It was a fun week, despite hating myself for eating so much. Thankfully I missed the "free ice cream" session break and I can still fit into some of my clothes.
There were more than enough sessions to choose from and I often found myself not knowing which one to go to first. I decided that I didn't want to attend any "overview" sessions, the kind that just gave a high level view of some feature or technology. I can get that kind of information on MSDN or some code example, I don't need to fly to Barcelona and have some expert present to me a "Hello world" application. With this in mind I went to sessions on the following techonologies
- Silverlight (advanced topics; one of the sessions was a big mistake though)
- ASP.NET (performance & scalability, hidden gems, asyncronous processing, MVC Framework)
- SQL Server Reporting Services (parameters can be used for more than just filtering results)
- Security (concepts and principles; wish it went a bit more in depth)
- SQL Server 2005 (putting new features in great use, peformance & scalability)
- F# (asyncronous programming)
- Astoria (exception to the rule of not going to high level sessions)
- Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 (cleared the confusion between v2.0, v3.0, v3.5 and multi-targeting)
In addition to all the sessions and the standard keynote at the beginning of the event, there was a very interesting talk by Pat Helland titled "Movable Objects and Irresistable Forces". It was about how he sees the future of computing in terms of hardware becoming cheaper and more un-reliable (irresistable forces) and how he believes software will have to adapt to cater for this (movable objects).
I'm going to follow this up by a series of posts in each of the topics I think are interesting. In the meantime I'll just finish off by saying that I'm still not convinced by LINQ and I'm not the only one either!