Third day at TechEd

Once again, I attended some very interesting talks at TechEd. This mornings sessions was entitled “The daily Scrum”, about doing Scrum and agile development. This was mostly a Q&A session with answers to many of the practical problems one might encounter when trying to be agile.

Next, I had a real hard time deciding between staying on the agile track and attending the “Tools and Agile Teams” talk versus hearing Don Syme speak about F#. I chose the F# session, which I think was a good choice. Don is one of the primary architects behind F#, so it would have been a shame not to hear him speak about it. This talk really drove home some points about F#, and why it helps you do parallel programming, with immutability, the async language construct and Agents. Another good point is that F# should not be used for anything, and in a large application, Don suggested that only a small DLL might be written in F# - it should be used as a tool, where you needed. Don also showed some really impressing demos, using Direct3D from F#.

After lunch, I attended Roy Osherove’s talk about unit testing. His main points where to write maintainable, consistent and readable unit tests, and proceeded to show this can be done. He suggested using test reviews in order to get started writing good unit tests, which I think is a very good idea. Very insightful talk.

The last session of today was about cloud computing: “ Deep Dive into Developing Line-of-Business Applications Running in the Cloud ”. I don’t think this was a good session. There was too much demoing of an app in the cloud, and too little talk about the actual architecture behind it. Also, the presenters neglected to do any introduction to the Azure tools, I guess they expected everyone attending to know about those in advance.