p&p Parking Lot

Day 1: Architecture

Enterprise Service Bus: complicated. I couldn't figure out how it'd be useful for us.

Scalability: seemed really geared toward high-availability, high-traffic apps, which mine definitely isn't. The advice about degrading services gracefully is helpful, though.

SecPAL: new standard is an oxymoron, it's all game theory figuring out who's going to adopt it and how many peers would need to in order to make it useful.

Day 2: Agile

Does the fact that day 1 was "architecture" make this a "waterfall" conference?

Empirical research on Agile adoption: zzz... I mean, it is awesome, I'll take the deck to work for show-and-tell, seriously. Why's it called a "deck", anyway?

Longitudinal study shows correlation between introduction/adoption of Scrum (specifically) and less overtime (fewer hours and less often). This makes agility interesting for us because the sustainable pace is less negotiable in our environment, while productivity is what flexes...!

Day 3: Development

Totally unable to overcome skepticism of IronRuby. Also, speaker less than riveting. He's talking about IronRuby while presenting on a MacBook. Bwah?

Rocky: "Sharepoint is the new Access!" LOL.

Models: zzz. I suck for not paying attention to this.

Day 4: Software Factories

Microsoft's ill-fitting latte lids, thoughtfully supporting me in my mission to spill coffee on important technology persons. Starting, today, with myself.

In the half hour before the keynote, Scott H popped up a Notepad window over his lead slide, and hacked out a short story about someone at the conference this week actually playing Quake and CounterStrike during the sessions, headphones and all, and finished with the question: how many of you are planning to play CounterStrike during my keynote? About five minutes before his talk began, he ^A-deleted it. Never said a word about it. It was like an Easter egg for presentations.

The entire rest of day 4, so far: my brain hurts. My laptop's brain hurts. My chair's brain hurts.

Swag update: Code Complete 2, Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET