Going, going....

Well, there's still a ton of people here at the San Diego Convention Center even though it's down to the last session slot of TechEd 2004.

It's a little sad though.  Weeks like this are great with tons of learning and great interaction.  You hate to see it end, but the real world waits and there's a lot of work to do for customers.  So, get on that plane and go home.  Last one out,... turn out the lights and lock up, please.

My reflections from this week are as follows:

1) Conference: Once again the conference folks did a great job organizing and making the week productive. The food was good (healthier than TechEd 2003 and PDC'04).  San Diego is a great city - clean, nice weather, great people, lots of stuff to do.  I'm looking forward to a nice vacation with my family now and we'll be visiting the Wild Animal Park and SeaWorld as well as other activities like the beach.

2) Community Lounges: These were a big hit with customers.  Easy access to experts and casual atmoshphere made it enjoyable.  Great interaction.  The Cabana Sessions that I saw were well attended (~30 in attendance), but the sound was dismal.  More walls and a local microphone with speakers would've been good to have.

3) The developers at the conference gave us good feedback on a lot of topics.  I think we're going to deliver a very popular product in VS 2005 and customers are anticipating its release.  I even suggested to a couple of eager devs that they could do their development with VS 2005 Beta or Community Tech Preview and just build their projects with Everett for deployment.  The VS 2005 editing/code navigation features are superior to VS 2003.  Of course, VS 2005 Community Tech Previews and Betas will have issues so tread with caution.  As a matter of fact, the Community Tech Preview is so raw that we recommend installing it on a spare machine or in a virtual PC.

4) VSIP: A lot of good information provided to customers about VSIP for both VS 2003 and VS 2005.  The partner list is growing and there's a lot of exciting products that partners are working on for the future.  There's a ton of products out now that extend VS and we distributed a lot of copies of the VS Partner Resource Kit features over 150 partner products (and a 60 day trial version of VS).

If you came to TechEd 2004 and didn't get a chance to say hello, please drop me a note with your feedback about VS, VSIP or the conference.  I'll pass your feedback along.

Thanks,
Allen