TechEd 2006. I’ll post photos and perhaps write a few lines here.