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.

It’s nice to have a conference to look forward to.

No sessions up yet and no pre-conference seminars neither so I guess I’ll just have to sit and wait for a while.

A little bit harder to get up than usual, it became rather late after the country drinks last evening. But it was worth it, I came talk to a lot of people that I’ve never met before as well as those I actually have worked with but haven’t seen for like 9 years.

However, last night was long gone when the first session started:

WIA304 – Building LOB Apps Fast with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services(Tim Heuer)

Tim Heuer again, lovely session again. I even more convinced that I have to learn Silverlight and start to seek projects that uses Silverlight. After the first (of many) cup of coffee was it at last time for the first 400-level session this week:

DEV402 – Dynamic in C# 4.0: The Why’s and How’s (Alex Turner)

I had never heard of this guy before, but he was a brilliant speaker - the topic helps, of course, but he was good at it too. It turned out that the new dynamic keyword was more that just access to Python and Ruby – more to test after this week, the list of things to try starts to get really long now. Lunch, exhibition, and more sessions:

ARC308 – Credit Crunch Code: Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt (Gary Short)

I’ve seen Gary Short in numerous short instruction screen casts on DevExpress’ XPO and XAF, but this topic was different and he did a surprisingly good job. Rarely this year, there were a lot more last TechEd I attended, but in the next time slot no less than 4 highly interesting session took place. Which one to choose? The nice experience from this morning, together wit the nice experiences with interactive sessions earlier this week, made it:

DEV03-IS – C# 4.0 And VB2010 Interop Features with Silverlight, Office and Python.

More good stuff on the dynamic keyword! Time flies and the last session for the day was held by a fellow country man of me:

ARC401 – Flexible Design (Magnus Mårtensson)

He could have renamed the title to “Use Dependency Injection”, I should have attended anyway but with other expectations.

Not that many interesting titles to choose between at the first slot, so I picked the session based on speaker more than the title and went to:

ITS202 - The Daily Scrum (Stephen Forte)

Nice talk, but a 200-level session on a topic that I kind of know. Next slot I saw just one session that were interesting, but that was enough

DEV306 – F# for Parallel and Asynchronous Programming (Donald Syme)

was awesome. How should I do to start working with F# – I got to come up with a plan for that!

I had a quick lunch so I could go to a lunch session:

DEV01-DEMO – TFS:Become productive in 30 minutes (Brian Randell)

Nice quick overview. Initially it was Doug Seven that was supposed to do this talk, but he had to go home and Brian did a good job as the substitute.

After lunch it was time for

WIA202 – Silverlight 3: What’s in It for Developers? (Tim Heuer)

and it was a good update. I haven’t look much into Silverlight for a while now and it’s definitely time to pick it up again.

After a long coffee break while strolling around in the exhibition hall it was about time for some serious coding:

DEV309 - The Windows API Code Pack: How Managed  Code Developers Can Easily Access Exciting New Windows Vista and Windows 7 Features (Kate Gregory)

Lots of code and good examples how to build jump lists, thumbnails etc. This was the last session for the day and then it was time for one of the social parts for this event – country drinks. Time to chat and get to know peers from home.