When I got to the convention center this morning I had to sit down and do some work. Email was backing up on me left and right. One of my team members and I found a table and got some work done. Then it was lunch time which gets my vote for worst lunch this week.
After lunch I met up with David Silverlight in the developer area where I picked up my 6th place winnings from http://community-credit.com for the month of May and my award winning plaque. I spent the next several hours hanging out in the developer area talking to the product teams about different technologies.
A few highlights were I stopped by the Workflow Foundation and WCF booth and was talking to a Microsoft employee about WF and it turns out it was Tom Lake! For those that don’t know, Tom is on the SDK test team for Workflow Foundation and used to be on the Biztalk team. Tom answers a lot of forum posts on Workflow Foundation and has written a lot of samples. It was great to meet him finally since he’s even answered some of my questions as I explored WF. Great guy and very easy to talk to. If you have been wondering about WF, stop by and chat with Tom, he can walk you up and down the stack. Tom it was a pleasure to put a name with a face.
I bumped into Alexei and we chatted about agile development and Team Foundation Server. I met Alexei in person earlier in the week and it was good to put another face with a name since Alexei spoke at our Internal .Net User Group during the month of April. I then walked over to the Data Dude booth to get some ideas on how to version database diffs, or at least how I was going to try to handle it with not everyone on our team having a licensed copy of Data Dude. I chatted with several members of the C# team that I met in March at the MVP Summit and got done just in time to attend the Acropolis session.
I blogged about Acropolis earlier this week but this was a deep dive session showing the current state of affairs. After the session was over I don’t think I learned anything I can use yet. Things are still very rough but the vision of what it is going to be I think is something to keep an eye on. I am going to have to get the bits and start playing with it. During the session the presenter had to restart Visual Studio at least 5 times so if you do download the bits, expect things to be really rough.
After the Acropolis session I checked email and saw that I had received my CodeRush and Refactor! license I won from .Net Rocks. I downloaded the bits real quick and then jumped on the bus so I could install it on the way back to the hotel. As soon as I got back to the hotel I dropped my laptop off at the hotel and picked up Ellen. We jumped back on the bus and were off to the TechEd party which was at the Islands of Adventure theme park at Universal.