A few weeks ago, I was invited by my colleague from Microsoft Poland to speak at their main event, Microsoft Technology Summit 2006.
This is the biggest event (so I was told) in Western Europe with 2000 attendees inside the most characteristic building in Warsaw, the palace of nature and science. The palace is a gift that was given to the Poles from the Russians. It is interesting to see that in the past, nations donated buildings and statues to their allies -> for example, the statue of liberty donated by the French to the US.
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The interesting thing for us about the event was that it was the first time me and my colleagues really decend to the Subsidiary. It means that the whole architects track was driven by the architect advisors from EMEA region (EMEA HQ, Belgium, Austria, Czech and Israel).
The result was that the architects track got the highest score in the entire event !
The name I chose for my session was "Architecting the Martix with Software Factories". Feel free to download it from here.
Software Factories are one of the most important trends in software today. It talks about adding more reuse into the cycle. Instead of building from scratch or inventing the wheel, we should compose the project from a set of reusable assets (= the software factory). The topics I drilled down into were Visual Studio Team Architect 2005, Domain Specific Language Toolkit (recently announced) and Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT). All these technologies help you build reusable assets using model driven development and wizard driven development techniques.
The Matrix was the theme of the presentation with demos that put us in the shoes of the Matrix architects. We built the Matrix architecture, added agents to an application designer, generated classes from models, built DSLs related to the movie and even used the wizard framework of GAT to automate generation of classes representing the Matrix entities.
The visit to Poland was not only about summits and events. I also had a bit of time to take a fast train to Krakow which is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. First of all, the population of the city includes many students, so you can feel the party atmosphere in every corner. Second, the city was left intact by the Germans when the Russians came at the end of the second World War (as opposed to Warsaw which was destroyed and rebuilt later). This is why most of the impressive palaces, castles, churches are still there.
After arriving at the hotel, I walked around the florian gate, the old market square (amazing !!!), the Wawel Hill Royal Castle and Cathedral and the former Jewish District which is actually one of the nightlife centers in Krakow. At morning, I woke up real early and went to the Wieliczka Salt Mines. The salt mines tour is a two-hour tour 150 meters underground to see the caves that remained from 900 years of work. The most impressive site there is the church cave that is an entire church whose walls are the carved cave walls with chandeliers from the cave ceiling – AMAZING!!!! I didn't understand a thing that the guide talked about because it was in Polish, but I couldn't afford to wait for the English tour and lose the next site, Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the place where almost everyone from Israel goes to when visiting Poland. We learn about it, but the heartbeats when walking there and imagining the horrors that happened there really left their impression on me.