Tech-Ed Wednesday

Reading back my blogging of yesterday, I think I did good in keeping a diary, but not so good in telling new stuff. So I will cut it short (at least I will try).

I did a SOA session and a Fabriq lab this morning, then three Team System sessions, a Black Belt BizTalk session and a not-so Black Belt (very basic) BizTalk session, which I left after 5 minutes.

First of all, although nothing new to most blogreaders, Visual Studio Team System IS GOOD STUFF. It is going to be pricy, though, although Universal Subscriber will get a reduction to SOME parts IF they are subscriber on the day of shipping. Prashant Sridharan showed an awful lot of good demo's. Of course, anything he showed can already be done today, but not in one integrated environment. There's change management, work item management, Excel integration, unit test integration, performance test integration, class diagrams, application diagram, physical system diagrams. application to system mapping diagrams. Luckely there's lot's written on the subject, so I won't redo that, but one thing I like to share is the enhancement of Source Control to the notion of shelving. Shelving is a kind of check-in where you do put stuff back in Source Control but do not actually check-in to the main stream. This means that you can store unfinished code centrally without breaking the main program flow. This also allows for code reviewing by other teammembers. Looked very promising to me.

FABRIQ Lab was nice, but a little limited. I think I like FABRIQ but need to see more to really know. The SOA session ("Realizing Service-Oriented Architecture) was good. What I generally like about the SOA sessions, is that they are really going down into the details of building it, describing different kinds of services, different kinds of approaches, different kinds of data, etc. This does mean that a lot of new terms are made up describing all the different concepts (today I learned about process services, activity services and entity services). All those terms are sometimes a puzzle, but in the end I like it, it really describes what it's all about.

Shoot, it has become another long story. Sorry for that, but I'm really enjoying this Tech-Ed, and you know, writing about something is a good way to remember it. So, more to come...