It was only the week before last, but already I feel the clarity slipping away like a dream in the morning. Ahem. It was reasonably an fascinating year, because apart from Windows Mobile 7, most of the stuff that was being talked about really exists at RTM now, which was a nice exchange from learning about stuff you force get to use in 6 month’s time.

Memes this year:

• Devices are ‘windows’ to the cloud [1]
• Virtualisation, virtualization, virtualization
• All I want for Christmas is Windows Mobile 7

Anyhow, here’s what I went to

Day 1:

• A lap around Windows Azure (a-ha, now I get it)
• Scalability Standouts: The largest in the world, and how they did it (Nicholas ‘SQLCAT’ Dritsas, huge sites and a lot of red/green switching)
• SQL Sever Hyper Cloud (why Instance Stacking is dead, and VM is king, including 5 minutes that finally clarified to me what hardware virtualisation support really means and why it’s vital)
• 10 Things you need to know to succeed with NUI (engaging futuristic navel staring)
• Pimp my app (or making a silk purse out of a pigs arse. Excellent advice on colours and fonts, bit slow on the rest)
• From Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 Minutes (a twin-screen blur of cut-and-paste madness that went way over my head)

Day 2:

• Data Warehousing with FastTrack and PDW (Nicholas Dritsas again)
• ORM Smack Down: What do you expect from your ORM? (or ‘fascinating questions left unanswered’
• BI for the Microsoft a load – Top 10 Challenges (how to get an enterprise BI reporting portal off-the-ground quickly and incrementally)
• PowerPivot: How, Why, When? (still scary)
• Advanced Windows Phone Services (GPS and Notifications on WinMo7 with Nick Randolph, not up yet)

Day 3:

• Spatial BI (binding data to SSRS Maps and Visio visualisations)
• Windows Server AppFabric: Simplifying the life of WCF and WF (I’d forgotten that Chris Hewitt gave more or less the same talk last year, but this time it made a bit more sense)
• High performance, highly scalable applications on the .Net framework (CCR and RX. Joel Pobar. ‘nuf said)

And here’s all the sessions I will be catching up on Online (as and when the videos come up):

• Philosophy of software quality
• ASP.Net MVC 2 – What’s new and cool
• Reporting Services Enhancements in SQL 2008 R2 (Greg Low)
• The Role of an Architect in an Agile team
• Smashing IO bottlenecks with solid-state storage space (Greg Linwood)
• Master Data Services (possibly)
• Solving the problems of SharePoint and SSRS integration

…and a couple from TechEd North America that looked honestly promising:

• Hyper-V and dynamic reminiscence management in depth
• Branching and Merging Practices
• CQRS (with Udi Dahan)
• Deep dive into Being Framework
• MDX Solutions from the field, for the field
• Patterns of Parallel Programming
• Pushing the limits of Windows with Mark Russinovich (the speaker’s name is in the title. Says it all really)
• By the MVVM pattern with the VS 2010 XAML designer (Rockford Lhotka)

Phew.

[1] If you reflect this cloud stuff is finally becoming the William Gibson / Ian M Banks model of pervasive cyberspace, you’d be right.

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