Today there was a lunch session given by representatives of the Microsoft Research group. They have been working on a tool called the Spec Explorer. This tool is used for a business analyst to lay out the spec in a series of workflow like descriptions to create a model of what the application is functionally supposed to do. That model is then used to generate a series of tests of the model.
The last talk of the day was given by David Trowbridge and Mark Groves. This session was on creating skeleton baseline architectures, but really seemed to be a “see what’s coming with Orcas and Team Architect edition of VS”. They showed how some of the new design tools in the upcoming Orcas release would include some top down design tools. It was neat to see, but I’m wondering about the real world usage of it.
The sixth scheduled talk was given by Shawn Veney on Architecting for Security. This was by far the most entertaining talk of the day. Shawn is ex-military, and while he apologized for the speaking habits that history had instilled in him it was a great talk. His euphemisms were funny and well placed. His descriptions of chasing developers around with bamboo swords were great.
His talk was on getting security into your life cycle.