P & P Summit Day 1

Today was long but good. They kept getting behind so we had lunches and breaks in the room while someone spoke. The speakers were good thank god.

The key note was Tommy Morris who talked about an army field medical application that was pretty cool. They use IPAQ's and specially made sandisk SD cards with reinforced cases so they can't be bent and special connections so salt water does not affect them. When someone is hurt in the field a medic comes along with his IPAQ, gets the SD Card that is around the soldiers neck like a dog tag and puts it in the IPAQ. Immediately the application opens with that soldier and all their medical information. The Medic can add information about what happened to him or her and it's saved on the IPAQ and written to the card to it goes with the Soldier. Also apparently they used to carry 20 lbs of field manuals with them. Now all that information is on the IPAQ, and accessible via context sensitive help. There was lots more to this presentation but that was the cool part for me. :)

I particularly liked Jim Newkirk's presentation on Test Driven Development. Nothing new here but a good presentation all the same.

Ron Jacobs spoke for the next two sessions. I could listen to him speak all day. He filled in all the SOA holes for me. I've heard the presentations before but he has done the best job of making it clear to date. EDRA is the new name for ShadowFax. Enterprise Development Reference Architecture contains a framework, four quick starts, an application template, documentation and a sample application The Global Bank. If you are about to build a distributed application in .Net this is likely worth looking at.

Chris Kinsman did a presentation on security. Not one of my favorite subjects, not unlike most developers. But he did a good job and made it less frightening. There were some good practical ideas that have come out of MS that help you design a secure application. Too much to blog here tonight.

Tomorrow is another day.