TechEd Impressions

I've finished my last session for the day here at TechEd. Right now I'm staring out over Yokohama Bay where the expansive Yokohama Bay Bridge dominates the view.

I attended the VB 2005 session this afternoon to see what the audience was like and what kind of topics were discussed. The room, which sits about 1200, was probably 1/3 full (the same was true for the C# session immediately following). The presentation started out with demos of new language features such as My, unsigned types, operator overloading, and generics, and ended up discussing application settings and project related improvements. I sometimes forget that there is so much more to VB than the core language. The VB language and IDE team (the folks who do Intellisense, Edit & Continue, etc.) at Microsoft has historically been around 10 people in size, but there are 20 to 30 other developers in VB working on vital features such as Data, Project, and Deployment.

Talked with a few attendees after the session and asked what they thought about the new features in VB 2005. The favorite by far was Edit & Continue. I asked about Refactoring (prominently featured in C#) and the reception was lukewarm. My Japanese isn't good enough, so I couldn't figure out the reason why.

I am surprised with how many women are attending TechEd, and I don't know whether it's Japan or a general industry trend (maybe not). We, society as a whole, need more women working in IT. The industry simply cannot grow and innovate if 50% of society's intelligence resources aren't significantly involved.

More to follow tomorrow.