Greetings from Madrid!

Some Final Changes ....

After last week's event in Istanbul, we had the impression that the flow of the final session ("Defining and Building Software Factories") could be improved so that we decided to change the way we deliver it.

In this session we for example show the DSL Toolkit and how it can be used to create a new visual language. We have noticed that this is a rather complicated topic because you need to convey three totally different viewpoints at the same time: the implementation viewpoint ("that's what you would have to do without a DSL"), the DSL Designer ("this is a DSL for creating DSLs. A meta-language essentially") and the resulting DSL which will at the end be used to produce code which is equivalent with the manual implementation. We normally like to show "real" demos but we decided that it isn't really helpful if we switch back-and-forth between different instances of Visual Studio while explaining the different viewpoints. We've therefore decide to create a very clean and nicely flowing illustration based purely on screenshots and diagrams. (And, yes, after the event we concluded that it really works even better when doing it this way.)

The Power Of Models

The event itself went really well. One of the two translators was extremely good and it seemed that the overal flow worked out as we envisioned it. The changes in the final session really helped to clarify the information we wanted to convey.

Interview with Marino Posadas of dotNetMania

During the day, Beat and I have been interviewed by Marino Posadas for the Spanish developer magazine dotNetMania with whom we shared some of our ideas regarding the "software factories" vision and the DSL tools. Marino has also attended one of my sessions at TechEd Europe earlier this year so that we also had the chance to dig deeper into performance, scalability and availability and the age old questions of WCF (Indigo), Remoting and ASMX migration. I really enjoyed talking with Marino and I'm looking forward to seeing the interview in print.

Going out after the event ...

There is one thing which i personally find extremely remarkable about Madrid: the subtle differences in timing the day. In Austria or Germany for example, an event like this would usually start at 9:00, have a rather short lunch from 12:00 to 12:45, and would end at 4:00 pm. Afterwards, you would head for Dinner at around 6:30p, finish at around 8:30p, maybe take another drink and close at around 10:00p or 11:00p.

Now, here in Madrid, it's very different: the event started at 10:00, the lunch break was for 1 hour and 45 minutes (and it's a lot more of a social event than it is in other places. All the great food seems to exist mainly to set the stage for discussions between all attendees.) The event then concludes at around 5:30 to 6:00p. After this, we went to an early dinner (in fact, Carlos had to convince the restaurant to open that early) at around 9:00 to 9:30p. The dinner (ohh ... just don't get me started raving about the food. It's top league. Jamon (a very special ham from hogs which are fed mainly acorn) followed by an excellent steak ... delicious. I could come back just for the food) lasts until about 12:15a. After this, we went off to a bar for a final drink (and some more food) to close the day at later than 2:00a. When we walked home at that time, we noticed that most folks on the streets just started going out for the night ... (In the UK, where Beat lives, most pubs will usually close at 11:00pm ;-))

Next stop: Reading, UK. December 9, 2005.