D-Day

Well, here we are at the fourth day of the 2006 TechED for Developers in Barcelona. Today I will to have to show the Idols Contest jury what I have to offer on presentation skills. Unfortunately, yesterday evening was also the right time to be at the Dutch Country drink in Barcelona City Hall night club. Drinks were free, and I forgot that I'm not used to drink that many Bacardi Coke's anymore.

Therefore, I decided to start the day with a highly interactive Whiteboard Discussion on best practices for using Team System (which is great for starting after a hangover). The session was hosted by two Team System MVPs so clearly these guys have a lot of experience. In fact, it already took 15 minutes just to prioritize the many requests from the audience, . Since I ran into many issues while working with Team System, I'd like to ask them a question or few! I sure am going to check-out their blogs later on. As a side note, I was now getting a little bit nervous for the Idols stuff during lunch...

The next session was about the synchronization issues you run into with occasionally connected Smart Client applications. It was co-presented by Microsoft's Brad Adams, which is known for his books on .NET design guidelines. As part of Visual Studio 'Orcas', they've been cooking up a framework that should help us creating applications that are as great to use as Microsoft Outlook even if you don't have a connected right now. This stuff is not yet available fully and it relies on SQL Server Compact Edition for the local database, but a CTP is supposed to arrive soon enough.