Jeroen’s weblog

It’s been an excellent week at TechEd Europe! I know it’s been over for two days but I just now found some time to write about it. I’ve visited lots of sessions, mostly the ones about SOA since that was my focus this year, to get a good idea of what the concepts are before I dive in and start to think about how to apply it (my experience is that if you do it the other way around you end up mapping what everybody says onto your original (and probably wrong) ideas about the stuff and incorrectly believe that you already knew what it was all about).

The coolest thing however were the sessions on the upcoming Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Tools that Microsoft is working on. These are a suite of tools that let you define a domain model, define and relate shapes to the concepts in it and provide templates to do code generation based upon it. This looks like it could be a very interesting tool as I believe that code generation is something that should be leveraged much more in the developer community. The opportunity to make your own along with a visual modeling tool is just too tempting to pass up, so I’ll be playing with the CTPs and probably post on my experiences in that area.

So TechEd was great, also because I got to hang out with some interesting people, including my good friend Frans Bouma who’s always up for a technical discussion. It’s amazing how much you can learn about stuff just by having a discussion about it with people that have good insights on the issues.