Live from OOPSLA 2006

This is the third day of my OOPLSA/GPCE 2006 experience. This year, OOPSLA takes place in the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.
I spent half of the time talking to other people such as Rob van den Berg, Arno Zimmermann, Eric Mejier, Jimmy Nilsson, Neil Harrison, Peter Sommerlad, Doug Schmidt, Arno Haase, Markus Völter. Conferences are an ideal place for meeting other interesting people.
Yesterday, I attended a tutorial by Arno Haase and Markus Völter on Domain Specific Languages and Model-Based Development. As tool chain they used OpenArchitectureWare and Eclipse. As an running example Arno and Markus illustrated the domain of state machines. The tutorial was absolutely entertaining. Now, I know about all of the important buzzwords. Just kidding :-) Indeed, the main benefit of the tutorial was its pragmatic approach. Funny to see Markus torturing Eclipse to get the most out of it.
Today, I planned to see Niclas Nilsson in his tutorial how to write code generators. Unfortunately, the tutorial was already crowded with people. Tutorial speakers like me can attend other tutorials free of charge if there are some seats left. And that can be a challenge. As an alternative, I intended to participate in a tutorial on programming the Sun SPOTS robots. Guess, what? Thus, I eventually attended a tutorial by Jeff Garland and Richard Anthony, both experienced practitioners for building large scale systems. They talked about building solid distributed enterprise software architectures. In details, they focused how UML and architectural principles can help for this purpose. It was the intent of the tutorial to illustrate how to effectively use UML and architectural principles to design and document an architecture. I missed a little bit the architecture principles aspect. All in all, I can recommend the tutorial.
This evening, I will meet Eric Evans and Jimmy Nilsson for dinner. Before, there will be the Welcome Reception, the first event in a series of social events.