Last day at TechEd

It's friday, and TechEd is over for this time.

My first session on friday was about little-known secrets in Microsoft Silverlight 3. This was a really good session for advanced Silverlight development, and I took away many tricks - including the ability to download and use assemblies dynamically and asynchronously; and to use the OS client stack instead of the browser stack for network access.

Second session was about extending Visual Studio 2010's architecture modelling tools. This was a code-rich session, where we were walked through creating 3 extensions for the modelling tools. With VSIX packages, deployment of Visual Studio extensions are now much easier. The coding experience when creating extenions has also been made much nicer in the new verison of Visual Studio 2010. It is a no-frills experience, where you only need to work in the problem domain, and not jump through hoops to make Visual Studio do what you want.

The last session of this year's TechEd is about Pex and Code Contracts. I am writing this while waiting for the session to be begin - it's a very interesting topic, and I might do a full length blog post about Pex and Code Contracts at a later time.

This has been a very educational and interesting week. I have learned about architecture and design, new tools and techniques. In general, the quality of the talks has been very high (there were a few misses, but it's been an overall good experience). The only problem has been to select the right session, when there were multiple interesting selections in the same time slot, which happened to me a lot. For instance, I never got to see a talk about the Concurrency Runtime (CCR), because there were always something more interesting on the menu. Now, I need to get home and get into the gym - it's been a week with good foods, eggs and bacon each morning at the hotel, so I need it :-) I Might be coming back next year !