Not so much sleep, some heavy breakfast and off to the second day of conference.

Windows Identity Foundation Introduction (Vittorio Bertocci)

Hesitant as I was about which session to attend after my chosen one (Ruby for .Net Developers) was dropped I decided that it would be a good idea to have some introductory information about something I know very little about: WIF.

It turned out to be a very good session and the speaker, that “Italian Hippy” (as himself described) did an awesome job infusing a good dose of well needed energy into our sleepy brains.

I learn how about yet another try to unify APIs (bye hosted membership providers) in a just-configuration-driven manner with easy to understand examples and simple code samples. Not a bad way to start the day.

Entity Framework Persistence Ignorance (Julia Lerman)

A technical conference would not be a complete technical conference if I did not attend a Julie Lerman’s session.
And, for a change, because of something that interests me. No, not EF, silly boy! PI and Microsoft’s attempts to embrace the concept.

Nice and to-the-point session, although the speaker had some issues with some of the samples (she is not C# native speaker ;-p)

I still need to do some more research and playing with EF, but my beliefs are that it is not “there” yet.

Fluent NHibernate (James Gregory)

A product I have used some time ago and saved my day. I wanted to know how well has matured from the mouth of its creator (and “benevolent dictator” as he calls himself).

Reality is, the product has improved in great wealth since I used it. The session was a very good overview except for the fact that the only code shown was in Powerpoint which made answering the questions a bit of a challenge.

Testers Are Not Your Enemy (Karianne Berg)

I had very high hopes on this one, as the subject is a situation we are dealing with in my day-to-day work. Sadly, the session did not live to my expectations.

Leaving aside that it was extremely short (around 40 minutes) there were not many “tangibles” to take away: some advices that may be revelations for some people that has very little to none exposure to agile projects, but for the practitioner sound to common sense (iterative testing, testers are part of the team); some very debatable assertions (quality is defined by the products owner); and some generalizations and clichés about developers vs. testers.

Testers are still my enemies ;-)

Making Manual Testing a Part of Your Development Process (Richard Fennell)

Since my testing-ego was not satisfied with the previous session, I attended this one in hopes of finding out the possibilities and goodness of TFS as a tool for the manual tester.

And I have to say that it turned out pretty well. There is a lot that can be done (and a lot to be improved as well) and the results are somehow impressive.
If only I could shut up those inner voices that tell me that works well for demos but it would crumble and become more of a pain than of a solution in my real world…

If I Ruled the World – C# 5 (Jon Skeet)

I am a follower (and believer) of Jon, so most of the ideas he threw at the audience were already known to me, but listening to the reasoning behind it always help.

Very nice session. I really liked the presence of some very important “MS personas” inside the C# development team listening and taking notes about the various suggestions or adding some educated reasoning as to why it cannot be the way Jon wants it to be (at least for now).

Really, really interesting. I am looking forward to seeing the video on the next session about the future of C# (which I did not attend)

5 Reasons Why DDD Project Fail (Greg Young)

I like ideas about DDD. The speaker has a lot of ideas about DDD. It seems like a perfect match.
But (and I always have to come up with one, haven’t I?), I am too traditional in terms of knowledge delivery. I am not that thrilled about “too alternative” ways to present slides. Alternative is alright, interesting at the beginning, catchy for a while… but they do not stick in my brain. My bad.

Except for that “but”, I enjoyed very much the session and I have but agree with most (if not all) of his reasoning: applying DDD to the wrong type of projects (CRUD-y), lack of isolation (mixing technical and domain concepts), poor leverage of the ubiquitous language and a missing Domain Expert (“Domain Expert Proxies” aka. “Business Analyst” do not count) are very valid reasons for a DDD project to fail.
I had my disagreements too. For example, his animadversion to DDD-lite. I give him that going all the way is way better, but, in my opinion, one can still get benefits from a subset of the practices.