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TechEd Boston – Day Five: The End is Here

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Today at 9am Don and I repeated the Service Factory chalk talk. Since this was fairly early in the morning, and also after the attendee party, we didn’t expect too many folks to show up. We were pleasantly surprised to have about 20 people show up, including good friends like Stuart and Patrick from Corillian. The talk was great (and a little different from the one we did on Wednesday) and the audience gave us very good feedback and some interesting ideas.

Afterwards, Don and I had a design discussion with one of the presentation attendees that revolved around data flow patterns and handling huge query results in interactive multi-tier applications (caching results vs. using indexes, etc.). Later on Beat and I reviewed a diagram for some company’s reference implementation for web-services. The diagram conflated cross cutting infrastructure and implementation details with architecture, which was very interesting since it helped me understand how much more guidance is needed in this area.

There’s a very natural tendency for people who are deep into a subject to forget where the majority of the folks are. You can see this for example in some of the technical tracks we have in Microsoft conferences. Instead of focusing on the basics we sometimes focus on the cool things in the fringes. If you se us doing this please let us know – your feedback matters and helps us better address your needs.

At lunch I talked with Beat about TechEd Europe. I still did not submit my abstracts yet, so let me know if there’s anything in particular that you want me to talk about. Later on we were joined by Hans Verbeek, Mark White from MS UK, Payam and others for a rather random discussion about TechEd Europe.

After lunch I talked some more with attendees, and even got to do some coding to illustrate a WCF feature (I coded WCF on the WF demo machine, but no one caught me J).

Towards the afternoon, the conference quieted down (well, except for the loud cheers from the Architecture track when they did the Iron Architect contest) and that was it – TechEd was over.

Later that night we assembled 11 guys for dinner at Hungry I. As expected, the food and service were great! Actually, everyone met at Cheers beforehand, but I had to stay at the hotel and reconstruct an important document (that I deleted all by myself L) before I forget all the details – don’t you just hate it when these things happen?! After that we took the T to Cambridge, listened to some bluegrass music at one place, had some random conversations with locals in another place, and ended the night at 3am in Chinatown for a second dinner (Robert, I managed to find good spicy food in Boston – thanks for the tip about East Coast Grill though!) and went back to the hotel at 4:30. I guess we really, really didn’t want it to end.

That’s it – TechEd is over. And now back to our regular scheduled program J

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