Brian H. Prince

Well, it's Father's Day, and I have finally recovered from TechEd. I think I slept most of Saturday just trying to regain from the exhaustion. Out session on designing BizTalk solutions on Thursday morning went much better than I had hoped. I expected ten people to show up because it as was at 8:00am, which is a hard time to get up on the Thursday of TechEd. About 100 people showed up, and our score was 8.5 on a scale of 1-9! We were in the top ten of all 1,006 sessions until later that day. We got bumped to #11. Still a great showing. Personally, I think I have done better before, but the crowd seemed to have liked it. I ended up going to several IIS7 sessions, a session on DSL's and frameworks, and went to some other great sessions/chalk talks. The new architecture for IIS7 is really awesome. I can see how it will really help in the future. The first major step they did was to take the core functionality that supplied authentication, caching, dir browsing, static file ser...

Wow! What a day. I needed some time off from going to sessions so I hung out in the architectre TLC area. I got to watch an arcCast be recorded. The topic was about the new service library GAT tools for patterns and practices. It was really intersting to see them talk about these new features. You should check out the kit. They have a CTP now, and will release at the end of July. The best talk so far, at all of TechEd was the SOA architecture talk by Beat Schwegler. He was a great speaker, very calm but very engaging. His slide deck was definitely outside what the content owners have been forcing us speakers to follow. I think that is cool. I have been toying with swapping to a serperate deck at the last minute. We shall see. I do want good scores, but I also want to be asked to come back next year. One of his points was that services should be designed around the What of business, not the how. Developers tend to immediately think of how, when an architect should always focus on the wh...

The 'blogosphere' (always hated that term) is a glow once more with a daily flood of TechEd updates. So, Yet Another Tech Ed Conference Update. I had a depressing start to the day. My first session was terrible, and the speaker was bad. The last ten minutes were what I thought the whole session was going to be about. I need to learn more about the new Office Scorecard Manager so that I can use it on a few upcoming projects (both internal and external). The speaker spent most of the time demoing and talking about BizTalk BAM. BAM is awesome, don't get me wrong, but the topic was supposed to be about scorecards. I learned my lesson, and should of bailed as soon as it was proving to be sucky. My second session was to be on building Finanical system with BizTalk and human components. Brian L and I thought maybe they were going Borg on us. But then decided that a human heart was likely NOT at the center of any financial system. James pointed out this was possible, if that heart...

So, day zero is nearly complete. Today is Sunday. I arrived yesterday after completely missing my plane. I thought my flight was on Sunday, and when I went to print out my itinerary Sat afternoon I made the connection that 6/10 was indeed not Sunday, but that someone had rudely moved it to Saturday. This would have been ok had I noticed this incovenient change before my flight. But I noticed this at 1:30, and my flight left at 11:00. I called up the travel people, and they re-booked me for a flight later that day. Got to the Hilton just fine thanks to them. While on the shuttle from the hotel I hooked up with Brian Loesgen, a fellow MVP and VTS'er. I spent the day registering for the event, and doing my initial check in at the speaker lounge. Registering was quick and painless, and instead of a normal laptop bag this year, we get Man-Purses. They are actually quite nice bags, your laptop goes in vertically however. The speaker lounge was less 'lounge-y' than I expected and ...