TechDays 2007 Impressions
Microsoft TechDays 2007 has ended. It was a good event with a good number of interesting subjects and interesting sessions.
It's specially worth mentioning 3 highlights of the event.
The Social Life of Information (TSLOI)
Beat Schwegler rolled out a series of 3 sessions with this "kind of strange" title: The Social Life of Information.
Beat is a great speaker that I always enjoy listening to on architecture subject matters. This time he focused on the Office System 2007 and how it can be used to manage all that scattered information (email, laptops, desktops, etc.) "owned" by all the employees in a organization to increase productivity through collaboration.
You could say that this wasn't really as much about architecture as it was about "selling" the new Office features (Sharepoint Services 3.0, Search, Business Data Catalog, Forms Services or Excel Services). My point in highlighting these sessions is that they would certainly put you thinking about collaboration in the enterprise and on the things we're still missing today. It certainly did that for me.
The Architect Anguishes
Bruno Câmara and Tiago Pascoal gave a really (crazy) funny session about architecture and all those buzzwords that keep coming up.
Bruno played the role of a cowboy developer recently "upgraded" to architect that has a lot of doubts and anguishes about what to do with all these technologies.
Tiago acts as the psychoanalyst in charge of helping him elaborate on and eventually solve the questions.
I wasn't expecting to exit this session knowing "where to put my business logic" but I sure had a great time.
GASP Presence
GASP was very active in the event.
We had a booth at the Ask the Experts community lounge (not so active because the Portuguese community seems to not have questions about software architecture :)).
More important, a very significant number of sessions were delivered by GASP members, covering at lot of subjects:
In a word, the time was worth spending and congratulations are in order to Nuno Costa and José António Silva for putting this together.