TechEd '06 trip report

I thought you might enjoy my summary of last week's trip to TechEd.

Executive summary: Lots of devs at TechEd. We should have a booth in the future. Main theme from users is that they want more and deeper samples (Tom can talk about tools). Lots of enthusiasm for msdnWiki, which is an effort we should be involved in. Tom is good at pool.

· Although there were around 12,000 attendees at the convention, the floor never felt crowded or busy where we were working. The traditional "cocktail party" night was very busy in the main section of the floor, where the vendors were gathered, but the conference basically set the Microsoft teams on the edges of the floor. Consequently, we had very good traffic but it was never really overwhelming.

· People loved our toolkit flashlights, though they were a bit bulky.

· There were many developers at the conference, and most everyone we spoke to seemed to know MSDN or the Windows SDK - though, to be honest, part of that was probably because we shared a booth with MSDN. Even given that, the level of knowledge and interest users had in our product was strong. It would be productive for us to have a booth at TechEd next year.

· Probably the most interesting conversation was one that Derek and I had with a man who manages the IT department at a large helathcare compamy. He defined IT as everything from internal apps to helpdesk activities - a broad range that doesn't easily fit into Microsoft's definitions of roles. Thuis user was a strong advocate for delivering large, cross-technology samples such as the old MSDN Duwamish or Fitch & Mather sample. He specifically said that his team takes code from these apps and treats it as "blessed" code which he wouldn't need to modify closely in order to make it work.

· Most every user liked the amount of samples that we carry. Several specifically called out that the SDK seemed to be the best place to find a broad range of WinFX samples. People mainly asked for more samples, two or three people especially singled out that they want WF samples. I asked several people about the cross-discipline samples, and had varying enthusiasm from "that would be great" to "could be useful, but I'd only use bits and pieces of it."

· Users love the documentation and use it both online and offline. The want downloadable code samples online (three users specifically mentioned that). Users want our stuff in the msdnWiki.

· Nobody had any comments or problems with setup, even when I asked them about it. That jibes with my general feeling that we should make setup helpful but unobtrusive, and that user errors have dropped off by a huge amount. I asked about ten people, and none had suggestions or comments re adding or removing stuff from the custom install options.

· We shared space with the msdnWiki team, which is an effort to provide comments and annotations for articles on MSDN. Response to the Beta was uniformly positive, with the only objections being that it wasn't truly a Wiki but more of an annotations system. Steve Butler and Molly Bostic of the Wiki project both ran presentations that turned into de facto focus groups during the conference, where users gave suggestions for future improvements. We should definitely work to get involved in the Wiki when it releases, and also think about if we have sufficient users to run a focus group type presentation at future conferences.

· Tom is a really good pool player.