By Oren Ellenbogen — May 13, 2006

TechEd 2006. Day 2. What a day...

We got up at 07:05. It was hard as hell, but we had to put the effort for the team. After all, we came to hear some great lectures. No way in hell I’m gonna miss it.

Lessons from “the Factory floor” on How Microsoft does software engineering, by Amnon Horowitz

This lecture was nice- but I can’t say that Amnon did the maximum he could have done. I think that he could transfer the material with some more excitement, after all, he manage thousand of people! The lecture turned out to be pretty dry and somehow boring as Amnon started to answer some really not-important(I’ll be soft) questions and even to answer a question which was answered 5 minutes before. I hope that on his next lecture he could be a little tougher and ask some of the guys to ask him those questions during break time. Enough bitching, there were 3 pluses as well:

MS doing some things right! It was great to hear how MS works from an insider. I really admire the strength to say: “Hey, we have to cut those features and to close those bugs for the near release”.
I was able to think about the way I communicate with my QA department. I can make some dramatic improvements by cutting down some long, hard to read & understand papers, and form a 6-7 lines of Dos(and how) & Donts so my programmers can work more efficient with our testers.
I had some time to think about ideas for my lecture, mostly about how to present the data I want to transport.

My grade for Amnon’s lecture (1-10): 6.

New directions for developing rich Web applications with Atlas, by Leon L.

I’ve enjoyed this session. I must admit that I didn’t play with Atlas enough so Leon managed to teach me a lot of things and make me want to start playing with Atlas. I really liked the Server Centric approach, its almost like you develop WinForms application. It’s amazing what you could do with a good, solid framework.

My grade for Leon’s lecture (1-10): 8.

Getting specific on Generics, by Noam King & Alon Felis

I must admit, this one was pretty bad. In a lecture of 400+ level, I expect to learn something new, even if I’m quite familiar on the subject. In addition, there were a lot(!) of errors in the presentation slides; Ken & I counted at least 4 slides with terrible mistakes. I told Noam about those mistakes at the end of the lecture so I hope he’ll get them fixed. To sum-up, I simply didn’t get into the “beat”…

My grade for Noam and Alon’s lecture (1-10): 4.

Oh, one thing! Try to tell what OS this dude is running:

Yep, this is Linux (GNome)! a big NO-NO at TechEd ! :-)

WPF – Part 2 – Interoperability with Windows Forms, by Arik Cohen

I love this dude! Arik is such a typical American geek. He’s one of those folks which you enjoy to share your geekness with. His presentation was pure joy. I really got excited about WPF for Windows Forms and Web Forms. Arik showed a bunch of samples about the way you develop WinForms & WebForms with WPF, just to understand how it all works. One important thing – WPF/e – This baby will able you to convert WinForms application to WebForms application in one click. WPF/e will download a small “host” (~2MB) for the browser which will allow you to show your XAML application as it was developed for WebForms application from the beginning. Cool !

My grade for Arik’s lecture (1-10): 9.

Ask The Experts

Ho man, that was cool !! Myself & Ken talked with Luca Bolognese about several ideas we had. We even met Oren Eini and talked a bit. And as always, Yossi Taguri, one of the guys I really like at MS, gave us some answers and connected us to some experts in the field – Thanks Yossi.
It’s just a shame that I don’t like beer because there were plenty of it there… :(

The P-A-R-T-Y !!

Woooo!!