Tuesday (yes, I'm posting this after 4:00 AM on Wednesday), was pretty interesting.  We discovered that SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 will all be released in the first week of November!  I'm looking forward to that!

I attended Scott Hanselman's talk this morning on Code Generation.  While the presentation was pretty cool (and he's a fantastic presenter), Code Generation is kinda like ORM to me...I don't quite subscribe to the concepts.  His talk was definitely interesting and full of great details and information, but one thing he didn't touch on (probably partially due to time constraints) was how to get to a point where code gen is feasible.  It's one thing to see how it might be beneficial - and I can comprehend many instances wherein it would be useful - but getting from a point where code gen isn't part of the picture to a fully automated, code gen'd state appears to be complicated.  It requires several things:

1.  Buy-in - at some level management and the dev team need to have buy-in that such an investment is worth it in the long run
2.  Time - getting to the point where code gen is feasible will take some time...it's not something that you can crank out overnight, though it probably can be phased into the dev cycle.
3.  Understanding the tradeoffs - unless I missed something, code gen kinda locks you into a particular implementation.  It, like ORM strategies, in my mind seems to make the system more tightly coupled around a few principles established in the XSD/WSDL schemas and templates, thereby making all business objects look and act the same.  If the logic / procedures needs to change, they're going to change everywhere and you have to re-gen everything.

Maybe it's just really late (early?) and I can't think straight.  I did, despite these comments, thoroughly enjoy Scott's presentation and will try to follow up with him on some of these concepts for my own enlightenment...I know I have a lot to learn.  Maybe I just need the blinders removed.  I'm sure it has its place.

Following Scott's presentation (which happened to be one of the reasons I wanted to come to Tech-Ed in the first place), I attended a few presentations on SQLCLR (which was incredibly dull so I left) and IIS debugging.  I then had to return to the hotel to wrap up some code for a client so I didn't even get to attend the Birds of a Feather presentations :-(.  I'll try to hit them tomorrow.