Tech-Ed 2008 – The Final Day

Well, today officially marks the end of Tech-Ed 2008 for me.  I started the morning by sitting on my suitcase in an attempt to compress all the SWAG into a container that was already full at the start of the week :-)  I lost count of how many T-shirts I ended up with and I believe I ended up with three caps along with miscellaneous “toys” that will provide hours of fun for my kids :-)

I attended a session this morning on the Architecture Edition of “Rosario”.  Although I’ve seen most of what was presented, it was nice to see some of the features being developed that are not yet publicly available (with any luck, the new features will be in the next CTP – around the fall timeframe).  Some of the new (i.e. not in CTP12) features include:

• Architecture Browser - this isn't new from the current CTP but it has been improved quite a bit.
• Layer Diagram – this is a really cool, new feature that allows you to visually (i.e. graphically) depict the logical partitions in your application (e.g. User Interface layer, Business Logic layer, Data Access layer, etc.).  Once you have the various layers configured, the really cool part starts - Visual Studio can then validate the implementation of the design so code does not cross architectural boundaries inappropriately.  Brian Harry has a nice post on this feature (he demo'd it during the Tech-Ed keynote this week).

I spent the rest of the morning/early afternoon walking around talking to the folks in the MVP area and hitting the Team System guys up for some giveaway items for the Omaha Team System User Group (thanks, guys, for the Visual Studio Team System branded USB drives!).

I mentioned in my first post this week that I was participating in the “Step-it-Up” program with my company (where I attempt to get a set number of steps in per day for roughly 12 weeks).  By the time I arrived back home after Tech-Ed, I had walked a total of 91,316 steps during the week averaging 18,263 steps per day.  Not too bad – the hard part will be keeping up with this pace over the remaining weeks :-)

I learned a lot at this year’s Tech-Ed and made some great contacts.  I’ve also come back with some great ideas for various articles, blog posts, and utilities related to Team System/TFS so I’m looking forward to digging into all of that and getting some items published during the next few weeks.

So, my goals for next year’s Tech-Ed is to present in an interactive theatre or a breakout session.  We’ll have to wait and see if I’m able to pull it off…  Right now, it’s nice to be home :-)