Day started with a keynote all about Microsoft Research (MSR).  Key point is that it is structured like a University, and actually has more acedemic output than almost any other CS department and more patents/papers than any other R&D group worldwide.

They showed off some cool new tech they are working on, including sensor arrays, SecondLight, and Boku.  Boku was especially interesting to me as it is a a programming skills game for children (7 years and up) that is a 3d interactive environment and uses an XBox controller to do all the "coding".

 

The rest of the morning I spent session hopping to lots of different "Showcase" and "Case Study" type sessions to see how these technologies have been used in the real world, including the NBC Olympics site, which registered more than 55 million unique visitors, which now all have SilverLight installed (due to this and other genious parterships, such as the new NetFlix Live service, SilverLight already is on 25% of all connected internet devices).

 

After lunch I did a short little presentation as part of the CodePlex Townhall meeting.  My little demo (about 10 minutes), was on the Community Kit for SharePoint, Extended Blog Edition (CKS:EBE).  That went very well and I got a nice CodePlex jacket out of the deal.  Channel9 recorded it, so perhaps in the next week or so it will show up there.

 

 

Then I went to the Windows Azure: Cloud Service Development Best Practices which was a great session (no code), that covered all the considerations that need to be addressed when using the new mindset.  I'm glad I went to this as the "Business Considerations for the Cloud" session I had planned on going to on Day 4 got cancelled.

 

Last session of the day was "Architecture without Big Upfront Design" which showed all the new modelling tools that are part of VSTS2010 Architect Edition.  Not everything worked, but the stuff that did looked great.  The overriding message was that it's rare that you ever get to start with a green field and so you need to evolve and adapt your architectures anyway (as opposed to designing them perfectly up front).  Assuming you have the tools to do this properly, then it only makes sense to design your architectures to be flexible up front even when doing green field development.  The presenter was very "Agilista".