Day one of SAF was great, if short. It didn’t get started until 2PM so people could fly in that morning. The event is held @ the MS Conference Center on campus. The MSCC is pretty sterile, like most conference centers, so we bring in comfy furniture, rugs, zen gardens, fountains, plants so the rooms have a much friendlier feel to them. The only technology trappings are that the main meeting room is ringed with shared PCs and we have a ton of power strips strategically placed though mostly out of site under furniture. We also have bookshelves – the content of which is pretty funny. Mostly knick-knacks and very few books. The one closest to me has two books: Hunting Dinosaurs and Great Taste-Low Fat Holiday Cooking. Interesting choices for an architect event. Of course, we’re not expecting anyone to sit and read.

We had two keynotes yesterday: Pat Helland and David Campbell. For those following along at home, yes they presented the first two sessions @ the PDC Architecture Symposium. While the content was similar (baring changes Pat made @ 10pm Sunday night to adjust to the new PPT template), the big new addition was the launch of our new “Metropolis” metaphor. I hope to get this deck posted to the architecture center soon, but the basic idea is to draw an analogy between the way cities evolved in the late 1800′s with the advent of the railroad and the ways IT shops will evolve with the advent of the Internet. It’s a very interesting metaphor that I think we can learn a lot about where we are headed in this industry. More when we get the deck posted.

Today, we are having mostly breakout discussions. Instead of big breakout sessions, a la the PDC, we limit our discussion breakouts to around fifteen customers plus the MSFT speaker, moderator and note taker. Today, I’m moderating discussions on Envisioning the Service Oriented Enterprise and Microsoft’s Internal Approach to Enterprise Architecture. I’ll blog on those later. We also have a keynote by John Shewchuk, architect from the Indigo team. Should be quite a day.

Rumsfeld said “We will win this war” on Meet the Press today. Funny, I thought we already had.

I’ve been reading “LIES: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them—A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” by Al Franken. Very funny, except when you think about what the current administration has done to this country. Then, it’s depressing.

I just noticed that the inaugural Microsoft Architecture Update newsletter is posted online. We handed out hardcopies @ the PDC. There’s a little piece in there on our community efforts by yours truly. Thankfully, my horrific picture didn’t make it into the online version. I’m actually going to have an “official” (read: good) picture of me taken for future use at some point.

My ex-teammate Jeromy Carriere has started a blog. Or should I say he started a blog months ago but only recently started writing anything but test posts. He was part of a panel @ OOPSLA (which was happening concurrently with PDC) on app servers, which he describes in detail.

So that makes one current teammate and two ex-teammates who are blogging. (The other ex-teammate is Rick Culpepper, who left MSFT in search of less traveled pastures.) I think that number needs to go up.

It’s been over for a day, and I realize I didn’t blog that much about PDC. Of course, there are plenty who did, so I’ll just add a few thoughts.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Architecture Symposium. Sorry the logistics got so screwed up. In retrospect, I’d say the last minute decision to move us to a smaller room in order to accommodate an Avalon session repeat was a very bad one. We tried to guess what the attendance would be. You all really blew away our expectations. I guess there’s a lot of interest in architecture! I hope this means that you can expect more architecture themed content (driven by our team) at future MSFT conferences. The slides from Pat and David's talk as well as Keith's are available online. We’ll get streaming media & transcripts on the architecture as soon as possible, but not until after next week. If you liked Keith’s talk as much as I did, check out the Modeling Languages for Distributed Applications whitepaper that’s up on the VS.NET Home for the Enterprise Customer, which was launched @ PDC.

Here are a few other random thoughts:

• Favorite Quote: “If it wasn’t for blogging, I’d be very lonely. I wouldn’t know anyone here” – Werner Vogel
• I’m really glad I met Peter Provost. We had a great conversation @ the weblogger’s BOF and I ended hanging out with him several more times thru the con.
• Really sorry I didn’t get to see the opening keynote, Scott Hanselman or Band on the Runtime.
• PDC Bloggers rocks. Has the site changed, or has it always been the “Professional Developer Community Bloggers”? I met with Kevin and Drew during PDC, for obvious reasons.
• I’m not sure I get why this Longhorn Tweaking Guide advises uninstalling WinFS. The authors of the guide “wouldn’t trust WinFS to be stable enough to house my data just yet”. Personally, I wouldn’t trust Longhorn to be stable enough to house my data just yet. What’s the point of developing for Longhorn now if you’re not going to use the big three pillars: Avalon/WinFS/Indigo?

To top off the craziness of this past week, my team is having our big event – the Strategic Architects Forum – in Redmond next week. That means another week of 12 hour plus days. At least this time I get to sleep in my own bed each night. Since there are few (if any) bloggers outside of our team going to this event, I’ll be writing much more about SAF than I did about PDC.

To those who attended, thanks again for making our Architecture Symposium a raging success. Please let us know how we can continue and improve this for future conferences. You can reach me via the info on my virtual business card or you can reach me on IM @ harry@devhawk.net.