All in all, it's been a pretty fun week so far. My favorite sessions by far were Rocky's architecture session and David Platt's jam packed session on Why Software Sucks. Rocky and David are both very engaging speakers who use humor and make the audience feel comfortable in interacting with them and I wish that all the TechEd speakers would take note of this and try to spice up their sessions a bit.
On the technical side, more of the conference was about Vista, Windows Server 2008, and those types of technologies. There really wasn't a whole lot of new on the .NET 3.0 front (sessions of course, but very little "new" information). I continue to be impressed with WPF and picked up Chris Anderson's book which I've found to be a nice read, especially from someone who is something of a software genius. His talk at TechED on the hows and whys of the WPF model was quite humbling to me since I doubt I could ever conceive of such an elegant design. Then again I don't have a few hundred programmers at my disposal either.
On the pure technical side, I finally got a taste of something I crave in LINQ. I saw a VB demo today (this doesn't work in C#) where the developer used LINQ to emit XML in line with tagged markup. It was so easy to read and I think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The following syntax is not precise at all, but it will give you the gist of it (I'll blog something more exact when I get the time):
from c in customers
select customername, customerid
var xml = <customer><CustomerName><%= c.customername %></CustomerName><CustomerID><%=c.customerid%></CustomerID></customer>
Note that you aren't using a dom object, or using text quotes, or anything. VB just recognizes that you wanna format some xml and gets out of the way so you can do it. For generating xml documents etc on the fly, this is freaking fantastic imho because the readability will far exceed working with any standard xml classes! I am definitely going to implement this to generate print files etc to send to our external printer.
Visual Studio Orcas CTP looks pretty stable for a CTP. I heard some scuttlebutt that a beta 2 with go live is planned very soon, I'll probably make the move when this releases, just as I did with vs 2005 b2. There seems to be many improvements in orcas and I'd really like to start putting Chris Anderson's book to the test with my own WPF coding. It's just pretty clunky without blend or orcas because it's a lot of typing.
SQL 2008 continues to evolve. Didn't see a whole lot that blew my skirt up. The MERGE command looks pretty slick though. I really like what I see out of Groove for Office and I think I'm going to see about dogfooding that at work to work with compliance (Insurance companies, we have compliance departments and there's a lot of document collaberation going on, Groove seems to suit this without all the extras of sharepoint).
The jam sessions were pretty cool at the Groove (Universal Citywalk) and tonight is the party at the Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios that I'm looking forward to. See you on the other side.