Back in Business

I'm back blogging after a couple of weeks I've been gone. I got married on May 25th and with all the preparations, family and friends coming from all over I had to take some time off to take care of everything, but now I'm celebrating my honeymoon the best way possible (without my wife) in Tech Ed .

It's great to be back in Tech Ed (although it is VERY hot in Orlando). Last time I attended Tech Ed was 3 years ago, also in Orlando. This is the first year that Microsoft splits the event to two different weeks. This week is for developers and next week is for IT. The day started with Bill Gate's last Tech Ed keynote. Honestly, I don't remember when was the last time that he showed up for Tech Ed, but I guess he is taking advantage of every possible event to speak before he leaves his full time job July 1st. This is the second "last keynote" I attended from Bill Gates this year. The first one was in CES earlier in January. In this keynote they showed the same exact movie they showed in CES (maybe a little different cut) where you see the Bill's last day in office. The rest of the keynote of course was different and focused on the four areas for developers today: presentation, business logic, data and services. I especially liked the demo delivered by Soma for the presentation track. The keynote also focused on the Robotics framework developed by Microsoft. This area is it's initial steps and it seems like Microsoft hopes that developers will use its tools to push it forward.

Since I didn't attend Tech Ed in 3 years, I decided to focus on the things that are offered by the .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5. The things that can be done today with WPF and WCF are pretty amazing. You can do things that took a long time a couple of years ago very simply and quickly. I attended a great session by David S. Platt that talked about "using WPF for good and not evil". He had a very good point: It is so simple to do things with WPF today that developers tend to "overuse" the capabilities and make the user experience worse by using things like animation, fading etc just because they are "cool". He used different examples of using the same features in a good way and in a bad way (evil) and what the user understands and gains from each case. Another great session I attended was delivered by Mads Torgersen. Mads, who is a program manager and a member of the C# language design team, covered the new features and changes in the 3rd version of C#. It was great to see the new features that are geared towards making the developers life easier when writing his code.

The most interesting booth (at least to me) was the BlackBerry booth. They had the BlackBerry Bold there and even after all the reviews I read and videos I saw, there's nothing like seeing it and playing with it in real life. This device is great and I can't wait for it to be released so I can upgrade from my 8800!

After the partners expo reception (and a few glasses of wine), I went to the GeekFest 2008 party that took place the the Howl at the Moon piano bar for a few more drinks and pizza. Day 1 was pretty good. Interesting content in the sessions, good hands-on-labs (did one so far) and a lot of alcohol. The rest of the week should be the same as there is a different party every day I'll keep on updating throughout the week.