Much to the surprise of my husband, I did manage to get on the road at 6:10 a.m. Tuesday morning. The day is nearly a blur so much happened. It didn't start well when the registration folks could not find my registration in the system, but luckily I was able to show them the emails I received from them after I registered, so that didn't take too long to clear up.
I never made it up to the breakout session rooms, spending the day in the cabana and expo areas. TechEd evolves year after year. Normally, there is a cluster of "booths" for the various Microsoft developer and IT technologes in the expo hall with all of the other vendors. This year, these were out in the same area as the cabanas (which have been renamed again) and lounges. It was great to have it consolidated and to have all of the people we want to talk to in one place, but I think it put a damper on the MVPs that were also designated to help out in these areas since so many Microsoft experts were readily available.
The community area was tucked away in a dark little corner this year. INETA and the RD lounge were hard to find which is a bummer. Here are Chris Wallace and Chris Pels from the INETA board.
CodeZone, who's booth was pretty dead last year, had created a promotion that really engaged attendees and there were long lines all day of people spinning a wheel for assorted prizes. That was great to see.
Wandering around the various developer technology areas, I naturally found myself pulled toward the Connected Sytems booth where I found Steve Maine, who was responsible for the WCF extensions for Atlas. I was happy to be able to tell him that I acutally started playing with that finally, two days before I headed to Boston. The extensions make it simple for Atlas apps to make requests to WCF services. I was playing with this because I wanted to first get a simple sample working and then see what the story was for adding security in - which is already complicated for Atlas even with ASMX services. Steve helped me avoid wasting a lot of time by explaining that because of the limitations of working in client side script, there is no way to begin attaching the necessary goo to the request to make it conform to WS-Security. Although there is JSON to help with this in ASMX, with WCF the only answer is HTTPS. (I sure hope I got that right!)
Continuing on my Connected Systems path, I found myself at the booth for the Patterns and Practices booth where I got to visit with Don Smith who is one of the people behind the great Web Service secuirty (WSE2 and WSE3) guidance that this group has put out. Over the last few weeks, Don and I have been having a conversation about the difficulty ITPros are having understanding WS-Security. The crux of this was that I was trying to explain to the IT guys at one of my client's sites that I needed a web server certificate but that I wasn't doing HTTPS or using that to authenticate the server. It took me a few iterations to figure out how best to get the idea across.
I had a fun lunch with the crew (inlcuding the DevLead) of TechSmith - producers of two products that I (and most people who know them) find amazing : SnagIt and Camtasia Studio. I loved learning that they use Visual Studio (C++) to write these products and also that Dave, the dev lead, had attended Kate Gregory's C++ talk. Kate is a wonderful teacher, so I'm always happy to hear people talk about how much they get out of her sessions. We nabbed Carl Franklin on the way to lunch so that of course made it even more entertaining.
In the late afternoon, I attended the ADO.NET meetup which was great and I devoted a separate post to that.
After I got lost for quite some time trying to get the short distance from the convention center to the hotel in my car, I managed that and got to catch up with that nght's roomie, Esther Schindler before the now Boston-ite, Sara Williams (former lead of MSDN) and her husbad Robb picked me up so we could have visit before heading off the the party that was being put on by TechNet and MSDN Mag - which was phenomenally fun and for me, wonderful since it was an opportunity to meet up with so many of my friends that I only get to see at these events. I didn't bring my camera with me to the party because I didn't want to be accused of attempting to blackmail anyone.