Tech-Ed 2008: Day 2

It was a little difficult to get up on day 2 after all the drinks yesterday . I started the day with a great "instructor led lab". I have to say that both this type of labs and the hands-on-labs are the best things in Tech-Ed. This is where you actually get some experience and play with the new technologies you want to try. The lab I did was titled "Using the ASP.NET Silverlight control and Microsoft Silverlight tools". The goal of the lab was to create a piano application using Silverlight. I must say that it was extremely easy and clear and I finished it in about 15-20 minutes.

The next session I went to was titled "Building a line-of-business application using WPF". This session was delivered by Rob Relyea, who is an architect in the WPF team. Rob did a great job showing real life examples of different WPF applications that feed on real time data in order to visualize different types of information using WPF.

The day continued with an "ASP.NET Internals" session by Rob Howard. Rob did a great job digging into the execution engine of ASP.NET and explaining how things work behind the scenes, which events are triggered throughout the life-cycle of a single page and covered different tips and tricks to squeeze the most out of your application.

After this session I went to listen to "An introduction to Microsoft Silverlight controls framework" by Karen Corby. This was a very good session that covered the basics of Silverlight and every possible way there is to customize controls and create user controls: skinning, styling etc.

The last session of the day was "End-to-End Tracing with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and ADO.NET". This session was delivered by Bob Beauchemin. Bob is extremely knowledgeable about the internals of the SQL server and the different tools available to troubleshoot different problems. He covered the different ways available to trace the internals of both the clients making calls to SQL server and the SQL server itself using ETW. Follow his blog for examples and his whitepaper on the subject.

We ended the day in the VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partner) party. VSIP hosts a small private party for the partners every year, and this year it was in SeaWorld. After some food and a few beers we entered the park and went straight to the Kraken. It is a great ride! . The good news is that while walking in the park we realized that the park is owned by Anheuser-Busch, so they have a "hospitality area" where they let you try all their beers. The bad news is that the park is owned by Anheuser-Busch, so the beers that you can try are not all that great but when you get free alcohol you don't say no, so after another beer we ended the night at the Shamu Rocks show. Last time I saw the show it was back in '87. I don't know if it is because I was (much) younger back then but it seems to have been more exciting 21 years ago .