This is sort of a rushed post as I am leaving on long vacation for the first time in many years. So you will not hear from me in a month (as it it was the first time and you minded :-p)

Post-Conference

I changed my mind a couple of weeks before the conference to go to Julia Lerman's session about Entity Framework.

As I have said before I like her style a lot and she is as knowledgeable about the subject as the bests but, more importantly, she is honest about the product. She knows the weak points and investigates to find solutions. Besides I need to know. I need to know what makes it such a hated product amongst the Alt.Net crowd. And, let's face, in some clients, it would be the closest option to an ORM one could touch.

I enjoyed it a lot. She is great at communicating how it works and why it was thought like that, the reasoning that the product team revealed her. My opinion for the product? You are not going to have it here and now.

Besides I was lucky enough to win her book on the subject!! Thanks Julia!

Final Thoughts

What a conference it has been. To be honest, I think I have enjoyed it more this year than the former.

Thinking about it, I had way too great expectations for last year's and some of the names disappointed me a bit (not that they were bad, just that my foolish mind thought they were going to come down from heavenly skies riding a bolt) but this year my expectations were more down-to-earth, so that they were more than fulfilled.

I attended a lot of Silverlight sessions, which attracts me, but I am not crazy about it either. Mostly because of my fear for XAML. Not for itself but for its complexity and the roughness of tooling.

I did a lot of DDD. This one topic I am more crazy about. I try to apply as many ideas from "the movement", but the domain and the tools I am using in my day-to-day work do not lend themselves to that school of thinking.

I am looking forward to seeing Oslo grow up. I also need to invest some time on dynamic languages and recover some grammar theory knowledge from college days.

Entity Framework has a place in my schedule of technologies to play around with. But it will be when the next version is released. Then I am ready for it.

It is awesome being surrounded by so many talented and passionate people. But it makes you feel small and "un-smart". It reminds you of how long the way is ahead of you. One has two options: being brought down, or encourage oneself to become a better professional and let the people know.
I, for one, choose the later.

 

Happy holidays