Tech-Ed Europe 2004 is in its second day today, and so far it's been interesting. There've been some sessions about the Visual Studio 2005 Team System, and an interesting Birds-Of-A-Feather talk with James Newkirk of Team System and NUnit fame. That talk was an interesting chat in a small room, with nothing but unit-testing-interested people, and we all talked about how to motivate people to do unit testing, how to test database classes, etc. All in all, great fun, with Benjamin Mitchell reporting on his blog. I'm sure I'm going to do a piece on database testing soon, including source code.
XP
Microsoft is actually using Tech-Ed to evangelize XP -- no, not Windows XP or Office XP, but Extreme Programming. There are a couple of sessions on the subject here; so far, unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to join one yet (I'm spending a great deal of time at the U2U booths), but it's great to see that Microsoft is making an effort to promote agile methodologies. The more people who understand and practice these principles, the better. Thanks guys!
IBF
About a month ago, Microsoft launched Beta 1 of the Information Bridge Framework, which allows you to very easily turn Office applications into smart clients for your client/server applications. It's great to see it in action, integrating for example a personnel database with Word and Excel in just a few minutes. Surprisingly, only one (1) session here at Tech-Ed is about this fascinating new product, and it wasn't even mentioned in the Keynote... There's still some work for Microsoft there.