Tech-Ed 2008 - Day One

Well, day one of Tech-Ed 2008 is in the books.

The morning started off with Bill Gate's final public keynote as CEO of Microsoft.  The first portion of the keynote was spent watching a video that enacted what Bill's last day of work might be like at Microsoft.  It was a entertaining video with a lot of high-profile cameos by people such as Warren Buffet, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Bono (of U2), Matthew McConaughey, George Clooney, Al Gore, et. al.  Afterwards, Bill, along with the help of some others, spent some time covering various technologies including Silverlight (get product name), Visual Studio "Rosario" (including some cool architecture features not yet available in the CTP), SQL Server 2008, Microsoft Robotics, etc.  There were a few product-related announcements made during the keynote but nothing major.  You can read about them on Somasegar's blog.

One of the sessions I attended was Visual Studio Team System: Today and T tomorrow by Brian Harry.  I was looking forward to meeting Brian because of my personal interest in Team Foundation Server.  I finally caught up with him later in the day and got the chance to introduce myself and speak with him for just a minute (there was a line behind me).  So, check that goal off my Tech-Ed "to do" list :-)  There weren't any real surprises in Brian's session if you've been keeping up with the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta and Visual Studio "Rosario" but it was still an informative and interesting session.

I also attended the session .NET Interface-Based Programming by Juval Lowy.  He spent his time talking about how we should be developing interface-based software instead of object-oriented software because interfaces are the path to code reuse.  He made some very good points during his session which I plan on investigating a great deal over the coming weeks.

Although I don't really work with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), at least not yet, I attended the session Introduction to Windows Workflow (services) by Ron Jacobs.  Mainly because I've watched quite a few of the ARCast.TV videos in the past with Ron and I wanted to see him in person.  He does as great of a job presenting in person as he does on "TV" although I felt he should have plugged Philip Wolfe's TLC session More Windows Workflow Foundation Hosting Options than You Thought when hosting-related questions came up :-)

All in all, a great start to the Tech-Ed week!