So my thoughts at the end of day…. Certainly a useful day, but the conference seems a little slow. The breaks seem long,the sessions short and the breakout sessions finished quite early in the day. Maybe I am just used to the crammed in format of TechEd that go on late into the evening. On the plus side this format does give a good chance to chat to other attendees, who seem very chatty and are from a wide variety of locations across the world; though nearly all white and male, an even less diverse group than at Mix UK! What does this say about the IT industry or maybe more to the point who gets to go to conferences? ...

Sitting here at the back of the Kodiak room at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond is somewhat similar to the control room at JPL which I went to on my last trip to the USA. All is can see is a sea of laptops and heads just visible over the rows of desks. It is nice to have a desk and easy access to power and Internet - all conferences should be this way. ...

SOA being a conference on business process is a great place to learn new words for the game of buzzword bingo, new ones to me thus far are: Onboarding - to hire staff Toast - information provided via a gadget on the desktop

After a couple of days in the Washington state my body has caught up to a manageable time zone (somewhere east of Denver I think, but that is close enough) just in time for for the start of the Microsoft SOA 2007 conference. The keynote for me highlighted that Microsoft see the future in the cloud, the Internet Service Bus (ISB) as opposed to silo’d Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). Now this assumes customers have gone down the SOA route already, which I would say is not the case in the SME market I work in. I still see many monolithic legacy applications where migration to SOA has not been considered yet. ...

For a while I have been suffering that when I switch on my Acer Core2 Duo Vista laptop, both cores sometimes go to 85%+ utilization, so the PC is slooooow. Usually after a few reboots it seems to clear. This can happen after a resume from hibernate and complete restart; there was no obvious pattern. Task manager only says that the load is due to the NT Kernel process - so not much help there. ...

I have been on holiday for a week and I see that registration for DDD6 has opened and closed - good job my session was voted onto the agenda else I would not be going. Thanks to anyone who voted for my session, see you there.

I see Bradford, where the Black Marble offices are, has been ranked the greenest city in the UK. Strange that at the technology centre we are in there is no recycling at all, not for paper, cans or plastic. We have asked if such a service can be laid on (developers drink a lot of can of coke), but were told that recycling is not a service offered as part of the council’s commercial refuse collection service. ...

Just got home from a long day of Black Marble hosted presentations. This morning I was presenting on SQL 2008, seemed to go well. This afternoon it was a very busy MSDN session by Martin Parry and Daniel Moth from the Microsoft DPE team on VS2008 and .NET 3.5. Finally this evening there was a interesting community event on the .NET Micro Framework by Rob Miles, the same session he is doing at TechEd in Barcelona, worth getting along to if you are there, if not try the book. ...

Craig Murphy has just posted a podcast we did at SQLBits last weekend. Enjoy…………

The voting for DDD6 is now open - as I always say vote early vote often. I hope my submission of a proposal for a session on Scrum is of interest. I know I have had feedback on my previous sessions that people want to know more on this area. Also saw today on Colin Angus Mackey’s blog that DDD7 DDD Scotland will be in May 2008 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Well another 3+ hour drive but in a different direction! It will be interesting to see if the change of location alters attendance ...