Yeah, I'm looking forward to the JamSession tonight. It isn't guaranteed that I'll get up and play, but I just might. :)

Oh, and I ran into Kevin Pilch-Bisson on the way in this morning. We met at the Agile Universe conference last year and talked a lot about his work on the C# ide in visual studio. He said hello on the escalators coming into the building, and I recognized him immediately, but, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name. DOH! So, I looked down at his badge for the name, just as he reminded me where we met. Of course, once I saw the name, everything clicked, and I remember him.

I really need to get better at matching names and faces.

This was a pretty interesting session, focusing on the different remoting-style technologies: asmx, enterprise services, messaging and .net remoting. It discussed some of the principles of service-oriented architecture and how it relates to each technology.

The first thing that really struck me was a nice slide about how our thoughts on software development changed over time: the 80's brought OO; the 90's brought components; and, now, we are seing more service-oriented architectures. I like the idea that OO is great for internal systems, but you really have to look closely at the boundaries and what technologies are used for more interop/remote-based scenarios.

The speaker spoke about moving towards SO architectures, even before Indigo comes out, such as not using event, fields or properties. It is important, though, to remember that is centered around the distributed layer, not necessarily internally.

Well, here I am at TechEd. So far, it is pretty cool. The keynote was interesting, emphasizing what I imagine is the direction that Microsoft is really heading in: connectivity and availability. They really were pushing the server tools to keep track of your infrastructure. Of course, being a straight developer, these things aren't the most pressing ideas for me.

Samantha Bee was funny, especially the bit with the puppets. :)

Things to remember: Always make sure that your laptop is charged up. The sessions don't have power outlets available in the middle of the room. I turned on my laptop to do some note-taking during the keynote, and I found that I had only 25 minutes of power left. UGH! So, I'm sitting here, typing in the communication center while my laptop charges next to me. I'd love to be spending this time looking around, but there are plenty more days left.