After a long (and troubled) flight from Dublin, I finally arrived to Orlando last night, ready to participate to Tech-Ed FL. Cool eh? InnerWorkings is also involved as exhibitor, which means that I get to talk to lots of developers whenever I get a chance to hang around the booth. I am now towards the end of the first day and I’m just wrapping up before going to Sea World tonight for some party (eh eh, are you jealous?…well you should!).

How has been the day so far? Well I’m pretty sure that you already got the few announcements that Steve Ballmer made this morning in his keynote. The speech was centered on Microsoft helping developers and IT pros to work together, to connect people and information independently from their location. So we’ve been tortured with a list of Microsoft products and marketing info…Bah, and I haven’t slept in 24 hours “to be part of this”? Maybe I was sleeping too much, but it looks to me that the only announcement of “some” interest to developers was the Visual Studio Tools for Office support for Outlook add-ins. In reality it’s my fault, I’m just not a fan of keynotes… actually, I hate keynotes. I especially hate them when they are very product centric, regardless on who the speaker is.

Afterwards, I went to the Architecture Certification Chalk Talk which turned out to be a very instructive Q&A session about the upcoming program that aims at creating an elite group of highly regarded professionals. Our group was very small, there were no more than 10 of us asking questions. Gregor Hohpe was among us. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to talk to him as he had to run away. Lately, I have been discussing the finer details of a particular messaging pattern with a collegue of mine, and I hoped that Gregor could clear some our doubts. Sorry Jeno, I will try to talk to him later this week!

I also went to the “Building and Using a Software Factory” session. This is something that is definitely in my radar as currently we have about 400 solutions at InnerWorkings and we would certainly provide a good platform for automation.

Oops, it’s getting late… I must go to the party!!