First day at TechEd

A what a day…

Left home at 4.00 a.m. and arrived at Barcelona at 11.00, rushed to the convention center to register and then headed up to my hotel to check in. Then I left again and met some of the other Greek delegates and had lunch discussing our travel adventures (those that traveled with ALITALIA on Sunday lost their baggage, one ending up at Chicago!!).

After that I watched the keynote of Soma which although pretty interesting in content wasn’t what I expected and what I’m used to as a Microsoft event keynote. I feel that choosing Soma as the keynote speaker was a bit unfortunate.

Anyway, things that were announced at the keynote include:

• Release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 before the end of November 2007 while official business launch is scheduled for January-February.

• Removing license restrictions with Visual Studio and the Visual Studio SDK to enable customers to use the Visual Studio IDE and build applications that target the platform of your choice.

• Access to the Visual Studio source code for VSIP premier partners to enable you to better design and debug your add-ins to Visual Studio.

• Popfly Explorer add-in to Visual Studio as a Codeplex project.

• CTP for the Microsoft Sync Framework that enables you to build on the offline synchronization capability in Visual Studio 2008.

After that I had a tour of Visual Studio 2008 by Daniel Moth which was great (and that’s not because he’s Greek 😉 which opened up my appetite for exploring new Studio features.

I then had to take a break to catch my breath and my emails and news and then prepare for my first Ask The Expert Session  in the Official event reception (I really didn’t have the courage to attend anything more).

Participating in the Ask The Expert program was probably the best experience of the day, I had the chance to communicate and share views on new MS technologies like MVC .NET 3.5 Ajax support etc. with a lot of cool people. More on that later…

You probably that’s all eh? Well it’s not, that was not the last thing of my day. At 21.00 after finishing up from my ATE booth, I met some of the other Greek delegates and headed out for Tapas and Beer.

I have to say that once I got back to my hotel room the only thing I managed to do was take my clothes out 😉

Well that’s all for now have to head on to my ASP.NET boot for my second ATE day…