It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

Last week was DevWeek 2006 and I attended and gave a couple of sessions. I had a really good time and enjoyed all the sessions that I attended although I spent as much time hanging around the conference as I did in sessions.

I enjoyed Dave Wheeler’s keynote talk as it resonated a lot with me with its themes around how the WPF presents a greatly improved experience and platform for building applications over what people are trying to do with AJAX (I hope I’m paraphrasing Dave’s talk ok there).

The second keynote was (for me) a bigger highlight. Tim Ewald delivered a great talk on the “state of play” in the web services world and it was really captivating. I’d heard a lot of rumour around the conference that Tim was going to be a bit negative about the Windows Communication Foundation but, in the end, I thought he presented a completely rational view as to what was going on and there was nothing in there that struck me as out of the ordinary.

I also saw Christian Weyer’s talk on software factories and got introduced to the Guidance Automation Toolkit and some work that Christian’s been doing around Domain Specific Languages. Christian’s always bursting with energy and did a great session.

Finally, the talk of the week for me was Mike Pelton’s talk around the range of possibilities that the Windows Presentation Foundation enables versus what can be done with DirectX.

Why was Mike’s talk the best? He had the coolest demos on the planet but then the subject matter was a big help in that area :-)