TechEd Day 1 - Developers, Developers, D-d-d-d-d-developers

This is as close as I got to BalmerBot at the TechEd keynote on Day 1. I enjoyed, but wasn't blown away by the content. I'm not sure whether this is indicative of the way we generally have access to most information before a conference or event or whether being inside the organisation, the stuff we talk about at out conferences have been talked about for some time prior. I guess it's probably a combination of the two. It does lead me to think that we need to make sure that keynotes at events such as TechEd Australia don't try to be product demo-fests. It makes much more sense to have a keynote with the roadmap and some generally future-looking discussion (as well as to set the scene for the conference and make sure that people have all the information they need to make the most of their time at the event).

I also used this day to catch up with the folks from EventPoint who are providing the CommNet application used to provide the onsite delegate scheduling, access to the slides used in presentations and much more. The EventPoint guys are going to do a couple of sessions in the Technology of TechEd Track about the infrastructure they use and about the application itself. It's an interesting storey as the have a very seasonal requirement, with almost no load on the application and infrastructure until the event itself where suddenly they need to be able to handle 10s of thousands of simultaneous connections.

I went to a couple of sessions (Linq to SQL and OOXML with Linq) and then attended the partner expo reception. I ran into Dr Neil again and we wandered around the sponsor pavilions.