The next talk was given by Andrew Flick on user experience. He starts with an example of the three mile island catastrophe. The whole thing boiled down to a poor user experience and design of the user interface (he had a picture of the design of the control center of the facility).
He talked about the Impedance Match, or being on the same page with what you are working with. Impedance Match in Software is difficult because the communication is pretty much one way.
The second talk of the day was given by James Newkirk, one of the original drivers behind NUnit. He starts with discussing the underlying longevity of the principles of software patterns. His example was the fact that the Design Patterns book was written in 1995, but is still relevant today and sits on the shelf of most of the people in the room.
James talks about the Open/Closed principle. Open for extension, closed to modification.
The keynote today was presented by Scott Isaacs, an architect for Microsoft.
He talked about Web 2.0 and how the future looks for web applications. He started with a history of the web and the evolution of technology that supported it, such as HTML, JavaScript, RSS, etc.
His point about what web 2.0 is that it’s a shift of focus of the web to experience and self-expression rather than just content.