Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Day two begins, and more lucid thoughts on last nights expo...

OK, now that I'm more awake, and not worried about missing the last bus from the convention center, I can opine a bit about last nights vendor-expo-reception-type-thingie...

All in all it was exactly what it sounds like; free food, free booze and lots of marketing. Some of the vendors are doing some very cool, interesting stuff. Others.... uh, did I mention the free food and free booze?

The free food was of the "on-a-stick" variety, which I know is easy for these kinds of events; it's easy to handle and you don't have much to clean afterward. But, I question the logic of grouping several tired, half-drunk swag-frenzied people in close quarters with what are essentially very small pikes. It was so crowded I almost accidentally stabbed four people! Ok, one of them wasn't as accidental as I claimed...

The swag was good. As I mentioned I was pretty "weighed-down" with it when I left. The hoops they are making you go through to get it are more and more invovled every year. To get a t-shirt I had to retrieve the Golden chalice from the Red Castle and return it to the Yellow Castle while being chased by some very disturbing looking ducks! And all I had was the aforementioned very small pike to defend myself!

But I got someone to snap a picture for me:




Anyway, here's the run down so far for today....

ARC206 Evolving to Patterns (James Newkirk): I really enjoyed this. Someone pointed out he "reused" stuff from Fowlers website, but I don't care. I plan to re-reuse the stuff when I work with developers.

CON213 Integration Technologies: What to use When (Kris Horrocks): So... did I mention that the Expo last night had free food and free booze? Actually, this wasn't bad, I think I was just "flooded with information" and since I'm relatively new to BizTalk, WCF and their ilk, didn't pick up as much as I had hoped.

SEC307 Baking Security into the Development Life Cycle (Michael Howard): To be honest, I didn't strictly go to this as my first choice. A co-worker of mine wanted a signed copy of his new book. I was sort of on the fence about this or another session, but decided to go so I could get the book signed and Brian could go to another session. I'm glad I did. This session was great and Michael really explained the value of the SDL and demonstrated (with real numbers from production Microsoft products) how using this can help generate more secure software. I went right afterward and bought my own copy of his book. Not sure about getting it signed though... :)

If my co-workers are reading this, I just picked up a SWEET piece of swag that I'll be giving away at some unspecified future event.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"IF" your co-workers are reading it? We're the ONLY ones reading it...

Anonymous said...

Will the REAL Philip please step forward?

James Bender said...

Uh oh! There is only one way to settle this...

THUNDER-DOME!