I definitely made an “executive” decision that since I was going to get the DVD’s, I would not spend my entire TechEd time in sessions — though there were some speakers I definitely wanted to see doing their thing live while I was there.

I found the hands on labs valuable, being able to take the cert tests (which I have avoided for many many years) and what I call hanging around with my friends — and others refer to as networking — to be things that I could not do from the confines of my home office. I met and talked to a lot of microsoft people that are interesting to me, Kit George, Eric Gunnerson, Dan Fernandez, Jan Gray more more more more and though I didn’t get to check in with Keith Ballinger after his talk (which I definitely went to!)  I did happen to meet and spend some time with Lara Ballinger, who is another softie and just happens to be married to Keith. I completely missed seeing [fellow .NET Rock Star :-))  Paul Vick, which bummed me out. But I did spend a bunch of time with another VB’er Jay Roxe and have him PENNED IN for November at VTdotNet, right Jay???

Fun as always chatting with Korby Parnell who had a lot to gloat about during TechEd – VS2005 Team System is his baby.

I did attend sessions definitely (and I evaled all of them!) and if I had unlimited time I would have attended many many more. But it is just way too fun to get an opportunity to hang out with people you know, people you like and people that you have a lot in common with (even if they are way the heck smarter than you!)

Who says “hindsight’s 20/20”? My memory is smooshing the week together quickly.

TESTING

Tuesday morning I wandered down to the Pearson Vue Testing center to find that the tests were still half price (first 500), so I paid for Windows and Web tests and just sat down and took the Windows VB.NET certification test and passed it (narrowly!)

TABLETS

I spent a lot of Tuesday playing with some of the new tablets and wandering around the Microsoft area of the expo (including of course the INETA booth that they gave us).

I also did a Tablet development Hands on Lab. This is a GREAT lab, very clear and even though I have done some tablet programming already with the SDK I learned a ton. I will keep trolling around for an online version of this though I don’t see one right now. Keep an eye on the MSDN Tablet PC Developer center

HERE IS WHERE TO FIND THEM! Thanks to Barry Gervin.

MORE TABLETS – the BOF

I finished up the DevLab in time to run over to the Tablet PC BOF that I was leading. This turned out to be an awesome gathering. I met a bunch of bloggers that I knew online: Steele Price (here’s his blog post on the BOF) and Jay Glynn, for example. Kent Tengels was there, though we had already spent lots of time together since he was at the INETA summit and we bumped into each other throughout the conference (TechEd is funny that way – 11,000 people and you can almost count on seeing people you know over and over..a good thing of course). Also a bunch of folks from the Tablet Team were there including Arin Goldberg, Frank Goczinski and David Hale. The nicest surprise in new faces was Mark Woods, one of the students from Washington Univ. in St. Louis, MO, who had come to compete in the last rounds of the U.S. portion of the Imagine Cup and had come in second place with their very interesting Tablet PC application designed for educational purposes. Also at this session were two people from Univ. of Vermont Business School including one that I knew well by email but had not yet met in person.

I love the BOF’s …they are so free form. It took a while to get everyone to feel comfortable with  that format, so I talked about some of the different things I have been doing with tablet development and started asking questions. Luckily, with familiar people, I knew what some of them were up to so I was able to ask questions that were a bit leading to draw them out….then it really took off. We talked about everything from business apps to educational apps to visual apps to architectural applications. Jane ______ from Microsoft Research was there and has been very involved with what’s going on in the universities with Tablets. We also got a little technical since some people had not realized they could have easy access to the tablet team so they started to ask some deeper questions. I had to pull the direction of the BOF away from that because it was way over most of the rest of our heads.

DINN-DINN with the Tablet Team

After the BOF, Arin, Frank and the rest of the team took the crowd out to dinner so we could just keep the conversation going.

MSDN Parteeeeeee

I had to bow out at about 9 as I had been invited to the MSDN party over at the Bitter End and definitely wanted to go. The MSDN party has been one of the my favorite parties at the past TechEd and PDC events I have attended. Since I was allowed one guest, I brought Stan Schultes, who was at dinner. It was the usual crowd which just gets more and more fun every time – and of course some new [to me] faces as well. I dragged myself out of there so that I could get at least some sleep in before starting the next day.

Still no Kate…but that would be fixed on Wednesday.

Denise Smith posts the top speakers at TechEd. The #1 was based on only 5 evals where the others had a lot more. This doesn’t seem properly weighted. Nothing against Patrick who got the #1 spot, but I think they should do something like not include talks with less than a certain number.

