TechEd day 1

Today was day 1 at TechEd. Well, the real day one was yesterday with the precons. We had really interesting presentations digging into Windows Embedded tools and products.

Here is Dion presenting a great session on the future of graphical rendering for Windows Embedded CE:

After a full day of precon seminar, and after giving away Spark kits to all of the attendees, we invited them for a drink at the YardHouse. The usual suspects (the Beckhoff team and Dion) could enjoy some beers:
 

Missing Mike who will arrive tomorrow, John was impersonating him… This looks like Mike’s famous face, right?

And here is another nice episode of this diner: Stefan (from Beckhoff) explaining the Schtick demo using his beer glass as the Schtick!

Now the main event has started and I presented an interesting Interactive session : “Windows for Devices: meet the Windows Embedded family”.
I had some really interesting questions from IT Pros about the future integration of tools they would need to have embedded devices part of their enterprise Networks. It seems the Windows Embedded group is heading in the right direction when providing support for SCCM and this kind of tools into Windows Embedded.

The Windows Embedded booth also got a lot of attention today because of really cool demos/devices. The Schtick demo built by Beckhoff demonstrating the real time capabilities of Windows Embedded CE 6 and the usage of DPWS to implement a distributed scenario with devices discovering and discussing with each other: CE real time devices discovered by a Windows Embedded Standard device host a UI to control the robot. And the CE device discovering an Embedded server (still using DPWS) and pushing data retrieved from sensors to the server. really cool and slick demo. See this video in this previous post.

The Golden-i is also at our booth and is a really impressive demo of a wearable CE device, voice controlled giving access to info, data, movies, Internet, enabling thousands of amazing scenarios. The company developing this device is called Kopin. they are behind pretty much all of the small display you can see on camcorders or on military equipment. This device WILL BE in some of my future demos for sure!

Check out some pictures of us wearing and using it on John’s blog!