What a day, but unfortunately it started off a bit slow, and as usual very cold! I started in the auditorium where David Gristwood and Ted Pattison held a talk about workflows in SharePoint. The talk was supposed to be a 400 session and was titled: "Workflow in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007: Deep Dive for Developers". Though it was about workflow, it was not a 400 session. It was rather an introduction to workflow, and showing how the designer works and so forth. The best part was that Ted was really good at talking about this stuff, and his CodeMonkey David knew his way around Visual Studio. But all in all, it was not worth sitting there freezing!

The next session about SharePoint Ajax, was really cool. Jan Tielens and Patrick Tisseghem presented us with the ability to do Ajax in MOSS, as well as using SilverLight and PopFly. The most interesting was a demo by Jan about his SmartPart component. He showed how to include normal User Controls in SharePoint by just selecting it from a dropdown. I'll have to give it a try! The SmartPart also supported Ajax, and connections between the components, which was a really cool demo! Patrick's part about the SilverLight and PopFly, was really a waste of time, since you can include PopFly in your application by means of an iframe :(

After lunch I went to an interactive session with Pablo Castro, Carl Perry, Mike Taulty, Luca Bolognese and Elisa Flasko. The session was called "Linq to X ...", which was about which framework you should use. As normal they are hesitant to say which you should use, but as they say the reasons could be quite difference. Some won't even allow dynamic SQL to their DB, so LINQ to SQL might not be the best option. Of course its still nice, since it supports Stored Procedures as well. The Entity framework is something you can use with other DB's, so the choice is really yours. Otherwise great session :)

Concurrency with Joe Duffy was not what I expected at all! He talked about concurrency in general, and showed people how to use the BackgroundWorker. The session was 400, but the content was not. I can understand if you've never heard about concurrency before, but that's what a 400 level warning should warn you about.. Anyway, I was hoping to hear something about the Parallel framework (PFX), but he just talked about it briefly and then he ran out of time. He knows his stuff, but the presentation was not thereafter.

For the last session I was planning to hear Ingo Rammer again, but since he was going to talk in the Auditorium I didn't want to go (too cold!!!!). So I went to an interactive session with our very own Mark Seemann from Microsoft Services Denmark. The talk was about "Test Driven Development in Practice - How does it really work", and he started by clearing out his slide, and asked people what they wanted to hear. His favorites was about UI and databases, but showed us an example of TDD with a 4 layer architecture. He asked around for much time he had spent on creating the project, where people mentioned from 10 minutes to 1 hour of work. When he presented the 40 to 60 hours of work to complete the project, the room went numb. So, I guess it shows that TDD is not an easy thing to just start off with. Mark really showed he knows about the stuff he does - hats off!