Today started out pretty much like yesterday. I did my typical thing of staying up just a tad too late thanks to DOTA 2 and my terrible addiction to watching the Discovery Channel if its on the hotel TV (you should’ve seen the gold dredging showdown I watched, it was incredible television) meant I wasn’t at 100% when I got up but the smorgasbord of breakfast stuffs and coffee are a powerful motivator. Also it seems the combination of some good old fashioned delayed onset muscle soreness coupled with what I think is a mild cold has left me in less than stellar shape. Still I made it to all the sessions I planned to today and some of them really impressed me, not least of which was PowerShell V3.0
I won’t go into terrible detail about it here as my post tomorrow on LifeHacker will give a better rundown of the features but suffice to say I’m excited to use it. It might be a long time before I get to see any of it in production (my current project is only just getting onto Windows 7) but I’ll probably be playing around with it at home as there’s an awful lot of good stuff in there that I could make use of. I’m probably going to have to sweet talk my way into a TechNet/MSDN subscription though as I don’t have access to one at the moment (nudge nudge wink wink Microsoft).
I was also very impressed by the number of value add services available from Microsoft for any kind of application. Long time readers will know of the pains I had back when I thought that I was only 2 steps away from being the next Internet success story and it seems I’m not alone if Microsoft has put this much effort into giving us plebs some amazing things for free. I’ve actually got an application in the pipeline that I’ve been working on casually for the past couple weeks and I think it’s going to be a good candidate to try some of these services out and hopefully actually launch it instead of procrastinating endlessly.
There was one particular session I was rather disappointed in (Building Cross Device Mobile Applications Powered By SQL Azure Federations if you were wondering) as the name lead me to believe there’d be a heavy focus on the challenges of cross platform development. It wasn’t unfortunately as the majority of the session was dedicated to the back end infrastructure with the cross platform part of it amounting to little more than “We used MonoTouch”. That’s cool and all but it’s nothing I didn’t learn a year ago after an hour or so of Googling the different options. I can understand that they can’t really spend the majority of their time here spruiking another company’s product but that doesn’t stop me from feeling somewhat disappointed.
Tomorrow’s my last day here and thankfully it’ll be a relatively tame affair as my current condition coupled with the potential shenanigans that I might get up to at the Hype party that’s currently raging near me could leave me as an incoherent mess. I’ll power on though because I’m crazy like that and it’d be a right shame to let an opportunity like this go to waste because I wasn’t feeling perfect on the day.
