My Tech-ED Tuesday afternoon

After all the fun this morning, stuff got more serious.

First of all, I got a chance to talk 1-on-1 to Scott Woodgate, which was good. He gave some good advices on the real problems we have and noted down the ones he didn't cover. That was very good.

My afternoon was planned around SOA in three steps, namely:

1) BizTalk in a Service Oriented environment -> Good presentation from David Chappell. What I found a little anoying is, that after a very good half an hour, he spend the second half an hour on explaining BizTalk concepts at a high leveling, while I hoped he would give some better examples of how BizTalk can be placed in a Service Oriented environment. Great takeaway -> David believes that in one to two year everybody wants to develop in BizTalk.

2) Using data in a Service Oriented Architecture -> Good session from Pat Helland. Jumped in a little late from my chat with Scott, I saw some good ways of looking of different kinds of data, the lifecycle of that data and versioning of data. Very interesting.

3) Metropolis: Building Apps in a Service Oriented Enterprise -> Pat Helland again. I didn't like the session, wrong choice. I think Pat is taking his analogy work to far here. His session was about comparing buildings to applications. Although he's able to take the analogy remarkably far (I agree on parts of his analogy), the presentation felt very 'made'. I didn't see the comparisons he saw and I think I can reasonably argue against some of the statements he made.

I think I've seen enough of SOA for now, tomorrow will be my VS Team System day. Let's see if it's as entertaining as today.