I am down in Reading for the VBug conference where I am speaking on TFS tomorrow. Whilst in the bar chatting to Roy Osherove from Typemock, the keynote speaker for the conference, he asked if I had looked at the Sharepoint patterns and practices document that details using Typemock Isolator for unit testing in Sharepoint. On a first look it seems very interesting; as usual at this point I just wonder how I missed the announcement of this document last month! Is is just me or does everyone struggle to keep up with the the blogs and site you should read? ...

Robert blogged about the new beta release of the patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance document. I have had a chance to do a quick read now and I have to say I am impressed. If nothing else it gives great comparative look at waterfall and agile methods for delivery, and a review of many types of acceptance testing. As with many of the p&p documents it is not exhaustive in what it covers, but what it does give is an excellent and detailed starting point for you to make the decisions that are right for your project. It does not give all the answers just most of the right questions. ...

So back home now after a reasonable journey back from LA all things considered; so I have had a bit of time to reflect, was the PDC good? Well I think I enjoyed my previous PDC in 2005 more, your first time always sticks in your memory. I think that this might be due to the fact that at the 2005 PDC LINQ was announced and it was a real left field thing, nobody seemed to see it coming. Due to the prior announcements (leaks) there was nothing that was not expected at this years PDC. ...

While I was at the PDC I missed the announcement that the release candidate for Database Edition was made, I was not following blogs too much. You can find all the download links for the RTM at Gert Drapers Blog, you can also see his PDC session where he made the announcement. Why did I miss the session you might ask? well I was in Agile development with Team System session – some big improvement in Office integration with TFS ...

The keynote today was all about MSR, interesting as ever. I particularly liked the demos of Second Light (Surface computing that reaches beyond the surface of the physical pc) and Boku (a system to help children program). The latter is close to our hearts at Black Marble due to the work we have done on FPL, another system to teach children to program (watch out for free downloads of this application soon) ...

Well it was all end user focused today; Windows 7 and experience in Live systems. All looks very nice, given the usually question you have to raise in a connected environment over personal data security. I am sure Microsoft have done a good job of physical and logical data security, but the whole concept of mesh networks opens up a huge potential for social attacks. No developer can protect against the user clicking on an ill advised email or now mesh link; I know I have fixed too many friends PCs with the XP Antivirus 2008 Trojan of late, where they click on a link because an email said their anti virus was out of date, they thought they were doing good. ...

It has been a while but I knew a conference would turn up some good buzzwords Meshify – to add Live mesh functions to a site

At the PDC expo drinks last night I was asked to show age ID to get a drink! Just me it seems, nobody else from the company. I thought I was doing well to be carded on my 30th birthday whilst in the US, but 10 years on it getting silly – You must ask how do I keep my youthfully countenance? Wish I knew, but they say it is youth culture here in LA. ...

Though not really mentioned in the keynote there are a lot of sessions on VSTS 2010 at the PDC; it is going to be a major really major release. Chatting in between the sessions with other delegates there seems to loads of interest in the new testing features, but we know this is pain point from Alt.net meetings. It will be interesting to see how these new tools deliver, I am sure the manual testing tools will be useful, but I am a bit more doubtful over the UI testing tools. We have all seen the demo promise of these products before and hit problems when we try to use them for real. ...

So it seems we are going to have themed days at the 2008 PDC and day one is all about the Azure services platform. Though judging by the expo stands the key announcements for tomorrow - Oslo and Dublin are out there too. As conferences go it seems a bit confused to me, I guess Microsoft are aiming for three big bangs at three keynotes; but we seem to have had a big bang today and splutter of future items. ...