First day at the TechEd Developer 2007

In contrast to last year's TechEd, the first day is not a pre-conference day, but starts with the traditional keynote. However, we did not know that it would not start until 14:00. So we used the morning to do some shopping and getting ourselves a nice (but cheap) breakfast in the sun. I finally convinced Arnold Jan to buy a decent jacket and drop his Aviva Solutions jacket. I'd rather not walk around next to a walking billboard. Sorry Bart :-)

Since we already registrered ourselves before the 1st of July, we were entitled as Early Birds. In addition to an ugly baseball cap we were allowed to sit in the front of the keynote session. I typically don't really care about keynotes, but the techno music was great. Check out the picture with the two of us below...and notice the smiles...without any alcohol (yet).

Unfortunately, the organization has not learned from last year. Soma Somasegar may be the corporate vice president and from what I've heard he is a nice guy, but he is definitely not the best speaker. Nevertheless, one of his product managers gave a great demo showing the full potential of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. And after making an important announcement (see the post of Arnold Jan van der Berg), they played a very funny demo highlighting some of the way Microsoft works internally.

The first real presentation today was done by Daniel Moth. I've been following his blog very closely because he is one of the few who has been posting a lot (and with a lot, I mean a lot (!)) about Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. It appeared that he is a gifted speaker as well. One of the great things I learned today is that many of the new C# 3.0 features are also available to .NET Framework 2.0 applications. In fact, all new IDE features are as well (such as Javascript Intellisense and debugging and the new ASP.NET features). Make sure you check out his blog as well.

The second presentation was held by Roy Osherove and dealt with the various aspects of Agile development and the way Team System facilitates that. Since it did not know much of Scrum, it was interesting to see how you can make other Agile methodologies work with VSTS. Other than highlighting some very recognizing project management challenges, he actually played a piece of music on his guitar. And I must say, not bad at all. This session lasted until 19:00 and concluded the first day. Now we need to get ready for Olaf Conijn's birthday party.