We had to leave on Sunday from Amsterdam at 4:30 AM to get the plane to Barcelona at 6:55 AM. At the airport at 5 o’clock in the morning 3(!) non Dutch speaking employees at Starbucks were needed to get us a double espresso. This must be very good for employment and integration!
We arrived at 9:00 AM in Barcelona and after checking into the hotel and picking up our TechEd conference bags we were ready to explore Barcelona. It took some time to find our way in the metro but once you know, you like it.
We have visited the amazing Sagrada Familia, the home of FC Barcelona Camp Nou and of course La Rambla where we enjoyed the nice weather with tapas and beer.
On Monday at day 1 of the TechEd we arrived early to do some hands-on labs and to explore the conference place.
We were very surprised that with over 4000 visitor we had found a very nice and quiet spot to get online and enjoy our lunch. During lunch we were told that delegates were not allowed to join the speakers lounge (oops!) but we could finish our lunch and had a very nice chat with Howard Dierking who is Editor-in-Chief of MSDN Magazine.
At 14:00 Mr. S. (Soma) Somasegar welcomed us at the keynote. It is hard to believe the corporate vice president of the developer division cannot pronounce the word "developer".
Roy Osherove did a very good presentation on Agile development but the best of his presentation was his song “Every build you break” (from “Every breath you take” – Police) a few lines that I remember: Every build you break, every change you make, I will be watching you…
Accessibility and MOSS always have our special attention and we were very interested in the session about AKS (Accessibility Kit for SharePoint). We are very disappointed by the fact that the kit will not be very useful in our Dutch situation (see Waldek's post).
A developer of Gaia Ajax Widgets had contacted us through our blog and we visited their stand to say hello. They did a very good job on their product but I think they try to mimic a Windows application to much…
In the rest of week we focused mainly on MOSS 2007 development and ASP.NET and we were certainly not disappointed.
Ted Pattison has a very good reputation in the MOSS community and now I know why. Ted is a great speaker who brings the information simple and clear. A great eye-opener for me!
Patrick Tisseghem and Jan Tielens from U2U in Belgium also have made their good reputation in the community come true.
We have also bought 3 books on MOSS 2007 development:
- Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Ted Pattison; Daniel Larson
- Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Patrick Tisseghem
- Real World SharePoint 2007 – Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs
Although ASP.NET 2.0 already exists for a couple of years now there were some very good deep diving sessions especially the one of Rob Howard of Telligent.
Microsoft is eating his own dog food. A very good example of this is the TechEd website. It is completely build on MOSS 2007. Every delegate has is own personal space where you can make your own calendar, give session feedback and meet other delegates. One drawback is that you have to remember yet another userID and password to access your personal space. Why not use your Live ID for that??
Speaking about dog food… The food at the conference was not very good and you could tell after the terrible smell of the toilets. Although in between the sessions there was always plenty of coffee and refreshments and the organisation went very smoothly.
Microsoft Netherlands organised the Country drinks in CATWALK. This must be a very cool club when it is full of party people but with only 100 Dutch male developers and 3 females this was a very big disappointment. We have tried to compensate this with drinking to much Heineken which have seemed not a very good idea the next morning…
The latest trend in fashion will be the orange MSDN caps. Hundreds and hundreds of them were spread and taken away from the "Ask the Experts" area. I have also grabbed a nice and warm "Thinking Cap" from the Windows and Services stand.
Thanks to our employee Imtech ICT and to Microsoft for giving us this great experience! We are looking forward to TechEd 2008!
tmt