So, a little more adjusted to the time zone, not wakening up 4 am to watch the ceiling for an hour before going down to the Fitness Center. Today I just woke up 6.30, got a shower and then went to GWCC to meet up with Martin for breakfast.

Eventually there’s a timeslot where kind of no session seem that appealing – this was one of them and early in the morning as well. Should I pass or should I go to the Hands On Lab area to try one of them out? I did pick a session and it was

COS304 - Using Windows Azure Storage (Jai Haridas)

Actually worth going to this one, he did a good job explaining the differences between the way of storing data in the cloud: Blobs, Drives, Tables and Queues. Good demos made me understand how I’m supposed to use this in real life. He got in to all of them in enough depth so I got a felling for what they could do and what they couldn’t do – and when to use what. I really liked this session and did not at all regret going here.

DEV313 - Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4 and Beyond: Building Real-World Applications (Jeff Derstadt & Jonathan Aneja)

We’re using EF4 right now in my current project so I thought that it would be a good idea to go to some of the EF4 sessions. In this one there were a real world example from NBC. It’s nice to see that we’re not the only one to struggle with (against) EF4 – but in all a satisfactory session. One of the gems to bring home was the compiled query stuff and the ability to serialize it as JSON.

DEV338 - NuGet: Microsoft .NET Package Management for the Enterprise (Scott Hanselman)

This one wasn’t either on my original schedule, but after all the talk the first day about NuGet I just was forced to see this. On the other hand it was Hanselman so I could have picked anyway. Well, as usual he delivered a good – or actually very good – talk, an this time without demo crashes. There were some mocking on Twitter after his crash in the Monday session.

Now, I’m completely aware of what NuGet is and what it can do – 75 minutes well spent. I’ll have to start using this when I’m back home, I guess I have to show some demos for my colleagues before they accept this, but now I’m well prepared.

During this talk I also picked up other stuff to put on my must-try-list: Elmah and Mercurial with BitBucket, lets see if it’s anything to use.

DEV337 - Moving Your App and Skills from WinForms to Silverlight and WPF (Pete Brown)

Despite of the level and of the title, this felt like a 200-level talk and even if there were lots of demos the technical content was way to simple. He brought up obvious thing when shifting from WinForms to Silverlight and/or WPF – and it felt like he just jumped over the hard stuff.

DEV323 - A Taste of F#: Today and Tomorrow (Don Syme)

Not all that much new, but a decent talk. The today-stuff was more focused on beginners – I have been playing around with F# since early 2008 way before PDC 2008 so all the points of simplicity and the async/parallel reasons didn’t bring anything new to the table. And the tomorrow stuff was focused on FrebaseData – interesting for sure, but not that’s more a cool thing that a language innovation or a language development. Always nice to listen to Don Syme, though.

On the pre-conf day it feels like the conference is going to last forever, but all of sudden it is the last day…

DEV302 - Identify and Fix Performance Problems with VS Ultimate (Benjamin Day)

When I do performance coding, I do think the “fix” is the more interesting part. The “identify” is simply the boring stuff I have to go through to get to the “fix” part. This talk was totally focused on the “identify” part – and therefor for me, totally boring. And not much new stuff either, the last day could definitely have started better…

DEV335 - Improving Your Microsoft ASP.NET Application Performance with Asynchronous Pages and Actions (Tiberiu Covaci)

Ah, a fellow Swede… Good session that matched the title perfectly. Lot of things that I have been unaware of – or at some point in time had been aware of but now forgot. Yet again the full history of Begin/End, Async/Complete to the new async keyword. I don’t know if the speakers look at each other topics or if the track chair look – but this was my third session where this full history. Now, I like asynchronous programming so it really doesn’t matter that much to me – but could we use the time more effectively?

The twist in this talk was the asynchronous page directive in ASP.NET, and that was completely new to me – or perhaps as in the previous talk, something that I have been aware of but forgot because I never used it. Since I usually tends to do back-end or server stuff the async thing is on my radar, but it wasn’t really for page code. Now I have to have it there as well.

MID302 - AppFabric Caching: How It Works and When You Should Use It (Jon Flanders)

I might say that this was one of the reasons for going here. I’ve been working with AppFabric cache the last month at my current project. The bottom line for this session is that I think I got it all while working with it. Now, that might be feeling like wasting time to go to a session like this, but it’s actually kind of nice to get a confirmation that there isn’t anything else.

DEV377 - Ask Scott Hanselman

My only interactive session this year, with my favourite: Hanselman, and he delivered one more time. There were no specific topic, instead the audience asked questions from organizational questions about MS to specific technical details about lots of stuff – and lots of jokes as well.

