In some ways, the conference feels more comfortable than innovative. It's nice to see old friends and visit with new people. I got some useful small ideas, but I didn't walk away learning "the next big thing." Regrettably, attendance was down by a fair bit.

One theme at the conference was "Domain-Driven Design." This means different things to different people. One branch is the philosophy advocated by Eric Evans and others, where there's a lot of focus on aligning the way a team thinks and talks about its software. Eric offered an interesting tutorial, in the form of a reading group reading patterns from his book.

I never got a good definitions of the other interpretation, and didn't see enough of it to form a good one myself. What I saw made it appear to be a combination of domain-specific architectures and graphical 4GLs.

Some panels, demos, and talks:

• Test-Driven Development panel: People have been experimenting with shifting the level of tests and learning when to delete tests. Many in the audience said they were already doing TDD; fewer (but a still significant number) were using tools such as Ward Cunningham's fit testing framework.
• Dungeons and Patterns, and Test-Driven Development Workout - a couple tutorials I taught with Steve Metsker.
• Innovate! panel: "What are the barriers? Politics and money."
• Prevayler demo: Prevayler is a persistence layer for Java. Essentially, you do persistence via transactions that are commands. (The system can replay the commands to re-acquire the current state.) Very cute - I have to try it.
• Eclipse and the Dark Side of the Moon, Erich Gamma: a brief background and introduction of Eclipse, with a focus on the notions of plugins/extension points, and rules for working with it.
• Self, David Ungar: A look back at "essential contradictions" in language design, and how Self tries to balance them.
• Retrospectives workshop, hosted by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns. We worked on the seeds of patterns for retrospectives; I hope these will grow into something publishable soon.