Wow, I saw/did so much cool stuff today, it's hard for me to keep it all straight.

First and foremost, I ended up taking my 70-300 (Analysis and Architecture) exam early, and I passed!  I'm now a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer.  I'm rather pleased with this.  :)

I hung out with Patrick Cauldwell for an hour or so, talking about life, family, business, regional weather patterns, and food.  That guy is seriously fun to chat with, and I look forward to speaking with him again.

Speaking of dudes from Corillian, I wandered by the DevExpress booth again, where Mark Miller was again demoing the product, and I noticed Stuart Celerier hanging out.  I said, "Stuart, I know you already use CodeRush, so what are you doing here?"  His response:  "I just enjoy hearing Mark present it."  So at least I'm not the only creepy Mark Miller stalker.

Speaking of hearing Mark Miller speak, I caught two rounds of Speaker Idol today at the Virtual Tech·Ed stage.  Several of the presentations were really good, but the one that I enjoyed the most was by Steven Smith.  He demonstrated something he called micro-caching in ASP.NET.  Basically, the premise is that when you've got a data-driven page displaying real-time data, you can still use ASP.NET caching to remove the database bottleneck while still maintaining at least a semblance of real-time.  In his example, he had a page that displayed a simple bound datagrid.  He started load testing it with Application Center Test, and it had a throughput of about 150 requests per second.  Then he enabled page-level caching with a cache timeout of only 1 second, and his throughput jumped to over 600 requests per second.  That was freakin' cool. 

During my latest round of stalking Mark Miller at the DevX booth, I noticed Miguel Castro lounging around on a bean bag chair.  I learned the other day that Miguel and I have a common bond, so I started a conversation with him.  He and I actually had a lot to talk about.

Finally, I closed out the day hearing Caleb Sima give a talk on threat models impacting Ajax applications.  Most of it was pretty common knowledge to anyone who understands how Ajax works and how ASP.NET security plays into it.  The session was still great though, as Caleb is an awesome speaker with an awesome background - Pretty amazing for a dude who's only a year younger than me.