TechEd Wrap-Up

TechEd is essentially over for me - I'll be driving to the airport tomorrow morning and should be home by around noon. It was a good week - though only about half of the presentations I attended met my expectations. I was able to use the week to write some long overdue white papers on integrating .NET into the Corillian Voyager platform, as well as play with some message-based concept code I've been working on with our chief architects, Scott Hanselman and Bradley McLain. Clemens' talk on AOP cemented many concepts I've been thinking about incorporating, particularly relating to session management and audit logging. If only this stuff was baked into the .NET framework today.

The highlight of the show for me was Scott Hanselman's presentation (that's Scott on the left schmoozing the crowd before his talk): Learning to Love WSDL. Granted I'm a bit biased, but damn he's good at this. He has a way of blending humor and personal stories with great content.

On a much lighter note, I ran into Scott Ladewig (that's Scott on the right, I'm on the left), a college roommate and old friend (well, he's young, but we've been friends for around 17 years I suppose). Scott manages the IT infrastructure at the Washington University School of Business. Scott and I lived in the same dorm freshman year, then shared a suite our sophomore year. Scott was a ChemE and one of the smartest engineering students I knew at Wash U. He worked for Exxon for a while, but decided he liked computers more so went back to WashU for a couple of graduate degrees and ended up working there. I was absolutely floored when I ran into him at the show, and I'm glad we got some time together.

Scott and I wrapped up the evening at the closing TechEd party, featuring Smashmouth and the Wallflowers. The Wallflowers were amazing - I've been a fan since their first album and they didn't disappoint. Great way to end the week.