TechEd was a whirlwind and I never had a chance to breathe, much less blog. I plan to catch up with a few posts but I wrote this one on the plane coming home before I passed out from exhaustion.
I blew in on Tuesday afternoon rather than Sunday (first delay, second delay) and immediately did an Ask the Expert session on Silverlight Annotation which was a blast. It was non-stop the entire time I was there. After the session, Stuart Celarier appeared to tell me my Entity Framework BOF, which I thought was the next day (!), was starting and it was a long walk (which I ran the entire way carrying two back packs) to get there. There were about 70 people there and I was happy to meet David Sceppa and Ward Bell in person finally. David is also writing an E.F. book (for MS Press) so we played tag team with a lot of the questions (and I thought a great team, at that!) A BOF is supposed to be a conversation, and I kept trying to throw the discussion back to the group, but I just couldn’t steer it away from a Q&A session – which of course, with the help of some very knowledgeable people who were there, was a lot of fun.
As soon as that was done, I had to go back to my hotel (little did I know that the route I chose was the long way around to the hotel) for a quick change and head to an awesome dinner (at Emeril’s) which deserves its own blog post. The short story on the dinner was that it was a small dinner with Somasegar, Tandy Trower (who has been at Microsoft for over 26 years and currently is the GM for the Microsoft Robotics Group) and Robert Wahbe. Technically, I had the least in common with Tandy, but he and I had the most fun and I’m looking forward to getting him to come to Vermont someday. It’s interesting to me that I am tagged somewhere as “blogger” which is why I get invited to do things like this and the Mix n Mash event, as opposed to “community person” which defined the attendees of the Bill Gates luncheon. But the beauty of this is that I end up getting the best of both worlds! After dinner I headed back to the hotel where of course, plenty of my pals who I haven’t seen in a while were easily found in the lobby bar.
The next day it was go go go again with the Women in IT luncheon which was as packed as it has always been even when TechEd was combined Dev & I.T. It was a huge pleasure and honor to be on the panel with some amazing women and of course, the one and only Eileen Brown as the moderator. I think more than anywhere, I was totally in my element at this event.
After that I was very fortunate to spend quite a bit of time with Brad Sarsfield who is one of the performance guys in Data Programmability. I had a perf demo that I was dissatisfied with and learned a ton while we worked out what might be causing what looked like a not very credible result.
Then I ran to the next BOF, “Going Solo” which Steve Smith and I co-hosted.It was an awesome conversation with a nice balance of solos and “solo curious”. Steve is a good organizer. I played Carol Merril to his Monty Hall.
After that it was time for a little partying (a very little partying as it was a school night for me). There were a bunch of parties that night. I attended one of them for an entire half hour! That was the sum of “play time” for me at TechEd. Then back to the hotel to work until the wee hours followed by Thursday with my two talks nearly back to back. I at least took some time out for lunch where I got to catch up with Joe Stagner and Stan Spotts and about 5 minutes with Brian Loesgen before I had to bolt yet again.
My last talk ended at 4 and I had to bolt (yet again) for the airport immediately after that! So that was it. I blew in, did my thing and left. Now I’m on my way home to Vermont where I will get to spend the ENTIRE summer. I’m going nowhere until “fall conference season” starts up with PDC and DevConnections and maybe one or two others. And of course, I have a wee bit of writing to catch up on.
