Day 2 of the HDC is over and I’m back in Des Moines after two days worth of cramming my brain with a load of technical info. It was a whirlwind of material, and I’m sure half of it has already fallen out of my head; I’m just glad I took a lot of notes.

Day Two started out pretty good. Scott Guthrie graced us with his presence today with a boatload of information over the latest technologies coming out of Microsoft. His keynote this morning was over Silverlight and he did a good job with demos showing the differences between versions 1.0 and 1.1. He then spent about 2.5 hours in the afternoon covering the new features in Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”, and… I mean…. wow!…. It makes me want to dump the VS 2005 IDE by the curb – it is that tastey.

Otherwise, I sat in on one other good presentation from an IT leader at Farm Credit Services of America and her company’s leap to agility (specifically Scrum) two years ago and what they learned along the way. It seemed like very 101-level material from an agile aspect, but it offered a great testimony from a good-sized company who had successfully made the transition from a Waterfall to Agile software methodology.

Now, it is time to rest and recover…