Yesterday (Day Two) I managed to curtail my socializing enough to attend four sessions! It is so incredibly difficult to choose, but mostly I focused on Indigo which I really need to get sooner than later. I had been told by Angela Mills who is the Group Program Manager for XML Enterprise Services in Indigo (phew long title) that Shy Cohen's Reliable Messaging in Indigo talk had some to-die-for demos, so it was one of the ones that I was sure to see. Shy is a great presenter. One of the most important things about indigo is that you don't have to be a plumber to do messaging, to do security, etc and the style of Shy's presentation highlighted that beautifully. Here he was talking about things like queues and transactions and it was very tangible. One of the demos he used is something I hope to see on Channel 9 soon. Rather than just doing a console app so that it was easier to focus on the code - something many of us tend to do - he had a 3D Avalon demo of a Rubik's cube that had all of the pieces moving and the application's task was to “solve” the cube - getting the surfaces all back in line. He used the demo to show what would happen when some of the many messages sent from the client app to the service to solve the cube were dropped. With Reliable messaging, there are many ways to ensure that messages are skipped or lost and we could see the before and after effects.
The demos were written with the help of Steve White from the Avalon team and Mike Moroney who wrote the algorithms. Definitely worth the price of admission!
In addition to the Indigo talks (one of which was given by Martin Gudgin who I have always heard so much about) I attended the Part 1 Atlas talk. It was a lot of fun to see all of the things you can do withthis technology in a strictly Web UI, such as dragging objects around on the web page. The talk was in a huge auditorium and was totally packed.
Another mission of mine is to bring back swag for my Monday night VTdotNET meeting. I ended up walking around most of the day with a huge pile of t-shirts in my arms. Like any good conference attendee, I brought an extra bag just for the purpose of bringing stuff back.