Hola! Barcelona is a VS SDK hit!

My first trip to Europe is turning out to be great!  The city of Barcelona is great.  Many attractions to see, lots of nice things to do.

Sunday and Monday this week the VSIP team conducted a Developer Lab with lots of great presentations and 1:1 meetings discussing extensibilty.  We ended that event with a dinner for Lab attendees and partners at TechEd at a Flemenco show.

Now we are in the middle of TechEd: Developers (next week is the IT conference).  Lots of great presentations at this show and about 4000 people in attendance (some 700 staff).

My own theater-style presentation was well attended compared to TechEd US this summer. I wrote code to build a package on stage.  Gareth Jones joined us today for a packed theater presentation on the DSLTools that come with the VS SDK. Additionally partners companies that presented have met with great success in attendance. Most attendees treated the theater like a real session venue staying for the entire presentation.

A lot of good traffic through the VS SDK booth on the first day. Typically we play a triage role finding the right people for the attendees question and did so this event, but there were quite a bit of questions directly related to the VS SDK and extending Visual Studio. The session presented on Tuesday afternoon was a hit with a medium sized full room (not packed tight and not sparse). Some good questions after the session and good opportunity to drive traffic to our booth.

I took some time to visit a session on SharePoint customization on Wednesday.  SharePoint itself is totally awesome and great a collaboration platform.  I was unimpressed, however, with the SDK to provide code that can customize a site.  There were several points where I thought that a schema file for some XML configuration files would be very effective at preventing authoring errors.  Additionally there are several opportunities for custom project items or even custom projects that would make the development and deployment of SharePoint customizations much easier to accomplish.  Definitely a partner opportunity.

More on TechEd and my first trip to Europe when I find time to post...

Allen