No Long Days

Unless you live under a rock... and if you do and get internet access there I am impressed... you are aware that Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC08) took place this past week.

However, it seems that on twitter there were several people that tweeted that they were not at PDC. I was among them. I'm not sure how it started but a grass roots virtual "NotATPDC" conference was born. The organizers set up a web site and a twitter account. Then impromptu sessions were scheduled and delivered using LiveMeeting. Live Meeting is Microsoft's virtual meeting software similar to WebEx and GoToMeeting.

The organizers and presenter are to be highly commended. This is a testament to what can be done these days with the power of tools like twitter and the internet. The tubes were quivering with joy.

I first want to thank whomever was involved with pulling this together and volunteering resources and time to make a wonderful and usefull event. There was talk about getting the sessions hosted up somewhere since they were recorded. I hope to see that soon because I did miss a few session that ran concurrently. Keep watch on the web site at http://notatpdc.com.

I know that this gives a whole new twist on Code Camps and I see this as becoming the way many conferences will go soon.

The Virtual Conference is much more convenient. No need to travel or buy plane tickets. No need to sleep in some uncomfortable hotel bed. No need to wake up bleary eyed at 6AM to make a 7AM session. Of course you do miss out on the face to face networking.

Finally now I just wanted to give my brief review on the session I attended.

Beyond Hello World: jQuery in Depth by Steve Andrews

Unfortunately I go into this one late. But Steve showed how you could use jQuery to do some nice AJAX stuff on a sample MVC app he had. jQuery looks like a tool I want to add to my toolbox. Steve made it look easy and thanks so much for this.

An Introduction to an n-Tier Entity Framework Application by Chris Love

Once again, I didn't get to see this whole thing. I had to go to a meeting at the office. But, it is very relevant to my world. I am the architect at our division and working on the major V.Next of our application to prepare it for the future. It will be an n-Tier app and Entity Framework will play an important role. This is one I certainly am looking forward to watching once the recordings are made available.

UML Applied in 90 Minutes by Martin Shoemaker and Curtis Gray

This session gave a great introduction to URL. Martin took a suggestion from the audience on what to model and settled on an online voter registration and voting system. He started with a Use Case diagram. Then he moved on to a Sequence Diagrams etc. He made it all very understandable and explained how the business domain people could understand the diagrams and quickly see if something was missing. He use a tool that was called I think "Enterprise Architect" and showed how it can also do round tripping from diagrams to code and vice versa. Certainly something to look at. Using this tool to capture initial requirements and system overview while in a meeting with the domain experts looks like it would help has out stuff early.

Introduction to Silverlight by John Stockton & Gavin Leader

This session gave a high level overview of Silverlight and using it to create applications. They went over where they felt Silverlight was useful and answered some questions about it. While I knew most of what they talked about I did get some valuable information. Isn't that what these conferences are about.

There were several other sessions that unfortunately I did not get to see, but I am looking forward to the recordings. Once again, great job to all involved and thanks much. Perhaps at the next NotATPDC I will have a chance to present something instead of just watching.