The gem I bring with me from this session is Glimpse. I had not seen this tool before and I have to ask my more front-end focused colleagues if they use it. Hanselman describes it “like the FireBug client side debugger, except it's implemented in JavaScript on the client side with hooks in to ASP.NET on the Server Side” in a blog post.

Before the last session I ran to the exhibit hall book store to see if there were any books on sale and I bought two with 20% off.

DEV351 - Busy Microsoft .NET Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft Cloud (Ted Neward)

He started with a declaration that he would present any demos, that this would be a Power Point only talk and that anyone that was uncomfortable with this could leave if they wanted to. I remained in my seat somewhat sceptical, but it turned out to be one of more interesting talks of the week. Not the usual “hallelujah, do this and everything will be fine”, on the contrary he told us to be sceptical and careful about putting applications and/or data in the cloud.

An end session that gave us something to think about on our way home

…or day 3, it depends on if you count the pre-conf day as 1 or 0. Anyway the day started – perhaps not as focused as I should be – with

DEV340 - Tackle the Complexity of Async Calls in WPF and Silverlight (Brian Noyes)

He started with an overview of multithreading in general and the benefits and challenges that multithreading gives you.

He then did a quick review of the history of async call patterns in .net from Begin/End over Async/Completed and TPL & PLINQ. He continued with Async CTP and the new async keyword in C#, and at last he did a short detour to Reactive Extensions as well – a nice bonus, I really like that stuff. It takes me out of my ordinary path of thinking. Check it out or better, come to my talk about it on Wednesday at Valtech Tech Days.

I was very pleased with this talk and i didn’t felt at all as the morning session after the exhibit hall reception the night before.

DEV301 - The Future of Parallel Programming in the Microsoft .NET Framework (Danny Shih)

Parallel and async seem to go hand in hand, this turned out to be roughly the same talk as I just attended. Only more focused towards the new async stuff that’s in the pipe. The content was alright as so were the speaker – but he finished in 45 minutes so I felt a little bit disappointed. I mean, if you have a time slot of 75 minutes it would be OK to finish 10% early – like about 10 minutes, but 30 minutes early? Bad rehearsal I would say.

DEV355 - Orchard 1.1: Build, Customize, Extend, Ship (Sebastien Ros)

Completely brilliant session. A total walk through of (not perhaps) all features in Orchard. A good speaker with just the right amount of humour together with just right enough technical depth totally made my day. Originally I didn’t plan to see this session, I had another one scheduled but after all the talk yesterday about Orchard I had to see what is was – and I didn’t regret for a second that I switched session at the last minute.

And I got more sure than before that I definitely have to check this out – actually it’s now on top of my must-try-list.

DEV343 - Application Development with HTML5 (Brandon Satrom)

I’ve been to a fair amount of “development with HTML” talks before and all of them - including this one - are more about HTML5 than about developing. But since I don’t do a lot of HTML at all nowadays, it was a nice walkthrough of the stuff and he did it quite well. The one thing that he said got stuck in my mind hadn’t anything to do with HTML5 though, it was about the development process around IE9 and the upcoming IE10 – more early bits to developers that ever before.

MID307 - Make Yourself Comfortable and REST with Microsoft .NET (Howard Dierking)

I like REST, I like WCF, I like developing in .NET. This was an excellent description of how to make a REST service with WCF. Thank you, sir. Not that it’s hard or complicated, and I have played around with it a while ago and I think I got it then. But this talk explained it in a better way than I could pick up from other resources so whenever I'm about to make a REST service I will fast forward through this talk before I start.

As a developer I tend to think that Teched keynotes usually are to much focused on IT-pros, and usually not all that exciting. But this year I was surprised how interesting the keynote was. They had a shorter (?) big keynote for everybody and then we were split up in different Foundational sessions – it worked out pretty well.

Keynote

Cloud, cloud, cloud…

Phone, phone, phone…

Much talk about the cloud, much talk about the phone, and except for a short section about System Center – in which I have no interest, whatsoever – there were really nice stuff showed.

The sentence of the day was when Amir Netz demoed new BI-tools in Crescent and sorted/filtered 2.000.000.000 rows of data – “This is beyond wicked fast. This is the engine of the devil, right?” And I must agree, it was beyond wicked fast…

More interesting stuff came when Drew Robbins talked about next version of WP7, “Mango”. Yesterdays pre-conf on WP7 made me eager to start developing for this platform and with the new tool coming out for “Mango” this month it just increase my interest in this area.

