VS Live

Healthwise is
a great place to work.  Our team is lucky enough that all developers (10
people) are being allowed to attend VS Live in Vegas next week.  This should
be a major learning opportunity for our group and should allow us to get the same
level of technical awareness across the board.

I am hoping that when we leave VS Live next week, our team will answer at least
the following:

• Will we subscribe to the Team System model of development tools?  We are poised
  to make some significant changes to our development practices in the next year
  and we need to choose a platform to move forward on.
• How will we incorporate TDD via Whidbey?  Will we still need a third party framework
  for this?
• Will we stop using our current issue management system in lieu of Team System?
• Is the source control system in Team System a valid option for us, especially regarding
  remote developers?
• Can we actually use the Architect features to model our data center and write software
  to match the model?
• What is the road map for MSDN?  Is there a published pricing model?  If
  we don’t choose to use Team System, what does that mean to our licensing model?
• What does Indigo mean right now?  What will it do to/for us in the next year? 
  Should we begin planning to deploy a service level into our IDC based on Indigo technologies?
• Everyone on the team should understand how to write a basic web app in Whidbey. 
  We should also be comfortable with the debugging model so that we can make decisions
  about what OS configuration to run on our development platforms.  For instance,
  do we even need IIS anymore?
• How should we structure our build environment for Whidbey projects?  What is
  the right way to use MS Build?
• What will smart client deployment in the enterprise look like by this time next
  year?  Is click once the right option for us?
• What are the best practice suggestions for how to couple Whidbey to Yukon?  Is
  the data access model really all that different?
• Should we use the features of Whidbey to build out a client portal, or just go build
  one out on DNN because Whidbey is too far away and it would be too much work anyway?
• Does XAML matter? 
• How can we write more scalable web apps with cleaner session state management?
• What parts of the 2.0 framework are still in flux and what parts can we depend on
  from now on?
• How should we design a single-sign-on solution for our entire suite of web applications?
• What are best practices for sharing components in enterprise development scenarios
  with Enterprise Libraries?
• How should they be managed
• What are we doing wrong today?