My trip to Tech Ed - Day 4

Today was the first real day of Tech Ed.

We had the continental breakfast in the meal hall. I'm amazed how easy everything flows. There's over 10K people here but there's hardly any lines anywhere.

After the breakfast we attended the keynote speech from Steve Ballmer. The fun part of it was when they showed some of the new features of Windows Mobile 5.0 that included push email.

Next was a break out session about some c# tips and tricks in the Visual Studio IDE 2005.
They had included some nice time saving features like snippets, xml-formattted snippets that you can write yourself to help automate tedious tasks like writing properties.

Session 2 was about an in depth look at the new features of c# 2.0.
The lecturer was the "father" of c#; which was really cool and he talked about:

Generics: Something java has had for a while, but generics in .net seem to be better implemented because they've actually adjusted the CLR making it a .NET feature and not just a language feature.

Some new cool handling of delegates that went in conjunction with generics.

Lunch was served after that and still things went very smooth. They had people posted at empty tables with huge signs that made it easy to find an open table.

After lunch i attended a session about the new Visual Studio Team System.
This was really interesting because it described a developent lifecycle and what Microsoft has done to help out with it.

It was basically a new server product that acted as a repository for all information related to a project. This meant that they've replaced source safe (!!!!). the other things included in this was basically a total rip off of cruise control.net and nant and nunit etc etc. But it's good that they've really put an effort into solving this and putting it into one product.

After this session there was a reception where we got some more food and then we wandered the exhibition hall collecting t-shirts and other freebies. We spent the rest of the evening at the pool before going to bed.