Category Archives: Tech Ed

My TechEd Swag Mobile

I’ve seen a few posts like Jeff, suggesting that you bring an extra bag in your suitcase to bring swag home. Heck TechEd is in my backyard this year and I’m driving. So if I were a swaghound – I would have the ability to bring home a lot of cubic yards of stuff! I’ll definitely go trolling a little for my user group,but that will be about it.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

New friends at TechEd

This could be an endless post – shout out to so many bloggers I met in person for the first time at TechEd.

First and foremost is Amanda Murphy who I have known virtually for over a year and meeting her was like meeting a younger sister. Amanda runs a user group in St. Johns Newfoundland (practially out in the middle of the ocean). She won one of the INETA Scholarships to TEchEd (after a) the invitation to apply had landed in her junk mail box and b) after I got her to FIND the invite, still almost didn’t apply becasue she thought she would never get it.) Ha. Watch this girl – I think she is definitely an up & comer in the .NET community.

Also, I loved meeting Chris WilliamsJason Olson, seeing a bunch of the guys from MAD Code Camp again (like Frank LaVigne and Jeff Schoolcraft). Lorenzo Barbieri seemed a little surprised that I recognized him – the value of a good blog, having your picture on it and a few years of Italian in college (plus some help from Google language tools). I am going to try to find a GURU shirt for myself.

Oh, of course there are hundreds more. You know who you are! 🙂



TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

The best TechEd Session ever!

I can’t believe that I just found a picture on Kirk Allen Evan’s blog documenting what had to be the BEST TechEd session this week.

I was sitting at a cabana table this morning with some of my favorite German and North Carolinian guys, and the topic of transactions came up. I am admittedly pretty light when it comes to distributed transactions, but have had to dig deeper into them as of late, for example in preparation for the MARS webcast which I did with Glen Gordon (who I got to meet in person this week!) and also in yesterday’s conversations about DTC. Mentioning this, I suddenly found myself having a 20 minute private training session with Clemens Vasters, Rich Turner and Christian Weyer all teaching me about transaction resource managers. Just me. Three brilliant instructors, one student. 

Clemens walked me through a transaction resource manager that he has written and I was introduced to a whole new flavor of programming model. I have been limited to thinking about transactions only in the scope (ummm, no pun intended) of database transactions. I always feel that I am pretty much representative of the bulk of developers out there, so surely this is not an uncommon misconception.

Kirk posted a bunch of TechEd pictures and as I was looking at them tonight, I  was surprised, but happy, to see that he had captured the moment!

I think that we will soon all have our eyes opened up a little more about leveraging DTC to create transaction resource managers.

Also in the photo are Don Smith and Don Browning at the same table, and Robert Hurlbut (who also knows a thing or two about DTC) at the table behind us.

Posted from BLInk!

Whassup TechEd

Every year at TechEd it feels like a different experience to me – but always a great one!

In addition to attending some WSE talks today, the highlight of the day was the BOFs at the end of the day. But first was the CodeZone launch party which was fun to attend.

There were 30 BOFs last night! They have 3 time slots with 10 BOFs each. (You can filter on Birds of a Feather on the breakout page to see tonight’s schedule.) I attended Keith Pleas’ BOF to help people with migrating their VB6 apps to .NET (I’m lucky  -I only had to migrate my mind, not any applications), I co-hosted a BOF for women coders (who sometimes don’t generally get a chance to meet other women in their field!). This was great fun as always and Cathi Gero helped me host it. In addition to Cathi, I was happy to have some notable women devs show up including Olga Londer who has authored three books and Ginny Coffey who is speaking at TechEd. It’s nice to be able to have some really visible women to highlight. There were also some guys there including the affable Michael Kaplan (who had somehow temporarily evaded his stalkers).

After this I hung around for Tim Huckaby’s rousing debate on “What the heck is a smart client, anyway”. That one was continued at a hotel bar when the convention center closed down.

TechEd for me is more about catching up with people and meeting new folks. The cabanas this year are expanded but they have a different feel. Since they have a much larger space, the spaces set up for hanging out are segregated from one another, which somehow makes it different. Hard to explain.

Today will be a jam packed busy day. I’ll be working at the MyCodeZone booth for a few hours, then to the Women in I.T. luncheon, hopefully time for some afternoon sessions and then working at the TabletPC booth from 4-5. I even have one of the blue shirts – which I guess I’ll have to wear all day since it is a bit of a haul back to the wonderful hotel that I am staying at. Things are definitely spread out and the hotel for mingling is the Peabody – right by the convention center and it is the speaker hotel. But once I get back here, it’s basically up to the room and done for the night. A little less partying for me this year. I must be getting boring in my “old age”.

http://www.AcehAid.org

A week of torture

If you are not going to be at TechEd, and come on, there are millions of developers and only 10,000 or so attendees  so there’s a chance you aren’t  (although there aren’t millions of developers reading my blog, so it does narrow the field a bit 🙂 ) – prepare yourself for a week of torture. Once at TechEd, that’s basically all that a blogger (attending) will blog about. Saw this session, met that person, went to this party…. But hey, it’s the next best thing to being there….

The first year I was there I did give a blow by blow of all the people that I ran into. Now it is not possible because over the years I have gotten to know so many people. Anyway, I STILL have to pack and the clock is ticking.

http://www.AcehAid.org