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