When we left off, Ron had finished his Phil Donahue bit and we were heading into the real talks. Ron went first by himself and introduced all of the concepts and terminology around Service Orientation. After Ron, Arvidra and Beat presented some of their learnings around SO from MS EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). They've done some really cool work and it was cool to see it.
During all of that I was tweaking the code for my demo. I don't know about you, but I just can't leave well enough alone.
After Beat and Vin finished, we broke for lunch. We had run a little long, so we only gave them 55 minutes to grab food and get back. No worries, though, that should be plenty of time.
And then... with 10 minutes to go in the break, there is a loud POP.
And the lights went out.
There were some emergency lights on, so the room was dimly lit. But everything else was down.
The tech guy came over and said, "Hey... umm... we were kinda expecting that. The other half of the building has been down for 10 minutes already."
"Oh shit," I said.
"We don't know when it will be back up. Sorry. I'll let you know when I have more information."
Ron still wasn't back from lunch, so Don Smith and I stood up on the stage and yelled, "Hey everyone. I need your attention. As you can see the power is out and apparently is is the whole local neighborhood. Ummm. We'll give you more information soon."
Most people laughed a bit. From the stage it was kinda cool looking. About 50% of the people had their laptops open (even though the wireless was down) with the glow of the screen on their face. Cool looking.
Ten minutes later, Ron showed up to continue the talk and realized the pickle we were in. After a brief chat we decided to do an impromptu panel discussion. People yelled out questions about SOA, XSD, Contract-first development, etc. and we all stood up on stage, in the dark, and tried to answer them.
It was weird, but strangely, it was fun.
After about an hour, the power came back on and we got back to work.
Next up was Don Smith and Beat Schwegler who talked about some really cool automation that they're doing to enable Contract First service development in VS using GAT. Very very cool. I don't think we (p&p) are shipping it yet, but people liked it. (If you think we should ship it, drop an email to Don at don dot smith at microsoft dot com and let him know.)
After Don and Beat finished, Ron Jacobs and I got up and talked about CAB.
"What is the Smart Client guy doing at an SOA talk?" I hear you asking.
Well, consider this: In an enterprise one of the best ways to enable the consumption of lots of different services is to provide ready-to-go UI modules that people can plug into their apps with ease. And that's what CAB is all about. So why not?
I showed the newest bits of CAB and people who had already been playing with CAB were excited to see some of the changes we've been working on. After we finished about a dozen people came up to ask questions and chat. It was great. I was glad to have the opportunity to talk to people about it and to get their reaction to what we're doing. Very cool.
We finished with some excellent material from one of our customers (sorry--I forgot his name) who has actually implemented SOA and ESB within their org. The whole experience was great and I'm really looking forward to the rest of the week.
Assuming the power stays on. 
