TechEd 2006: second day

Well, after a couple of hours a sleep, I went out with some of the collegues (/images/but didn’t make it as late as some others ;-)), I decided to attend the following courses:

• ADO.NET 2.0 tips and tricks:
• WCF Building secure , reliable and transacted distributed services: okay this session was a bit too deep for me at the moment because I didn’t play around with the bits before.
• Hands on lab: since I couldn’t really follow the last session I thought to go out for hands on lab on WCF. Unfortunately it didn’t work after typing all that code. Even the “ask the experts” guys couldn’t find what went wrong. Too bad but I hope to have some time to install the final bits of .NET 3.0 the next week and play around with the RTM bits.
• White board discussion about AJAX by Shawn Burke: my first white board discussion and it went pretty well. I was one of the guys asking the most questions about why the betas are using prototypes instead of closures for example. If you’re interested: they did it because it performs better and is much easier to debug, especially to hook up debuggers in visual studio.
• Creating custom activities for WF: interesting session and I really would love to get my hands dirty on this new stuff. The last year and a half I spent my time creating a rules engine for our client with .NET 2.0. Man, why couldn’t WF be there in that time frame?? Really it would’ve made the lives of the team a lot easier.

After the sessions there was time for a country drink sponsored by Microsoft. We were put together with the delegates from Luxembourg and France. The pub could have been better but heck there was sangria, beer and tappas. Also a lot of known faces/collegues to talk to. Our little after party was in the Hard Rock cafe in pretty Barcelona.

Well, that’s the wrap up for the second day.

Grz, Kris.