May 2004 - Posts
According to the TechEd site, here are the details for the next two TechEds:
Tech·Ed 2005, Orlando, FL, June 5–10
Tech·Ed 2006, Boston, MA, June 11–16
I admit I'm torn about having 2006 in Boston. While I do think it is long overdue that a northern city host a TechEd, well, I live just outside Boston!
I look forward to TechEd as a week away from distractions where I can geek out and focus on drinking Microsoft Kool-Aid. With the conference so close to home, I'll have to face the commute to Boston and the potential to be pulled into the office.
On the plus side, the chances that more people from Monster will be able to attend would be much higher. Also, since Boston is such a fantastic city, it will be great to expose the TechEd community to all it has to offer.
I can only wonder what the attendee party will feature. Duck tours over to the Hatch Shell for some Jim's Big Ego or Push Stars (two of my favorite Boston bands)? Amusement parks like Canobie or Six Flags are too far away... Museum of Science? Aquarium?
Any other guesses?
-Chris
What a week! So much going on and so little time left over at the end each day. I had intended to write a summary of each day, but utterly failed to do so.
I'm sitting in CommNet now with about 45 minutes left until I'll be braving the holiday weekend airport scene.
Overall, I'm very satisfied with TechEd this year. As I mentioned before, this is my sixth one, so I have some perspective on what makes a good TechEd.
The content was great - I had lots of excellent breakouts. The cabanas were a great idea that unfortunately had serious flaws in execution (at least at first - they attempted to mitigate some of the issues later in the week.) Specifically, having Microsoft employees and other involved third parties on hand during the day, available for any discussion, was fantastic. The problem was that they also conducted breakout sessions in these cabana areas. Due to the nature of the Sails Pavillion at the convention center, it was difficult to see the monitors and very difficult to hear the presenter from any more than 10 feet away.
The convention center itself, while not bad, is not one of the best ones we've had. A bit difficult to get to/from certain areas. I miss having large areas of grass to stretch out and have a quick rest during the day. Not much like that here - lots of concrete. There are some nice views of the water, but I'd trade the latter for the former.
The hands-on labs were good in terms of content, but I would sometimes find a machine/lab combination that simply didn't have enough juice while running under the Virtual PC instance. However, that didn't stop me from doing about 5-6 of them!
Of greatest interest to me is Visual Studio .NET 2005 and the Team System addition. Tons of great work done there. It was good to get many details (and chances to use) the new features, so I can plan and adjust our current architecture and approaches to make migration easier when they are available.
More later. I'm off to sacrifice a small woodland creature to the God of Connecting Flights...
-Chris
Brian Loesgen of INETA has a great post detailing the San Diego area, check it out! I've recently volunteered with INETA, so I'm looking forward to the chance to meet Brian and others at TechEd.
I've also found some good resources:
Looking forward to great content and meeting many talented people!
-Chris
I noticed that the BOF sessions have been added since my last visit to the TechEd scheduling system. Unfortunately, two promising BOF sessions I had hoped to attend are scheduled for the same slot:
BOF35 Continuous Integration in .NET
Tuesday, May 25 6:30 PM- 7:30 PM, 16A
BOF36 Integrating Unit Testing Tools and Practices Into the Software Development LifeCycle
Tuesday, May 25 6:30 PM- 7:30 PM, 16B
Another sad case of wanting to see everything, but not being able to be in two places at the same time. Well, it seems the sessions are next door to each other, so maybe I should spend the hour running between the rooms for 5 minutes at a time? :)
Is anyone planning to attend either of these? Let me know and we can share notes afterward.
Now, to address the fact that I have on average 3.5 sessions picked for each breakout slot...
-Chris
After reading other people's blogs for close to two years now, I'm finally doing something about my shameful lack of blogging. Many thanks to dotnetjunkies.com for providing hosting services for my blog!
I'll post a longer “About Me” post later on, but for now, here's a brief version:
I'm currently Senior Architect with Monster Worldwide, Inc. (aka Monster.com) where I lead the .NET Architecture team. We're responsible for guiding the organization through the process of migrating to the .NET platform from ASP/COM/VB. We also define .NET development standards and practices for the company and publish a variety of tools for internal developer usage.
My current areas of interest are Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration, Scalability/Performance, Internationalization/Customization, Software Architecture and Code Management/Reviews.
I'm also involved as a developer leader with the Boston .NET User Group.
I will be attending TechEd in San Diego next week and am looking forward to it very much. This is TechEd #6 for me and I always enjoy the week as a chance to recharge my Geek Batteries.
One of the people on my team, Tim Weaver, just pointed out to me that we are now famous!*
We're both listed in the "Contributors and Reviewers" section of the newly published Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability guide from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group (aka the PAG team.)
I'll be expecting throngs of people waving their copies of the book - er, PDF - at me during TechEd demanding autographs.
The guide is definitely worth a read if you're concerned about scalability/performance of your .NET applications. One of my favorite chapters was 15, “Measuring .NET Application Performance” which features an excellent summary of performance counters, their meanings and critical thresholds.
Thanks to the PAG team for making such excellent content freely available.
-Chris
* Okay, not capital "F" Famous, but more of a tiny, barely perceptible fame - akin to "I'm a distant friend of the person who wrote the theme song for the 1983 television show Whiz Kids" fame.