Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010(#tee10): my report

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After being at Microsoft TechEd Europe for the second time in Berlin,
it’s time for a report and now I can also make a comparison with my previous TechEd.

Location and organization

As cities usually don’t change a lot in one year, I didn’t spend a lot of time in the Berlin city center this year, but Berlin is still a nice city.
Messe Berlin is still huge, but Microsoft did a better job this year to point attendees in the right direction with arrows and signs all over the place. The organization was definitely great, but the goodie bag of this year was a big disappointment, compared to last year. Also the food wasn’t always what it should be.

The keynote

One advice I can give to a developer after following the TechEd keynote for the second time is: don’t go there!
About 90% of the keynote contains IT pro content. As a developer I remember only one word from this year’s keynote: the Cloud! Microsoft wants to deliver Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Sessions I followed

This year I didn’t schedule a lot of sessions in advance as I always made last minute changes to my planning.
I also didn’t write recaps of the sessions this year as anyone can view them online for free.
List of sessions I followed (mainly in the development track) with links to the online screencast:

November 9

November 10

November 11

November 12

Awards

To review the sessions I followed from a different approach, I invented awards (just to be clear: these awards are just fictions, nobody will receive some kind of price 🙂 )

Killer session award

This award rewards the session with the best overal content. This one goes to:

WEB401 – Code Like a Pro: Tips, Tricks and Techniques for Writing Killer Silverlight Applications (Jeff Prosise)
This session contains everything a good session at TechEd needs to have:

  • Really nice content: I saw some Silverlight features I never heard off.
  • Outstanding speaker: I was already convinced from Jeff Prosise’s speaker skills last year and this year he did another great job!

Go home session award

This award points to the most boring or annoying session I attended:

ARC303 – Architecting Claims-Aware Applications (with the Windows Identity Foundation and Active Directory Federation Services) (Dominick Baier)
I just found this session very boring. Maybe this is due to my lack of knowledge of WIF, but I also have my doubts about Dominick Baier’s speaker skills.

Fun session award

This one is for the session with the most pleasant content or most funny speaker:

WEB201 – Nine Things I Hate About your website (Pete LePage)
Pete LePage must have a great job at Microsoft, looking for the most ugly and inefficient websites on the internet. Laughing with another one’s crappy website: I must admit it was fun!

Murphy session award

We all know Murphy’s law, so this award is for the session where a lot of things went wrong:

ASI201-LNC – Windows Workflow Foundation Futures (Ron Jacobs)
A lot of things went wrong in this session:

  • Ron Jacobs got lost in Messe Berlin, which caused this session to start 5 minutes to late
  • When connecting to his remote desktop machine in Redmond, the internet connection just seemed way to slow!
  • Some demos from PDC couldn’t be showed, because they were already working with a new build of WF.
  • A lot of ugly messages popped up when opening new examples of Windows Workflow Foundation

Belgian session award

As there is a little chauvinism left in me, I must have an award for the best Belgian session at TechEd:

WEB311 – What You, as an ASP.NET Developer, Need to Know About jQuery (Gill Cleeren)
This one was easy of course, because I only went to 1 Belgian session at TechEd (I don’t know if there were others?) I must say this was definitely a really interesting session if you want to have some basic knowledge about jQuery. There are not a lot of speakers who have filled their rooms completely at TechEd and did their session for a second time!