I'll be at TechEd, though only for three days during the week. I've heard another local refer to this as “too close to home” disease. That person lives so close to Boston that it makes no sense to stay in a hotel. Therefore he's already worried about his plan to stop by the office in the mornings on the way into Boston for “only a few minutes”. I can get to Boston in about 3 1/2 hours if there is no traffic. My husband is in stitches over my plan to be on the road at 6am on Tuesday morning. (Just not a morning person.) But going I am and early I'll be!
There is so much to do at TechEd. I'm not sure how much I can pack in but here are some of the things I have on my mind (and in my calendar):
- Announcements Announcements. I'm sure Microsoft could plan to make one big announcement every hour and fill up the entire week! WinFX is now officialy .NET 3.0, VS2005 Database Pro Edition, Vista Beta 2 is out, the usual list of imminent stuff (Atlas, LINQ, Expression Designers, VS.Next (Orcas), IIS7) and more more more.
- ADO.NET Meetup Tuesday late afternoon: organized by Jonathan Bruce of DataDirect. Pablo Castro, the Technical Lead for the ADO.NET team, and Bob Beauchemin, a long time data access guru will be giving short presentations and the rest of the time will be a panel and gobs of Q&A. That I'm looking forward to. There's a small chance of John Papa making an appearance too! (I just thought I'd add a little pressure by blogging that...)
- This will be the first TechEd that I am not doing any BOFs, which I'm sad about, but since I didn't know my schedule in advance, I wasn't able to make the commitment.There are so may excellent BOFs happening in the evenings and once again, they are abley coordinated and happily hosted by INETA. You can filter the session schedule on Session Type=“Birds of a Feather“ to see the schedule of the 41 sessions. I like “Information Overload - My Brain is Exploding!“ by my friend to the north, Guy Barrette. I did a similar session at last year's TechEd, but there are twice as many new things coming down the pipe now as there were a year ago. I also have an op-ed piece on this in the May/June issue of CoDe. Lots and lots of people are coming out of the closet with this now so this should be a fun session.
- Women in Technology luncheon - Wednesday. Rather than a panel this year, there will be one featured speaker. Lori Brownell, Microsoft General Manager. This is one of the most relaxed and fun networking events of TechEd and I wouldn't miss it for the world.
- Did I mention the over 900 break out sessions and hands on labs? :-)
- The keynote is tonight (Sunday). You can watch it on www.virtualTechEd.com!
- Focus Groups. These are very productive “bitch & stitch” session (without the knitting needles though) with the product teams. Generally you need to sign up in advance.
- 1/2 price Certification Testing. I knocked two certs at TechEd a few years ago. They were the easy ones - WinForms and Web. Just walked up and took them. I still have to take one more test if I want to have an MCAD. Its the test that has web services (not a problem) and remoting (I don't know a thing!) on it. I wonder if the do-over “2nd shot“ program will work with this. I could sit down and take the test and see how it goes. If I don't pass it, I can spend an hour drillig in on the areas that I messed up on and then takeit again immediately while it's still fresh in my brain. Seems like a bad way to waste the few precious days I have at TechEd, but I'm still a little tempted.
- Did I mention the over 900 break out sessions and hands on labs? :-)
- It wouldn't be TEchEd without parties. There are plenty.
- I'm bummed my pal Renee Reiser who I only get to see at TechEd as she lives in Alaska, won't be making it. But I'm saving up my air miles!
So I know this is going to be a busy three days. I plan to blog as much as I can about it. The reality is that it's the links that take the most time, so I may blog quickly and then go in and fill the links in later.