TechEd 2005 - Day 3

Wednesday was an exciting day for Architect edition of Visual Studio Team System. Bill and Alex both had sessions on Application Designer and the Logical Datacenter Designer. Both seemed to go very well with standing room only for the Application Designer session.

Jochen gave his talk on the DSL Toolkit also to a nearly full room. I was able to attend that one because I was at the cabana at the time, but from what I've heard from attendees, it was very well received. We had lots of folks follow Jochen back from his session to the cabana for extended Q&A. I've been blown away by the interest in DSLs at the conference. It seems to resonate well with the architect community. There are several architect partners at the cabana, and they've been hearing me answer questions about the DSL Toolkit for the last couple of days. And, it's peaked their interest. As a matter of fact I've given a few of them demos and pointed them to our Hands On Lab, and they've all thought this was a great designer toolkit and are thinking about how they may be able to use it in their applications.

Also, Matt and Ed from Northface University gave a chalk talk at the cabana on their ORM designer and how they used the DSL toolkit to jump start their development. It was nice to see someone else talk about the usefulness of our tools.

Working the cabana has been lots of fun (shhh... don't tell my manager, this is supposed to be hard work :). There were lots of people with Whitehorse designer questions after the sessions. But, DSLs still had the most questions and interest and longest discussion... Along the way, we came up with a new motto for DSL tools while talking with Karen Henderson:

A diagram is worth a thousand XML elements.

Well, actually, its probably worth more like 100 thousand XML elements, but that wasn't as poetic. :)

We (Jochen, Grayson, and myself) had dinner with most of the contingent from EDS. It was a fun dinner especially discussing modeling and XML. And, then we all went off to a Microsoft party for some drinks. Finally, making it back to the room way to late since I have to be back at the cabana Thursday at 9am.