TechEd Europe 2005 DSLs and Software Factories Thoughts

TechEd Europe 2005 DSLs/Software Factories Thoughts

 

Having had time to mull over this year's TechEd (and reading Steve's post) I'm fairly pleased with how the week went.
We seemed to reach a goodly chunk of people who were interested and hadn't come across us before.

However, when you hear our story for the first time in a 75 minute session, it's a lot to absorb. We need to get the thing into more digestible chunks.

 

Question: If you found out about DSLs for the first time at TechEd (and were interested), could we have done something better to get you into our stuff even earlier? What information channels are we missing?

 

This time, we seemed to be able to converse well with current UML practitioners in a non-confrontational way.
I'd say for a lot of people we'd moved past the "Why isn't it all UML?" conversation to something more like "You've got tools, they look quite practical - can you tell me whether they'll support scenario X?".

 

Finally, and most energizing for me, there were a bunch of people whose excitement at how they could apply our stuff in their domain was palpable. These guys were bursting with ideas about the drudgery they'd remove, the time they'd save by automating aspects of the development cycle that they'd never thought of abstracting or automating before. Those conversations were quite simply a real buzz.

 

All in all, a week well spent.