Day 3 was the best day overall, so far.  I started with Dan Wahlin's "Migrating from Web Services to SOAs".  He focused on the fact that SOA is an architecture strategy rather than a tool.  I think a lot of people equate SOA to Web Services, and that is a limited point of view.  WS may be the best way to implement SOA today, but we need to think of it like that -- just an implementation.  The more I consider SOA, the more I appreciate the need to look at this as an option for many enterprise solutions.  Like any other technology getting a lot of focus, though, I'm afraid that many people will try mapping everything to SOA solutions, and that would be a mistake.  I'll write about this more in the future.  Anyway, Dan had a lot to cover, and 75 minutes just doesn't cover it.

Next was Juval Lowe's "Programming Windows Comminucation Foundation - A Developer's Primer", which help define the latest generation of WS, remoting, etc., building upon Dan's talk.  Juval is one of the official "legends", and again he proved why.  He has a knack for clearly explaining complex topics, transcending any issues some people may have understanding him through his accent.  Each time he was on .NET Rocks!, I started out afraid he would be talking above my head, but each time I came away with a definite understanding of the topics he discussed.  I had the same experience with his articles.  My co-worker recommended taking a seminar of his for the past year, and ironically he paged me for help on a production issue exactly at this time.  I'll never let him live this down ;).

Next up was another legend, Dan Appleman, for "Tracing and Logging in .NET."  Wow -- I cannot believe I never made use of this stuff before.  My head is spinning with all the things we could have done on our last project.  This must get in next version.  But this is definitely one of those technologies you have to play with after the seminar to get a grasp on all the options (and idiosyncrities).  I highly recommend looking at the tracing technology in 2.0.

In a day of legends, Kathleen Dollard was next with "Improve Your .NET and Visual Studio 2005 Debugging Skills."  She clarified at the top of the session that this is not an advanced topic, and that a lot of it was teaching us how to think, instead of using the tools.  But it remained a standing-room-only session.  Kathleen rocks!  She goes 100 mph, and is very intense.  She pointed out several non-obvious tools.  Especially helpful was the Exceptions dialog available from the Debug menu.  I'm looking forward to seeing her on .NET Rocks! live, tomorrow.

Finally, there was the whacked-out Mark Miller and his "Extending Visual Studio" session, where he was showing off how you can easily add plug-ins to VS through his company's free tool, which name escapes me for the moment.  I'll post it as soon as I find it.  Within the last 20 minutes of the session, he added a drop-down in the code editor for displaying graphics in comments.  Between his hyperactive coding, and the use of his amazing CodeRush tool, you had to focus 100%, otherwise you'd miss it.  He'll make the code available for anyone who wants to play around with it.  Very cool stuff!