microsoft financal services tech conference 2007

spent 2 days at the conference. this is my first time going to a microsoft-centric technology conference, having spent a good 6-7 years in the java camp. here are some takeaways for me personally, in no particular order:

• although this was a financial services specific technology conference, there was not a whole lot of technology being discussed that would be terribly useful for an enterprise type of application. there was only one session covering microsoft financial services related application block (unfortunately i did not make it to this one - oops).
• ms is trying real hard to push wpf (winfx, xaml, etc). there were a couple of session focused almost exclusively on use of this technology for building thick clients.
• given the poor tooling in visual studio 2005 for xaml based development i am surprised ms is pushing this technology to financial services audience. right now, it seems the only audience for this would be software tools builders and hackers (ahhh, fond memories of mozilla XUL development on one of the past projects we did).
• apperantly microsoft HPC addition is cheap to deploy (about $400 per cpu). need to follow up on this, i have been itching to start utilizing grid computing.
• sadly, there are still plenty of people who tend to think that writing hundreds of lines of convoluted xslt is a much nicer option to QA's c# code. apperantly there is not need to qa a 50 line block of inlined/recursive called to insane string manipulation routines and just release it right into production. just because a particular technology does not need to be compiled into an EXE does not mean it has to go through a different release process. Even configuration changes should be heavily QA'd before making changes in production.