Teched 09: my report

After being for the first time at a Micrsoft TechEd event, I’m home again and it is time for some kind of report.

Brandenburger Tor

“Ich bin ein Berliner”

It must be one of the biggest cities in Europe and I must say I was impressed.
I have tried to visit a lot of things during my week in Berlin, but I didn’t manage to view them all.
Being there at the festival of the fall of the Berlin wall was really exciting, although my expectations for the celebrations were bigger.
Although it was raining a lot I was happy to be there. Apart from this celebrations, Berlin just looks like an American city:
big avenues with large buildings and trees on both sides. Saying that you can only find some bratwurst there is definitely wrong,
because I saw more sushi and other exotic food then the typical German food. Berlin is a world city!

The 5 most important technologies for developers if you asked me

Some topics appear more in sessions than others, indicating the importance for Microsoft:

  1. Silverlight:This is definitely the most important TechEd topic, covering a lot of sessions,
    it is clear that Microsoft invests a lot in Silverlight and we haven’t seen the end of the possibilities in this technology.
    (Unfortunately no announcements on Silverlight 4)
  2. Visual Studio Team System 2010: When Team Foundation Server 2008 was to expensive for a lot of companies,
    Microsoft will now deliver their Team Foundation Server 2010 directly in Team System 2010 for only $500.
    Team System 2010 will be a lot more than just a source control tool, also project management and agile development will be integrated well in the new environment.
  3. Sharepoint 2010: Although I didn’t attend sessions on Sharepoint, this technology just seems to be integrated into a whole bunch of systems.
    I think Sharepoint will definitely increase its popularity.
  4. Agile development:  VS Team System 2010 now better supports agile development, a lot of companies may finally put a step into this development technique.
  5. ASP.NET (MVC): Not only Silverlight, but also ASP.NET stays important for Microsoft. The line between “regular” ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC seems thinner.

My speaker top 5

  1. Jeff Prosise: Nobody can show Silverlight features like he does 🙂
  2. Donald Farmer: The BI-guy from Microsoft is just too funny.
  3. Stephen Walther: His ASP.NET talks were really clear and interesting.
  4. Tim Heuer: Another Silverlight guy, really interesting talks!
  5. Shawn Wildermuth: It must be said, I’ve seen a lot of Silverlight talks, but the sessions from Shawn were fun.

My session top 5

  1. The New Dynamics of Business Intelligence: bringing boring BI stuff like this, I think not a lot of people can do it.
  2. Tips and Tricks for Building High Performance Web Applications and Sites: really interesting session on general performance of websites.
  3. Can You Keep a Secret? The Biggest Little-Known Features in Microsoft Silverlight: a lot of interesting features I’ve never heard of.
  4. What’s New in Microsoft ASP.NET Model-View-Controller: clear explanation of the new features in MVC.
  5. The Windows Azure Platform: When and Why to use it? :  just a general approach to Windows Azure.

Session recaps (not all session recaps are complete)

Pros

  • The organization of the event was pretty good, I have never had the feeling that more than 7000 people  were gathered there.
  • Some really great sessions and ditto speakers.
  • Nice exhibition rooms for never getting bored in between the sessions (grabbed some gadgets and t-shirts)
  • Networking possibilities were great, with special thanks to Microsoft Belgium for their community drink.
  • Berlin rules!

Cons

  • I missed some candy for developers: no big new technologies were released (they seem to have PDC for that)
  • To much focus on IT pros: the keynote, a lot of the exhibition booths and more than half of the sessions were for IT pros.
    Maybe Microsoft should consider separate events again next year?

Pictures