Oh yeah, meant to mention this – did anyone notice how slimmed down Ballmer was at his keynote? Apparently he has worked hard for it. Kate Gregory linked this to the more healthy teched snacks this year – popcorn, baked chips, celery and frozen fruit bars. Even I was craving those damned Haagen Dasz bars and finally got my hands on one on Thursday.

I better start getting this down before my 40+ year old brain starts losing this stuff!

KEYNOTE

Day 1 began with Ballmer’s Keynote (details of which you can read in many many blogs) and the highlight of which was the very nice surprise of Rebecca Dias entering the stage to do the demos. Rebecca, who like many PMs at Microsoft, has a very technical background that most people don’t realize. This is Rebecca’s official title: “ Advanced Web Services Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation“. Many PMs are incorrectly viewed as marketing people and that is just so far from the truth. Here is a page from Brian Gold’s blog that has the definition of this job, if you are curious. Unfortunately Rebecca, surely in a moment of nervousness (on stage with Steve Ballmer in front of maybe 10,000 people) made a silly self-deprecating remark (if you knew her, you would have understood that’s all she was saying) that had a different meaning to a lot of people. Ballmer quickly covered it up and they moved on.

Rebecca’s demo (featuring IBF for Office and integration framework) was great and she got to be the person to announce VS2005 Team System as well as the public release finally of the WSE2 bits. I have played with the alpha a little over the last few months and was so impressed with it’s accessibility for non-plumbers, that I will be doing a talk called “Web Services Security for Dummies using WSE2” at DevConnections. (It was actually on the short list for TechEd but there are so many who are much more knowledgable about this topic that it would have been just silly to have me do it…)

SESSION

After the keynote was Don Box & Doug Purdy doing the first Connected Systems talk to a packed room. Poor Don was sick, bundled up in a very cozy looking sweater. I have never seen the Don & Doug show though I have seen the Don & Chris show a number of times. Doug is another fantastic stage presence. As you have probably read, they took a lot of audience questions in advance and made sure that their talk, which panned out from the central them of “there is only one program and it is still being written”, answered the questions.

Because of my experience with WSE2, I wanted to hear their thoughts on WSE2 for non-plumbers and asked “do you still have to be a plumber to work with WSE?”. Don’s answer was, as I have experienced, you do not have to be a plumber to WRITE WSE code, but at this point, if you have problems, you will need a plumber to solve them. Fair enough. That still gets us pretty far. And there are lots of plumbers around to help us out, too.

Michele L.B. has one of the best summaries of this session that I have seen so far.

HANGING

The rest of the day is a blur…a lunch meeting with Chris Pels and Eric King to talk about INETA stuff (which I was terribly unfocused since so many people came up to chat during that time – sorry Chris & Eric), wandering around the expo a bit though mostly hanging by the spot where Tablet PC, INETA, Mobile, SourceGear, Regional Director and VS Dev Tools booths merged. And I finally made my way to the cabanas and found the spot that became my homing place all week, by the RD cabana area.

SOCIAL TIME

At the end of the day, Christa Carpentiere (PM & content strategist for the Data Access & Storage dev Center), Sara Williams (head chick of MSDN) & I went over to the outdoor bar at the Marriott to hang out. A little later we were joined by a gaggle of MSDNers – Duncan Mackenzie, Brian Johnson (owns the Security dev Center), Matt Powell (web services dev center) and Shawn Morrissey (who helps Sara with the reigns and also did a great presenation at the INETA User Group Leaders Summit on Sunday). Then we all went to dinner by the water with the military choppers cruising overhead once in a while, and after that back to my hotel where there was a party on the rooftop “beach bar” that I wandered up to. Becky, who was wearing the #1 best shirt from the whole PDC, that was from the WSE release and said on it “I’M SECURE!” saw me wobbling a bit when walking through the sand and yelled out “Lerman you are wasted!” Not quite… 🙂 Lots of folks up there and it was fun.

But I still hadn’t found Kate Gregory yet, who by the way, took lots of pics and was a good tech ed blogger so go check out her blog!

I was a bad blog girl all week. I just had a dizzying and fun time seeing so many friends and meeting so many new people and learning learning learning. (oh and a party or two…)

I thought I would just try to get my experience down on [paper?] though much of this will be redundant from many many other posts.

(Day – 1) I flew in Saturday. I arrived at the airport at 6:15 am (mind you, I am not a morning person…) to find that my flight was cancelled and I would be flying out at 1:30pm instead. This meant missing an important INETA meeting on Saturday afternoon that I was really looking forward to. I met up with Christian Nagel, (author, Austrian MSDN Regional Director, INETA Europe Director and wearer of many other hats as well) in the Dulles airport while we waited for our flight to San Diego. I got to see the 4 possible covers of his upcoming Addison-Wesley book on Enterprise Services and had an opportunity to vote on which cover I preferred. This new book is part of the awesome A-W .NET Development Series. Very impressed!

