TechEd 2009 Sum-up

It is Monday 16th Nov 2009 – which means that TechEd Europe in Berlin is over. Overall I have had a good week – lots of time with product team members and colleagues.

The week didn’t start as indented though. I traveled feeling a bit sick and arrived at Berlin having a small fever. Spent the entire Sunday in bed trying to avoid getting worse but didn’t avoid going to the doctor on Monday only to find that I had tonsillitis and needed to start antibiotics. Good thing though is that after having taken it for a day all symptoms went away. Unfortunately I couldn’t drink any beer :-(.

Then Tuesday was my interview by Giorgio Sardo where I shared my experience in building a web slice with the Facebook API; we will also discussed some handy tips and tricks for building compelling accelerators and visual search providers for Internet Explorer 8. If you missed it you can see it here

P.S. I’m planning on posting a separate post on the Slice itself

Highlights

• Most of the developer sessions I did attend were good to very good. Presenters were well prepared and fun to listen, unfortunately the level was rather low for my standards but that’s something I expected since sessions are planned to fit the general audience level and not mine in particular.
• The conference was smooth and the facility worked well
• The expo area, hands on lab area and TLC area all were great – you could fill the week by taking advantage of those 3 and not attend a single session
• The 6 interactive theatres that delivered sessions even during lunch were a great addition
• It was fun to be in Berlin on the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. Nice one Microsoft.

Lowlights

• The keynotes on Monday. Awful. Sorry – but they were.
• Lack of “general” development session on .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I was told that around 45% of the sessions were dev but it never felt that way. The 45% included “edge sessions” like embedded and windows mobile that I think many of the developers attending would ignore (myself included) which sometimes meant you only had 2 or 3 sessions to choose from in any slot. Shame.
• Lack of developer announcements. Unfortunately they were kept for PDC.