TechEd Developers 2007: Round up

TechEd Developers is over. I wasn’t very good at real-time blogging (it’s difficult on a mobile) so I thought I would summarise it in a single post. 

Major Announcements

Visual Studio 2008 is being released by the end of the month.  Rumours are that it will in-fact be the 15th of this month.

SQL Server 2008 CTP 5 – Should be due out this month, but I would expect one or two weeks.

Sync Framework – Microsoft have released a sync framework for allowing applications to work effectively in an offline fashion.

ASP.net MVC – The ASP.net MVC framework will be out in three weeks (22nd?).  More on this in a later post.

Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio – Released @ http://dev.live.com/tools/

TechEd Sessions online next week.  This is great news for all the attendees (not so great for everyone else as it’s attendee only access).  There were some sessions which I wish I had went to but clashed with something more important.

Sessions

I found the sessions quite hit and miss.  Some sessions where amazing with Roy Osherove being the best speaker for me but others seemed very high level and marketing focused which I wasn’t really expecting.

The Party

On Wednesday night there was the country party.  This was a very enjoyable evening, lots of good food, free beer with great company.  However getting up for Thursday sessions was difficult 😉

The Swag

The swag was good, NxtGenUG were there dong one or two game shows.  Some of the companies where giving away freebies but managed to grab a few interesting items – mainly the The Security Development Lifecycle book.

Summary

Generally, it was a great week. Red Gate covered a lot of the cost which was amazing and there were 14 of us attending in total so there was great company. Hopefully I will be able to attend next year. One thing, I will take a laptop so I will have less stuff to catch up on when I return. Might be a reason for a new laptop by then….

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TechEd Developers 2007: First Day – All swagged out

As some of you will be aware, I am currently at TechEd developers conference.

Yesterday was the first day of the conference and it was very enjoyable. The keynote started with the general VS2008 information, but Dan Fernandez gave a cool demo of a new World Of Warcraft Addin designer built around the VS 2008 Shell as a plugin for Visual Studio which looked amazing!! I hope to catch one or two more sessions on this later.

The other really good session yesterday was on the Bootable.Net, being able to write C# code for micro devices. It seemed very easy to get started, but I think the hardware is out of my price range :(. Might just have to stick with emulators.

After the event, there was a drinks reception with lots of swag being handed out which I took full advantage of and one or two beers….. the NxtGenUG boyz also did swaggily fortunes which was good fun (it worked as well this time).

Now, onto a session about the new Sync framework.