Sorry, I got busy and didn’t post any more daily missives during Tech Ed. Here’s my ‘summary’ blog post on it.

Wednesday I ended up sleeping through my alarm, so I missed ScottGu’sfirst session on what’s new with 2.0, but I made it to his second session which was very popular and probably the better of the two, since he said it was much more demo-heavy whereas the first one had a lot more slides. The second session was very good. Wednesday night was an ‘Influentials’ party, which I attended after having dinner with some friends at a fantastic restaurant in the Peabody hotel. Best food of the week by far. I had the filet, Oscar style, which means covered with a sauce, crabmeat, and fresh (huge) asparagus. Yum. Not cheap, but excellent food.

The wednesday night influentials party was at Pointe Orlando in the Matrix/Underground clubs. It was ok, I got to see a lot of people there, including an old coworker of mine from my Software Architects days. He’s still working for SARK, down in Columbus, Ohio, which is where I started. In fact, the last time I was at Tech Ed, it was in Orlando (at the old convention center), and SARK was sending me along with another consultant. That seems like ages ago (2000) – it was a month before what would become .NET was announced at PDC 2000.

I didn’t stay out late Wednesday, but I ended up not being able to sleep, so Thursday was a pretty grueling day. I started it with Rob Howard’s Data Controls session, which was fun. I’ve seen most of these presentations from Scott and Rob many times over the last couple of years, but they’re frequently updated and since I give similar talks it’s good to see how otheres present the information. One thing I really liked about Rob’s talk was how he started an Application Center Test session and left it running as he tweaked the application in various ways. I’ve used ACT in demos before, especially when talking about caching, but usually I shut down each run before I start the next. His technique seemed more engaging, since I watched everyone in the audience perk up and pay attention as the graph updated in response to Rob’s configuration tweaks. So, next time I use ACT in a presentation, you’ll probably see me leaving it running (assuming it doesn’t totally kill my computer).

Also Thursday, I attended Brian Goldfarb’s session on Visual Studio Team System. I’m very interested in VSTS since it will replace a lot of tools I use today, including NUnit, NAnt, ACT, and Vault, if it manages to do everything it claims. I must say that the presentation was very compelling. At the same time, it’s rather overwhelming. VSTS has a LOT of features, and will take a long time for people to get a good grasp of. I see a lot of money in the VSTS training niche.

Thursday night was the attendee party at Universal Studios, but it was rainy so I decided to skip it and instead hung out and played around with some 2.0 code with Scott Cate. We’re building a little side project together as a test. Finally, I spent all day Friday at the Web Cabana answering questions (and asking a few). I helped out a few members of the ASP.NET team with some stuff they were working on, spoke with Nikhil and Andres a bit about the direction ASP.NET is heading, and continued working on my 2.0 side project.

My flight home was a bit interesting. I was supposed to connect through Charlotte and land in Akron around 11:30pm Friday. Instead, my Charlotte connection was delayed two hours, so I ended up getting in around 130am and getting to bed past 2:30am. But the layover in Charlotte did let me get some work done catching up on my Inbox, so it had some advantages.