TechEd
TechEd Conference Posts
Simply brilliant. Arvindra Sehmi and Beat Schwegler did and awesome job of explaining how to build connected systems going through the Business Model, SOA Model and Technology Model and explaning how the tenets of SOA were reflected throughout.
Beat gave a good demo on how he used the Guidance Automation Toolkit to generate an entire VS Solution based on the service pattern that he recommended. Looks like DSLs are going to be really big in this area, especially in helping generate code.
Arvindra dealt with SO Analysis and Design. This definitely struck a chord with me. I was trying to figure out how to document my architecture and he explained how to raise the OOAD one level of abstraction to describe services. So we can use Use cases, Collaboration Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams and so on, but they will deal with messages and services rather than with internal data and methods. He also showed a good “Application Architecture View” and a “Technical Architecture View” which I'm going to use immediately.
This apparently is the first architecture focussed pre-con they have done (at least for EMEA) and they did a great job.
Also good to meet up with folks from London (Ian Cooper and Chris Lowndes.)
Hey, just to say that I will be at TechED Amsterdam next week, so if anyone would like to meet up do send me a message on the email there or through the delegate networking tool.
I'm really looking forward to TechEd. Last year was my first and i didnt know what to expect. This time I think I know how to get the most from it. I wont be needing to go near the Hands On Labs at all since I'm already doing BizTalk hands on and I have VSTS installed on a workstation (not that I've actively used it since installing, but thats another matter).
The EventCalendar and the nice print out it gives makes it easy to see where I've double booked. Last year it was quite tough since i didnt know how to use those facilities and ended up working on a massive spreadsheet to divide up session attendance between my colleague and myself. The annoying thing is that as of today only 5 PPTs are available so I cant make up my mind about sessions where I'vr double booked.
I have the downloaded webcast of Ron Jacobs talking about Patterns for SOA, so i might not actually go for that, but the slides are really interesting, so I might end up changing my mind.