"We'll make a foodie out of you yet"
So says, nekochef. Maybe not.... But, mmmmm.... I did manage to start to appreciate his love for food, in particular, beef.
A bunch of us went out to a place called Daniel's Broiler in Bellevue. The organizer for the workshop at Microsoft had recommended it as an excellent place to go to eat. He suggested the price was around $20/entree, but really you're talking $30-50. If you want chicken, you can get in the low 20s. Anyway, so it was a little more upscale and pricier than some of us expected, but damn.... every penny was worth it. You're on the 21st floor of building providing an good view of the city and Lake Washington. Service was top notch. Most importantly the meat was seared to perfection. I felt a food-gasm coming on. My tummy and tastebuds were quite happy with the results. I also had a yummy lobster brisque.... I better stop. Getting hungry just thinking about it again. Apparently there were atleast two or three other groups from Microsoft there tonight too. Seems to be a popular place to take clients and visitors... too bad ours was not on them!
In general they have taken pretty good care of us. Fully catered breakfast, lunch and dinner the first night. Breakfast and lunch the other days. We got credit at the company store to purchase software/hardware and other items at significant discounts. It made me wish I had held off on a few game purchases.... Ah, well... I still managed to get some good deals and walk away happy (although close to $200 poorer). Played a bit of xbox the first evening. I kicked some ass in Halo 2. Only one guy who was playing gave me hell and he's been playing since Halo 2 was in the company's internal beta. I can't complain. :)
The workshop itself has been somewhat disappointing. It really hasn't addressed the real pain spots for migrating from J2EE to .NET. It is one thing to show some automated tools and talk about how to map features from one to the other. Yet so much wasn't covered. Architectural/design considerations. What to do if there's not a good 1-to-1 mapping. For example, there's no similar concept to CMP based Entity Beans. I was a bit disappointed in a suggestion that as an easy alternative for migrating CMP beans over to .NET was to use DataSets. Uh.... DataSets are nice and all, but they're not a solution to all one's data/persistence/disconnected access woes. In Microsoft's defense, they didn't create the material. The organizer of the presentation who works for Microsoft and has done these talks himself to real clients has been feeding us some juicier material offline. (It makes me wonder why he wasn't presenting!) Well, tomorrow we get to have at their product migration teams which should be far more interesting.... I really do not want to hear about the JLCA any further.
Friday evening I get to meetup with an old friend who moved out here years ago.... so that should help round at the trip. The weekend will likely not be too exciting. I really need to prep for class next week. On the other hand, I would like to take a moment to see the surrounding area or maybe even check out the scene here. Damn work getting in the way.
Overall, been a good trip so far...
A bunch of us went out to a place called Daniel's Broiler in Bellevue. The organizer for the workshop at Microsoft had recommended it as an excellent place to go to eat. He suggested the price was around $20/entree, but really you're talking $30-50. If you want chicken, you can get in the low 20s. Anyway, so it was a little more upscale and pricier than some of us expected, but damn.... every penny was worth it. You're on the 21st floor of building providing an good view of the city and Lake Washington. Service was top notch. Most importantly the meat was seared to perfection. I felt a food-gasm coming on. My tummy and tastebuds were quite happy with the results. I also had a yummy lobster brisque.... I better stop. Getting hungry just thinking about it again. Apparently there were atleast two or three other groups from Microsoft there tonight too. Seems to be a popular place to take clients and visitors... too bad ours was not on them!
In general they have taken pretty good care of us. Fully catered breakfast, lunch and dinner the first night. Breakfast and lunch the other days. We got credit at the company store to purchase software/hardware and other items at significant discounts. It made me wish I had held off on a few game purchases.... Ah, well... I still managed to get some good deals and walk away happy (although close to $200 poorer). Played a bit of xbox the first evening. I kicked some ass in Halo 2. Only one guy who was playing gave me hell and he's been playing since Halo 2 was in the company's internal beta. I can't complain. :)
The workshop itself has been somewhat disappointing. It really hasn't addressed the real pain spots for migrating from J2EE to .NET. It is one thing to show some automated tools and talk about how to map features from one to the other. Yet so much wasn't covered. Architectural/design considerations. What to do if there's not a good 1-to-1 mapping. For example, there's no similar concept to CMP based Entity Beans. I was a bit disappointed in a suggestion that as an easy alternative for migrating CMP beans over to .NET was to use DataSets. Uh.... DataSets are nice and all, but they're not a solution to all one's data/persistence/disconnected access woes. In Microsoft's defense, they didn't create the material. The organizer of the presentation who works for Microsoft and has done these talks himself to real clients has been feeding us some juicier material offline. (It makes me wonder why he wasn't presenting!) Well, tomorrow we get to have at their product migration teams which should be far more interesting.... I really do not want to hear about the JLCA any further.
Friday evening I get to meetup with an old friend who moved out here years ago.... so that should help round at the trip. The weekend will likely not be too exciting. I really need to prep for class next week. On the other hand, I would like to take a moment to see the surrounding area or maybe even check out the scene here. Damn work getting in the way.
Overall, been a good trip so far...