Today, my colleague Jurgen Postelmans talked about "SQL Server 2005 Web Services" while Pat Helland (Microsoft), Clemens Vasters (Newtelligence) and Rafal Lukawiecki (Botticelli) played "The Nerd, The Suit & The Fortuneteller", about service-orientation, business alignment and the difficulties of communication between businesspeople and development teams. It is hard for techies and non-techies to understand each other and get aligned... Anyone who can figure out an easy, cost-efficient and sure-fire way to align both parties can make a fortune!
The last session I followed was about architecting smart clients. Pretty cool stuff, involving the Offline Application Block and the Updater Application Block, threading issues (let your UI thread handle all UI and put the resource-intensive stuff on other threads, working asynchronously), integrated security etc.
Incidentally, my buddy Gunther B, a total .Net guy from Microsoft, started blogging recently. Subscribed!
I'm off now, heading back home...
During this Tech-Ed, Microsoft announced the freely-available downloads of the Betas of a new range of Express products.
Just as Outlook Express is a "downgraded" free version of Outlook, there are now free Express Editions of Visual Basic 2005, Visual C# 2005, Visual C++ 2005, Visual J# 2005, Visual Web Dev 2005 (the "sequel" to Web Matrix) and even SQL Server 2005. Each download is less than 100 MB. You can find them on MSDN Express.