Here you can see me with Bird Rock in the background. VS Live has come to an end and before I went home I enjoyed one more day in sunny northern California. I went on a daytrip from San Francisco to Monterey Bay, 17-mile drive with a stop at the Bird Rock. This stately landmark is home to countless shorebirds and groups of harbor seals and sea lions. It ended in an hour stop at Carmel by the sea; just awesome. VS Live conference was a bit different than the one I went to six months ago in October 2006. In Redmond the focus a clearly on SOA, BPM and BizTalk. Whereas this conference was more for developers, with subjects like ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Vista,.NET best practices, Visual Studio Team System and the upcoming (or already here) .NET 3.0 framework. For me the .NET 3.0 was most interesting and that’s where all my attention went to. There was not allot of SOA in the .NET 3.0 Sessions, although it was mentioned in the title, talks around WCF and SOA were more about best practices and patterns. Workflow as very interesting and talks done by Stiefel and Getz were good. WPF sessions I followed were amazing in their demos, very nice to see what this technology can bring to UI developers. Although I am not a UI guy, it is nice to see that service consumers like portals, ASP websites and so on will change in their look and feel in the future. It will be completely different. Now it’s up to me to take all this new technology and start getting hands on experience with it and share the knowledge with my colleagues at Inter Access and my blog readers.
