Hey, that was really a motivating day (after some different days in the office).
Listening to a lot of german (and international) experts in the area of object persistence, MDA, software testing and software quality and especially talking to other developers opened up my view of what we're doing in my company a lot.
I listened to the following sessions:

• Karl Kessler from SAP did a keynote about the development tools strategy, namely Netweaver, of the company. Interesting to see that almost all of the large software companies not only try to sell their end user products but also a whole bunch of development tools based on their software ecosystem. Notable here is one part of Netweaver product family called Visual Composer which is used for MDA stuff. It seems that this one is completely SVG based, no fat java applet client side!


• Joern Eisenbiegler from CAS Software talked about practical experiences when introducing automated software tests. I share his opinion that the tools that generate the results should be as close as possible to the developer. Although with most current implementations this is an issue because they are not an ' install and use' solution. That should change over time. I would like to see more tools like checkstyle and FxCop - small tools integrated in the IDE usable as post build steps easily.


• Next presentation was about Sotograph which is one of the tools I think they don't have a real future. First this one seems to have a price of the new car at least, secondly these commercial tools are technically too closed to be able to customize and extend them for your needs.


• The session about object persistence was held by Eric Samson, one of the gurus in that area. He's working in the JDO group and has also a history in creating object databases. As an employee of the french company Xcalia he's a bit too company bound. Today these companies are trying to present themselves as persistence/mapping experts - from XML persistence/binding to O/R mapping to WebService mapping/binding. Sounds a bit like a Golden Hammer...


• Markus Voelter - a german expert in MDA and MSDS was a really refreshing. The outcome of his session was: Don't believe in buzz words, don't believe in the commercial tool makers - make your life as a software developer easier by picking the useful part and make the rest by your own in a pragmatic manner.


• A session held by peter Rudolph, PI-Data, was about integrating mobile devices into SOA application landscape using Web Services. Hey, beside other devices they used a Zaurus to demonstrate it.


• Last session was about AOP in general and AspectJ in detail. I'm still not completely convinced if this is going to be the next revolution. Again, what was left from AOP use cases was logging, security and transactions. A bit too less for a revolution...

Christoph Andriessens presented an overview about software metrics, processes and tools to measure software metrics. Furthermore he presented 3 case studies of how a consultant based software review process can help teams to improve software quality or at least to find hot spots. I personally would prefer an continuous process triggered by a team of developers themselves improving the software quality stepwise.

Was again an interesting evening, I'm now looking forward to join the Entwickler-Tag end of next week.