During dinner several of us were discussing the shortfalls and successes of the TechED so far. Successes Great speakers , good content , well delivered. Which when all considered is all that is needed. however Shortfalls Perceivable lack of Theme , each talk has been categorized and I do say perceived , as a chat to …

As all of the developer community knows , developers live on caffeine and freebies , for example a .NET 3.0 FX T-Shirt can keep a developer alive for over 2 weeks , a hat and pen will keep a developer going for over a week, and a rucksack or Jacket for several months. TechED has been a bit lite on Swag , but that has …

I was lucky enough to see a hands on session with Side Show yesterday afternoon, Dan Polivy who presented the sesssion brought along a selection of mock-up and nearly ready prototypes of mock up Slide Show devices , I think there has been a lot of misconceptions as to the purpose on Side Show and I think that …

Most interesting session for me today was on '_Offline Caching and Synchronization with a New ADO.NET Sync Framework'. T_his can be summed up as making Smart Client applications behave like Outlook i.e. occasionally connected, but all done without the user having to be involved. Thus allowing the application to run on …

So far the quality of presentations at TechED has been fantastic , the only downside technically so far has been a dead machine ( now rectified ). The must see slots have been by Roy Osherove , Anders Hejlsburg , Aaron Skonnard and Todd Bleeker. My favorite so far was a white boarding session with Aaron on …

Just seen that my session at DDD4 has received enough votes to get on the schedule for the event in December, thanks to everyone who voted for it. If you have not been to a previous DDD event I would really recommend having a look at this day conference, I am sure anyone can learn a lot and a great networking …

End of the second day and just got back from the UK Party, the only real big social event at this party lite TechEd. After yesterday's SQL focus today I have wandered a bit, some Test Driven Dvelopment (TDD), some C# 3.0 futures as well as some other bits. Unlike other conferences I have been to, I think it is hard to …

So the first day is over and where have I been? we most of the day I have been in the Kimberly Tripp sessions on SQL optimization. All three have been excellent, but what as a day-to-day C# developer (as opposed to an SQL developer) have I learnt. Well it can be summed uo as any guess I make over indexes are wrong, and …

Kimberly Tripp is well regarded in SQL Server circles and after watching part 1 of a 2 part session on advanced indexing you can really see why. The depth of knowledge that Kimberly demonstrates is outstanding. Part 2 is about to start, looking round and part 1 has thinned the crowd a little. I will update after the …

It is a feeling of deja-vue, having been to the PDC last year the keynote was very similar; but that is what you would expect as PDC is an inspiring futures' event and TechEd, especially at this point in the release cycle is a 'its here now use it' event. On the more futures side the LINQ demo's are certainly slicker. …