First two days at OOPSLA '03

I arreived in Anaheim on Saturday night after driving from San Diego through the raging fires of southern California. A true disaster! Just barely making OOPSLA registration saturday night, sunday became a long day as I missed daylight savings and got up at 5 am.

Yesterday I attended three tutorials, of which none were right on the spot for me. An introduction to AOP was interesting until the details of AspectJ took the upper hand. A session on how to write effective usecases delivered nothing really new and a tutorial on SOA and WS did not at all compare to Clemens Vasters and Steve Swartz Architects Tour earlier this year.

Beeing a student volunteer at OOPSLA my first duty was to organize the tutorial held by Martin Fowler this morning. Fun getting assigned to someone thats written a lot of the literature we have used in school. Martins session was really good, working his way through his book “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”. The session cleared all uncertainties I had with the book and will certainly make me use it more actively.

In a mostly Java dominated croud, Fowler talked in warm words about several .NET based solutions, especially the DataSet and the ASP.NET PageController architecture. Nice to get it stated from a heavyweighter after having had several tech discussions last night with the java crowd.

At the moment I'm on my way up to the PDC to see if there are any possibility to get into anything the next days. Too bad not to get in beeing merely 30 minutes away.