Last Cameron Skinner showed upcoming features in VS “vNext”, but I don’t know if they really said when it’s about to be released – I thing it’s not settled yet. Anyway, one of the more interesting features is to be able to suspend my current work – shelf the changes and so on – when the boss comes with an urgent matter. And after having fixed it, be able to resume work exactly where I was before – not just getting back the shelved files, but restoring all windows and so on, so that VS looked exactly the same as when I suspended the work. And this just with one suspend and one resume button. He also showed how it will be possible to do storyboarding in PowerPoint for designers and/or advanced business/requirement analysts – I’ll have to try this one out before I can tell if this is good or bad.

Foundational session – The Microsoft Web Platform

Very interesting walk through of the current state and the close future of the web platform as Microsoft sees it. For me the bottom line was to look at and learn:

• NuGet
• WebMatrix
• Orchard

Look at really close and learn really well, that is. And of course to continue to improve the skills in ASP.NET MVC and Razor in general, but that wasn’t all that new.

In the afternoon there were ordinary breakout sessions and ad started with:

MID306 - Design Patterns, Practices and Techniques with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus (Juval Löwy)

Now, I’ve seen Juval Löwy before – in fact an whole post conference day at DevConnection 2007 and this time I was more prepared for his particular style of delivering talks. This one did its job to deliver what the title stated but nothing more.

DEV349 - An overview of the MS Web Stack (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is fantastic in delivering technical talks and even if he had his first demo crash in 8 years today he saved it brilliantly. This was about the same content as the foundational session before lunch – but more technical, more demos and because of that more close to my heart. It was interesting to hear that MS now does a lot of optimizations for “programmer happiness” and less work on optimizing the IDE for demo-style file-new-drag-and-drop scenarios.

This talk also emphasized the wisdom of this morning: learn NuGet, WebMatrix and Orchard.

DEV321 - Advanced Blend for Developer: Integrating MVVM and Designability (Pete Brown)

Not bad, but not a 300 level session and not that interesting – I will probably never work in Blend nor will the designers I work with. On the other hand, there were no other sessions in this time slot that seemed more interesting so… it wasn’t so bad that I left in the middle of the talk anyway, perhaps not just my focus topic.

PRC01 - Mastering Microsoft Silverlight for Windows Phone

Speaker: Charles Petzold

So, when I told my colleagues that I would spend a full day listening to Charles Petzold talking about Windows Phone development, they said “Great, but who is Charles Petzold?” Now, I maybe so old that I read Petzold’s “Programming Windows” in the 90’s and my colleagues are somewhat younger than me – but one got to know a little bit of history, don’t you think?

In my world Petzold has a lot of credibility on programming in general, and I was quite enthusiastic to hear what he had to say on the subject because the chance of me doing some WP7 programming in the future is fairly high.

I will not really go in to all the details on what he talked about, but he did a good job in deliver a huge amount of information on how to develop Silverlight applications for Windows Phone – lots of tips of dos and don’ts together with lots of code samples to study and digest in my own pace later on. The bottom line is that I got out of this day very motivated to start write applications for Windows Phone and a lot more equipped than before. He also pointed to a downloadable version of his latest book “Programming Windows Phone 7”.

On my way back to the hotel, when I tried to go through the whole day, one sentence he said kept popping up more than others. And it was something like “Soon, the phone will be the primary (if not the only) computer for a vast majority of people”. This is probably true and it scares me that I haven’t thought of it in that way before, for me as a programmer I sit in front of a desktop or laptop most of the day at work or one of my computers when I’m home - and the rest of the time I usually have a small netbook computer with me and I just use my phone when all other alternatives are gone.

PRC100 – Professional Career Development Seminar

Part 1: Building The Brand of You, Stephen Rose

Some useful practical tips, but they all came down to kind of “be aware of what you say and do in all places – including social media” and “take and stay in control of how others look at you”. Good speak, fairly enthusiastic but really nothing new.

Part 2: IT & Developer Careers of the future, Zeus Kerravala

Zzzzzz, or perhaps it just was my jet lag…

Part 3: How I Re-Invented My Developer Career, panel discussion with Michael Otey, Richard Campbell, Tim Huckaby, Michelle Leroux Bustamente, Jennifer Marsman and Tara Walker.

Awake again! A really good discussion on what to focus on how to “stay in shape”, not all that surprised by hearing it is: Mobile, Cloud and knowing the business.

Oh, and by the way… nice view from the hotel. The Centennial Olympic Park, CNN Center, Georgia Dome and GWCC – where TechEd is. It’s just a 10 min walk from the hotel and yet they have made arrangements to take buses from my hotel to the Conference Center.