I had a early start this morning, leaving Canberra at 4:30am in the vain hope of making it to the keynote address at TechEd in Sydney this year. My perfect plan was foiled by traffic on the M5 making me get to the conference at 9:30 rather than the intended 8:30.

After checking in, I headed over to my first two sessions. Introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation: Introduction, both of which were presented by Payam Shodjai. These were fantastic sessions and gave a great overview (including several code demos) of these up and coming releases.

Intro to .Net 3.0 (now called NetFX3) covered CardSpace, WCF, WF and WPF. This session gave great coverage of NetFX for all types of people (managers, developers etc). CardSpace I am finding really interesting because it should (over time), change the way we authenticate with many web sites which will provide a much more secure and user friendly internet. The explanation of WCF and its demos was a good opportunity for me to see how other presenters are showing off WCF. My WCF session will cover some of the same points, but my implementation is quite different. The thing that really hit home for me was the easy way to create a WF application with its designer and how you can step though a debug session in the designer. Very cool! Lastly, but certainly not least is WPF which I am excited about. I hope that WPF will bring about a UI revolution to the desktop application like browser rendering has done with internet applications.

Intro to WCF was an extended version of Intro to .Net 3.0 which went into a lot more detail and explanation. I am looking forward to Payam’s WCF security session tomorrow.

I would post some photos, but I don’t have any. I keep forgetting to bring my camera in. Maybe later…