I just finished my assessment of our CSI track at Tech Ed, and the work done by everyone payed off!  Kudos to all of the speakers and staff for pulling through. I wish that I could have been there to educate and learn with you.

Tell me if you think otherwise, but I believe the format for the track went over quite successfully.  I am bummed that I didn't have an opportunity to get first hand feedback.  I have received email from a few of you saying thank you etc.  If you have any other feedback, let us know.

These are some of my take aways:

  • You get Web services and don't need to learn the basics any more.  You like the idea of learning incrementally about Web services through other solutions oriented talks.  Web services are a core part of your toolkit 
  • You want to focus on the APIs in Whidbey that make your life better and easier and you want to learn about the next generation APIs provided by Indigo
  • Don Box continues to inspire you and his talk on MetaData was a piece of art
  • WSE 3.0 simplifies your life - Thank you for giving us MTOM, where is reliable messaging!
  • BizTalk is compelling and it makes no sense to build your own workflow and business process solutions

Yumay pointed me to the following article by Roger Sessions this morning.  It is nice to see folks recognizing the power of our tooling and simplicity in our guidance for building Connected Systems.

So What's Next?  I have been asking myself this for the past half year.  We have a powerful next generation infrastructure coming down the pipe, we have powerful business process integration story, ... what about systems management?  Well, we actually have a good story, but it seems as if a lot of people in the Connected Systems world don't know about it.  Prior to Tech Ed, I spoke with Fred Chong who is working on best practices in this space.  I also spoke with our Windows Server team.  All of this led to my acceptance of a job on the Window Server team.  So, I am off to learn a new audience, gather new requirements, and help drive our success in the world of systems management.

Wish me luck...