In S.D. we found Jas Sandhu while we were waiting for our bags and Jas and I headed up to La Jolla for Michele Leroux Bustamante’s party at her wonderful home and finally got to meet her hubby. I also met Richard Campbell in person for the first time there. what a great guy he is! Ted Neward had a car so we drove back to SD with him, almost by way of Los Angeles since the exit was really easy to miss. Ted exhibited a trait that we were all impressed with. He pulled off the highway and asked directions. Clemens Vasters was a exhausted from many hours of travel and [still blogless] Cathi Gero and I were teasing him that he was like one of those strangers on the NYC subways that doze off and end up with their head on your shoulder.

(Day 0 – INETA) Sunday was our all day INETA meeting. What fun it was to arrive and meet Joan Murray from Addison-Wesley after 2 years of communicating by email. There were so many people there and lots of new faces thanks to 20 “scholarship” invitees by D.E.s around the country. The meeting was all day. We had presentions by various INETA illuminati as well as a number of Microsoft folks. We learned how too work with sponsors, how to extend training within a user group, what Microsoft Developer Community Champions, Developer Evenglists and MSDN Regional Directors do and how to connect with them. We were presented with lots of information on how to work with resources at Microsoft. We also got to meet with many vendors (key to user group sponsorship and swag provision…). My own INETA committee, the User Group Relations committee, had an opportunity to do a little evangelizing to acquire some more liaisons. Since we are working with over 200 user groups in North America, we try to ensure that each user group leader has a personal relationship with someone at INETA and we continuously have to grow our committee in order to achieve that.

After the meeting, we migrated to a great cocktail party for INETA (surely, you’ve read about the tequila bottles by now) and I was also able to hook up with my Burlington pal, Ali Aghareza, who was very excited to be attending his very first conference.

After the cocktail party, Ali and a few others and I walked over to the convention center to register. By now it was about 9pm. On the way there, we bumped in to one person after another that was someone I am friends with and so happy to see, Stan Schultes,  (frequent VSM author and founder of the .NET Pub Clubs – link is to Russ Fustino’s page but has info on the pub clubs), Don Kiely and a host of others.

Back at the W MSDN was instrumental in sponsorship of the INETA meeting and had provided a block of rooms at the W San Diego Hotel that were filled up by many people attending the meetings. The W is a very trendy hotel. It’s not the kind of place where you can go buy a candy bar late at night. It is just filled with bars. It is also the hottest new nightspot in San Diego. Lots of young women with low cut  tight fitting shirts (it seems to be the main fashion trend in S.D.). Very trendy. I felt like a freakin’ school marm walking around there. Egads. But oh well. I finally went to bed at about 1:30 am (this is 4:30 my own time and I had gotten up at 5am that morning and of course did not sleep on the plane) and could still hear music from the bar way up on the 7th floor. Next time, I’m going to the old folks hotel. However, my room was beautiful and of course I love those fantastic Heavenly beds that are also in sister-hotel the Westin are, well, heavenly!

N. Alex Rupp was one of the many user group leaders invited to the INETA User Group Leader Summit on May 23rd. However, Alex is not a .NET User Group Leader but a Java developer who is very involved in the Java community. His weblog posts from the summit as well as his reaction to what he saw at TechEd are fascinating. I must admit, since I don’t know very much at all about the inner workings of EJB and all of the java techs, I did glaze over some of the deeper technical parts of the posts. But on a high level, comparing the communities, the tools and even the leaders (Ballmer’s keynote vs. McNealy’s at JavaOne) are very insightful.

Here are his posts from Day1, Day2, Day 3 and Day4. Thanks to Chris Pels for pointing out these posts.

I didn’t have a free moment at TechEd. I will write it all down soon…

The best thing, in my mind at TechEd is the cabanas. So many amazing people hanging out there and everyone and anyone can have access to them. It’s a beautiful space, light, birds. Not great for using computers (sunlight is a problem)…but great, relaxing and a lot of brain power happening in there.

I was just chatting with a sales person from MobilePlanet and when I mentioned shipping conflicts and a conference, she asked if I was on my way to TechEd.

She said that MobilePlanet has a booth there and that their #1 selling product during these conferences is….you guessed it…wireless cards!

So I need an SDIO card and they are NOT cheap …Socket’s is normally $109.95 with a deal right now (through 5/31) for $84.95. Ouch.

I have never had a pocket pc before but it sure seems a lot handier than whipping out even my little ACER tablet while wandering around TechEd. Of course if I don’t go start packing, I won’t be able to do much wandering in public…