Entertaining first morning on the Tech-ED

The keynote and my first session-presentation were very entertaining.

The keynote started with a drum session. Fun part was, everybody has got it's own drum, so everybody without a car is walking around with a drum now. But it was very entertaining to be part of several thousands of drummers, drumming at the same time. Brilliant. Besides that, the keynote was pretty calm. They announced the Visual Studio Express Edition, which is supposed to be very cheap and allow everybody, including students, to build .NET applications. There was some new stuff in it that was interesting, like an integrated way to insert codesnippets that looked pretty cool, but it didn't really warm me up. The Team System demo did, but the coverage of that was very high-level, didn't really touch the good points yet.

My first session was the Metropolis session from Pat Helland, who I respect for a long time now. I've been at the first MTS-announcements, back in 1996, with him convincing everybody about the revolutionizing technology MTS was bringing. The Metropolis session tries to create an analogy between the development of cities, railways, transportation and the like, mainly in second half of the 19th century and the current development of applications that start communicating and exchanging data etc. A already knew his analogy but yet it fun seeying him making his point and I believe he's right. The major point I took from his presentation, is that every application should really standardize on it's communication. Not in technical sense like XML and SOAP, but in a business sense. There are lots of examples, where this already happens, like between dutch electricity companies through ECH, but this is just the beginning.

O, and Pat closed his session with a song, while Don Box and David Chapell played along. Brilliant performance. He announced it to be posted on his website by wednesday (I guess that is tomorrow, but he might also mean next week).