This post has been a couple of days on it's way. The reason for not posting it after each day is that there was not much new that you could not already find on almost every .net blog out there.

Thursday I attended a session on "Velocity", Microsoft's upcoming solution to distributed in-memory cache. This is pretty cool and straight forward (at least for the basic stuff). To demonstrate this, a member of the audience set up Velocity on two servers in a few minutes. This reminded me of the importance of the abstractions we normally use on various features. With a simple abstraction for caching, I really believe you could make the switch to Velocity in a day.

I also attended an XNA session. Before leaving home, I actually decided not to go to that kind of sessions, but as you might have guessed, I changed my mind. Game development is a really hardcore object oriented discipline, and my idea is that a good game developer makes a hardcore application developer, and the session gave a good idea on a completly different way of using objects, methods, loops and more. Pretty cool, if I ever get the time (I doubt it) I'll put my old XBOX 360 to good use with XNA :o)

Friday I attended a very cool session with Udi Dahan on architecture, how to make interfaces concrete, and how he and his team resolved some of their (architectural) issues. Pretty cool guy, and a very inspirering session. I really like the following slide. It's on why to make roles explicit using interfaces.

Final Impressions

It has definitely been a unique experience to participate in the conference, I cannot help but to feel kind of privileged to be working in a company that realises this! I have agreed to participate in a podcast by Søren about the general TechEd experience, so stay tuned.