Microsoft Tech-Ed: Friday June 6

My last day at Tech-Ed was fairly uneventful. The morning started out well with the final Data Dude session, which included the full demo of the DB2 support that was announced. Only about ten people showed up to that presentation, but that's pretty much expected for early Friday morning. Still, it was nice to have my software displayed in it's full functionality. The keynote presentation really didn't show much.

That brings up another point. I never really thought about the personal honor in having my software in the keynote presentation of one of the biggest technology conferences, and featuring Bill Gates. I had only looked at it from a task point of view - it was something to do and something to get done. One Microsoft employee commented on how it was pretty amazing to have only been working at IBM for under 2 years and already have my software in the Tech-Ed keynote. Apparently, most Microsoft employees would kill for that. I didn't know what to say, so I made some comment about watching my back.

I guess I felt like I had achieved a slightly higher level of maturity, having accomplished this. I think I felt even more mature at the airport waiting for my flight back home, though. I was able to keep up a conversation with a stranger (who had Tech-Ed in common) for a full two hours. It was fairly amazing, from my perspective.

It's time for the most important part of this post: a full cataloging of what I got in Orlando:

• 14 t-shirts
• 1 slinky
• 1 squishy basketball
• 1 flying, howling monkey
• 1 foam dart flinger
• 1, 1GB flash drive
• 1 medium-sized notepad/binder w/ pen
• 1 mechanical pencil
• 1 water bottle
• 1 backpack
• 1 LINQ pocket reference book
• 1 luggage tag
• 1 key chain compass

Microsoft Tech-Ed: Thursday June 5

Once again, we'll start with what's important. Breakfast today had nice crisp bacon, good sausage, eggs, biscuits and gravy, and bagels. I overate slightly, but that's not too much of a problem.

My early morning session involved adding indexes to objects queried through LINQ, and would be interesting and useful if I had to do that for actual applications. It's just not something that can be worked into a generic data provider, near as I can tell. It was still a good talk, if a bit light on content (there was half an hour left out of a 75 minute presentation time slot).

My next morning talk was on DataDude and the new features in the GDR release (8 weeks after SQL Server 2008 is finished, apparently). There were a lot of cool features presented in the talk. It will be interesting to learn more about DataDude's capabilities as I move forward on my work project.

Lunch was pretty standard, but wasn't my favorite. There was some good Mongolian beef dish, but I probably should have skipped the rest.

For my 1:00pm session, I attended another DataDude talk on database references. It was a bit strange just because we spent 30-40 minutes talking about a few workarounds and random other stuff, then talked about the upcoming VS2008 GDR release which will apparently remove a lot of those situations. It was unclear exactly when we'll need the information we acquired once the new release comes out, but knowledge is good for its own sake, sometimes.

The next session was also on DataDude, but was a basic overview of functionality, which I've seen before a few times. The presenter was a non-Microsoft consultant, though, and it was interesting to hear what he found to be the coolest aspects, and then hear the questions and concerns from current and potential developers and DBAs.

The main happening on Thursday was the Attendee Party, though. Everyone was bussed over to Universal Studios for a three-hour exclusive party. All food and drinks were free, and the pool of people waiting for rides was limited to just the 6,000 people attending Microsoft Tech-Ed this week. Of course, that's still a lot of people, and the wait for the new Simpson's ride was 45 minutes during the first half or more of the party. When we were leaving, we saw it had dwindled down to about 20 minutes. The wait for all the other rides, like Jaws and Men In Black, was about 10-15 minutes. E.T., being rather sucky, was a very short wait, but I knew from a previous visit to Universal Studios in L.A. that E.T. sucked, so I didn't even have to waste that amount of time. The Disaster ride apparently broke, because people were leaving the short line an hour before the party ended.

Now, when I say food and drinks were free, I mean that the were included in the conference price of ~$1995. If I had lost my wrist-band and still wanted to attend the party, I would have to pay $110. Additional guest passes for those that brought their family along were also $110 each. That's really quite a lot of money for a three-hour party. But, since I didn't have to pay, I'm glad I got to go.

I've been trying to think of the single word that best describes the combination of extravagance, phoniness, gaudiness, cheesiness, chaos, and consumerism that makes up those types of amusement parks. I think I may end up getting TiVo when I get kids just so they can skip the commercials for all the crap out there, and minimize that influence. I don't want my kids begging me to go to these places, then beg me some more to buy random souvenir crap. It's all a bit depressing, really.

But the party was fun anyway.

Microsoft Tech-Ed: Wednesday June 4

This morning, the bus line was extremely long - one of the cons of being the second hotel on the route. Breakfast's bacon was much better today, though, so I was quite happy with the morning.

My morning talk was on managed to native interop best practices, which turned out to be a slight waste of time. C++/CLI and COM interop don't really apply to my current programming tasks, so I plan on remembering the keywords to look up when/if I actually need them. I will continue to use PInvoke, is what it comes down to. The second talk on LINQ and VS2008 IDE tips and tricks (combined and how they relate) was an excellent session. The speaker was Amanda Silver, so if you ever have the chance to attend a presentation of hers, I highly recommend it.

Lunch was a bit on the mediocre side, but the baked macaroni and cheese was surprisingly good. The conversation was better, and just as informative for me as most of the talks here. Which brings me to a surprising fact: Attending conferences can be tiring, even when you're just sitting in rooms learning. I guess my brain is working harder than I think sometimes.

I missed the afternoon sessions in order to prepare a virtual machine for a DataDude talk on Friday morning. It is nice to see all my work over the past few months start to come together for something practical, even if it's just a presentation, rather than a functional product. But, at one point, the press releases seemed to indicate that I need to have something done by the end of the year, so we'll have to see what happens. My busy work schedule may continue for awhile...

Dinner this evening was at SeaWorld in one of the pavilions. It was a bit awkward at first, because there was a live band for background music and very few people. The food was nothing to write home about, but I guess I'm doing that anyway, in a way. We left dinner on the earlier side in order to enter the rest of the park. We saw the Shamu Rocks show, and a ski show, then walked around until the 10:00pm fireworks Mystify show. The word cheesy comes to mind. I was only there for a couple of hours, and I'm just glad that I didn't have to pay, and that I didn't have to be there longer. If there's one thing recently that would keep me from having kids, it's attending this amusement park. I do not look forward to having to be at one again, and keeping track of kids in that chaos can only make such an experience even more taxing. And you all should know by now how much I hate taxes.

Needless to say, I'm going straight to bed tonight.

Microsoft Tech-Ed: Tuesday June 3

The keynote presentation was fairly enjoyable. Bill Gates had a "last full day at Microsoft" video which had some funny appearances from multiple celebrities. The demonstrations were interesting enough, too. IBM made an appearance in one, and that can be read about on an MSDN blog: DataDude goes multi-platform. It was nice to see some of my work make an appearance in front of thousands of people, but even better was that the demonstration worked!

Anyway, breakfast was pretty decent. The bacon needed to be crisper in order to be really enjoyable, but luckily, I only grabbed 7 pieces. I spent the rest of the day attending talks on LINQ, data binding in Windows Presentation Framework, DataDude, and parallel programming.

Probably the coolest part of the day was the dinner/party thing for the various sponsors. There was good food all around the booths and most booths were giving away some cool stuff. I got 6 new t-shirts, so I don't have to go shopping for shirts this year, plus a key chain compass, a squishy basketball, a noisy monkey toy, a LINQ pocket reference book, and a slinky! Free stuff rocks!