Well, overall the sessions have been okay. I’ve not been blown away with anything yet. As far as the conference itself:
They have good snacks and selection of drinks. The conference center is great - nice chairs, a table in front of you to write on, power ports directly in front of you. The lunch was a horrible box lunch thing. I have to remember to load up on the fruit before lunch tomorrow.
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.