MSDN Update Comes to Auckland
I'm in Auckland tonight for the second leg of the MSDN Update tour. Melbourne and Sydney are done and went pretty well, and I've made a few modifications to the slide deck to hopefully make them more visual and interactive. WSE (or any RPC/ IPC technology) is fairly dry, and there isn't some WinForms-like demo that can capture what you are trying to talk about. Showing a screen-full of raw SOAP message headers is pretty boring stuff, and I think it would be useless to most of the audience.
I haven't been to NZ before, and its a pity that I can't spend more than 2 days here. Seeing the city and the main tourist attraction barely scratches the surface of a city, and you really need to get out into the suburbs and beyond to experience a place. My preferred tourism strategy is to get a hire care and deliberately seek out places that aren't popular with tourists. Tourism centres are designed to rip money out of you and present some pre-canned packaged experience that someone with a marketing degree has dreamed up. While this can be fun for a while, I tire of it very quickly, and there is nothing more satisfying than finding a hidden gem to visit that doesn't even rate a mention in a Lonely Planet tour guide.
Tomorrow, it's Christchurch at 11am and Wellington at 6pm.
A few shots of and from the Skytower:
