TechReady 1 - 2005: Day 1 Sessions Update

Ok, so Clarry and I where flat out yesterday with sessions, unfortunately, after each session, my stock standard question of “Hi, I’m a Developer Evangelist, how much of this can I care to share?” was answered with a “Unfortunately none!”. This was until I went to undoubtedly the best session of the day anyway, “An architecture for the RFID-enabled enterprise”, where I received the wonderful response of “Hell Yeah!” to my question.

This session was both an overview and a drill-down into the new RFID platform for Windows Server, and covered off a suggested architecture for RFID solutions. What blew my mind was how evolved the whole offering was; not only did the demo show the RFID hardware picking up the RFID’s as they passed through, but also the Windows Server software monitoring the device and cataloging all the reads. The demo was given by Javed Sikander, who was not only a great presenter, but had an obvious passion for RFID (watching him get excited when the RFID values where being detected and filled a listbox on their tool was infectious). But what grabbed my short and curlies was the statement, “We want to do for RFID what ASP.NET did for the web!”; this is huge, because once you start integrating these kinds of technologies and innovations into our current platform (SQL Server, BizTalk, etc) and provide tight development support through Visual Studio, then a large proportion of the challenges of building RFID solutions go away. I mean, thinking about stuff like DSLs, and how they could apply to RFID solutions development makes me very excitement, ya!

I’m a little bummed that I couldn’t blog about much of the cool stuff I saw mainly around Office12; there are some outstanding innovations on that platform, but I’m a patient man, and I am already undertaking an assault to get a very early release to start playing with, so that I’m in a good position to start doing developer demo’s as soon as we are allowed :D