Great sessions and content on the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007. The following sessions where my favorites:
WCF communication patterns: more than request-reply and Beyond ABC: WCF practices from the field by Christian Weyer.
These ones were really nice! Not just plain marketing about how great WCF really is, but some real world stuff from the speaker's own experience. He's right you know. When you start looking further than the marketing stuff, you see the first version of an over-engineered framework for creating services: but I still love it!! I mean, endless extensibility options: what's not to like. This boring topic was very well compensated by the speaker itself an his speaking skills. Kudos!
Team System for Database Developers - Stuff you wish you had yesterday, Implementing Continuous Integration: With and Without Team System, FIT for acceptance testing: Beyond Unit Testing and Test Driven Development by Roy Osherove.
This was actually the first time I could go to his sessions and very much appreciated his teaching skills. "Data Dude" is really cool, but there is one major drawback that makes it almost completely useless for me to use it: no support for other databases except SQL Server 2000 and 2005. At my current employer, we are using DB2 most of the time. I will definitely use "Data Dude" when I'm on a project that uses SQL Server. The session on continuous integration was priceless and we are going to start using it on Monday.
The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework and C# 3.0: Future Directions in Language Innovation by Raj Pai.
During his sessions, he dumped the slides and went straight to the code. That's the way to present new C# features! Besides the fact that he's a very nice guy, I'm also glad that he's the Group Program Manager (GPM) of the Visual C# team. All the new LINQ features in C# 3.0 are originally coming from dynamic languages. The Visual C# team managed to implement all these features without sacrificing type safety. That's a great accomplishment! After one of his sessions I asked him if they are going to sacrifice some type safety in order to implement more dynamic language features. I mentioned that it's crucial to promote unit testing before doing such a thing. He recognized that and said that they were promoting more unit testing within Microsoft itself before making this the strategy to their community. He said that this was going to take some time, but that it's definitely the way to go. It was actually very reassuring to hear that. We definitely got to have some more testability features from the .NET Framework (especially ASP.NET). If they can accomplish this and reflect that to the entire .NET community, they've made one happy developer!
