We just got to this morning’s AJAX talk in time… however not in time to be able to fit into the room.

Nice.

There’s a two parter all this afternoon that we are hoping to get into.

We went to the Jolt Awards Ceremony tonight. The Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award was awarded to Bruce Schneier (Mr. Cryptography).

The Jolt Awards themselves had high points and low points. On the high side, I’m overjoyed that “Agile Web Development with Rails” won the Jolt for Technical Book.. a rare and dignified honor indeed Congrats guys! Not only that, but Rails won the Jolt in the Web Development Tool category. Kudos to DHH and 37 Signals.

Another high point was that Clover by Cenqua won a Productivity Award in the Testing Tool category.. Way to go, guys! Great folks, great company, great tools. I had the pleasure of meeting in person & chatting with Peter & Brandon tonight after the awards.

The low side, Microsoft won several Jolts for Database Engine (SQL Server 2005), Development Environment (Visual Studio Team System 2005), and Libraries, Frameworks, and Components (.NET Framework 2.0). To add insult to injury Visual Studio was awarded this year’s Hall of Fame entry. I hope this doesn’t mean that the SD Conferences are becoming M$-suckupathons.

One more thing.. for those that don’t know yet… Dr. Dobbs is absorbing SD Magazine. A New & Improved Dr. Dobbs will be on the stands soon.

I did my Intro to jUnit4 talk this morning. It went well with good discussion and a couple dozen people.

If you’re using Java 5 go get jUnit 4.. it’s cool.

I spent the first half of this morning listening to Alistair speaking about Agile Software Development and the Cooperative Game. Very interesting.. and my first time hearing Alistair speak.. a true showman.. it was very enjoyable.