Tech-Ed 2008: Day 3

The day before the last day of Tech-Ed is always the best day, as this is always the attendee party day! Day 3 is always a little slower. You can see people are already tired and the booth that has the most "traffic" is the MSDN area where they have the bean bags and people just sleep there all day .

Here is what I was able to cover today:

• Making Your Test Lab Obsolete with Team Test and Virtualization - Mike Azocar covered in this session how you can take advantage of the virtualization technology and management tools along with VSTS in order to automate your test lab and make sure that testers spend their time testing and not setting up test environments. One of the cool things that the tester can do when opening a bug in TFS is save and attach to that "work item" the state of his test virtual machine, this way the developer can just restore that image and see what happened there, troubleshoot, debug the code and even test a fix.
• Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation - This was an "instructor-led lab" that was directed by Enrique Lima. The purpose of this lab was to understand the programming model using in WCF and then build, configure and host a WCF service as well as consume. The best thing about this lab was that after writing the application it also covered the tools provided by Microsoft to trace and troubleshoot the messages sent and received over WCF.
• Building Rich Internet Applications with ASP.NET AJAX and Web Client Software Factory 2.0 - Glenn Block covered in this session the Web Client Software Factory (WCFS) and the new AJAX capabilities avaialble in version 2.0 of this great software factory that is provided by Microsoft's Patterns & Practices group. Using this you can very quickly build a Rich Internet Application.
• Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Graphics Deep Dive - This was a an "Interactive Theater" session led by David Teitlebaum. This type of session are much more technical than the breakout sessions. They go much deeper and are more technical and interactive. David covered in detail the improvements done in WPF 3.5 SP1 and demonstrated the differences in the graphics rendering, the affect on the CPU and how everything is implemented internally. Great talk!

After the sessions we headed to the attendee party @ Universal Studios. There was plenty of food and alcohol all over to celebrate the end of Tech-Ed and most of the rides were open. The first one we went to was The Simpsons Ride which just opened. It is a great simulator ride and very funny if you like the Simpsons. The other one was Men In Black which is older but still fun. There wasn't more time left for other rides since we had to eat and drink a little bit