Once the trees start coloring red and yellow, fall is in the air and that means another edition of TechEd Europe is taking place as well. For the second time in a row, the largest conference for Microsoft developers and IT professionals was organized in Berlin, Germany. For me personally, this was the fourth time I attended TechEd. While TechEd is not a developer-only conference anymore (some years ago, the event was split in a week developer-only and IT-Pro only), there’s a good amount of developer-content to be found. Sadly, no big announcements for developers though, they all happened at PDC 10 which was organized about 10 days earlier.
This edition had a very special meaning for me since it was the first time I was selected as speaker for the event. Let me walk you through my experience of the 4 day event.
Day 1: Monday
For the first time (as far as I can remember personally in any case), TechEd was not a full five day event. On Monday, which is normally the day the event starts, Microsoft choose to set up a pre-conference. The sessions varied from Windows Phone 7 development overview to deep architectural dives. Sadly, I arrived too late to attend.
Day 1 was closed with the official opening of TechEd 2010: indeed, the keynote which is traditionally the real opening of a conference was at the end of Monday. The biggest focus of the keynote was, of course, the cloud. Delivered by Brad Anderson, Brad highlighted the importance of the cloud for Microsoft. Proof of this is that Microsoft is focusing on delivering Software as a Service (Saas), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Related to this, Microsoft announced Hyper-V Cloud, which can help companies deploying private clouds. Some demos on Windows Phone 7 and Office 365 were shown as well.
Day 2: Tuesday
With the “real conference” kicked off, we were ready for 4 days of brain food. Tuesday was the only day for me on which I was not presenting myself, so I had the time to do some session attending. I started my day with a really interesting session on using Web Matrix by Bill Staples. While this session was marked as a level 200 session, it had a good pace to it, building up a nice demo which showed all features (including the extensibility points of the platform) towards the end of the talk.
Fellow RD Tim Huckaby managed to get a full room and quite some laughs for his Data Visualizations in Silverlight and WPF talk. He managed to impress the audience with some really nice demos of applications built by his company.
In the next timeslot, I choose for the Future of C# talk by Mads Torgenson. This talk was sadly a reprise of the PDC10 talk of Anders Hejlsberg, so I didn’t learn a lot of new things here. That said, there a nice future waiting for us with the dawn of C# 5: this session was mainly about the async features coming in the new version, which will make async development easier. Thinking about the fact that our beloved Silverlight does all server communication in an asynchronous manner, this is certainly something to keep an eye on!
After a decent lunch, I selected Jeff Prosise’s session, a level 400 session on Silverlight tips and tricks. This was a nice deep-technical talk on Silverlight development. I knew most things, but I did learn a few things which is a good sign.
Since Wednesday, I was doing my first-even TechEd presentation myself, I went to the hotel to go through my slides and demos one last time.
Day 3: Wednesday
Important day, so I got up really early! All speakers need to do a tech check: a 20-minute test of all technical stuff related to your session on the day of your talk. Many things can go wrong, but the staff at an event like this is very capable and knows what to do. My setup was simple: I was just using my laptop, so attaching and testing the beamer was all there was to it. I did witness setups where speakers were carrying around servers, so I’m happy to be a developer, not an IT Pro!
Before I had my session, I managed to attend a couple of sessions. The first one was on Orchard by Bradley Millington, an open-source CMS project, based on ASP.NET MVC. The Orchard project is being developed by people of Microsoft and the project is interesting to follow, not only for the CMS part, but the source code is a treasure of good design and best practices. Definitely worth a few hours of your time. Secondly, I attended Christian Wenz’s session on SEO and security in RIA (Silverlight and AJAX) applications. Christian talked about interesting topics such as browser history and improving the discoverability of a Silverlight application by a search engine bot.
After lunch, I attended… my own session, quite logically. The title of my session was ‘What you, as an ASP.NET developer, need to know about jQuery’. As can be deducted from the title, the session focused on jQuery, mainly giving an overview of the possibilities of the jQuery platform. This includes fundamentals such as selectors and the ready handler, but also more advanced stuff such as Ajax from jQuery, templates and data linking. I was surprised that so many people were interested in this topic: the room, which had over 350 seats, was full and between 50 and 100 people could not fit in. Therefore, I also did a repeat of my session on Friday. The feedback on my session was very good, I’m very happy to know that people learned a lot from my session.
Day 4: Thursday
Thursday was a busy day as well. I had 2 interactive sessions planned. The first one was the Silverlight Panel, where I got to answer questions from the audience together with Pete Brown and Laurent Bugnion. I was expecting many questions regarding the recent Silverlight/HTML 5 debate. However, only the very first question was related to this. All 3 of us gave our view on the state and future of Silverlight (you can read my view on this here). Most of the other questions were answered, however one did remain somehow unanswered: “When does Silverlight 5 get released?”. A lot more info however will be disclosed by Scott Guthrie at the upcoming Silverlight Firestarter event on December 2nd.
The second interactive session I gave was the Web Platform Panel, where I was joined by Christian Wenz and Bradley Millington for an interesting discussion on the state (and future direction) of the Microsoft web stack. Since Bradley is the man behind the previously discussed Orchard project, a lot of the discussion time was focusing on the CMS options we currently have in ASP.NET (DotNetNuke…). He did mention that a marketplace for added functionality (such as SnowCovered for DotNetNuke) is one thing they’re looking at for Orchard as well. Great news!
Day 5: Friday
The closing day of the event! After a tiring week, I was happy to have learned a lot. However, I did another session, namely the repeat of my own jQuery session and then left for home.
Conclusion
With over 6000 attendees and 700 sessions, TechEd Europe is still the largest conference in its kind. The great organization, nice and interesting partner area and technical content added to the value. I must confess that the 2009 edition was not really good for developers; the conference was too much aimed at IT Pros. That certainly changed this year: the 2010 edition was much more in balance and gave great value for money.