TechEd 5 (Wenesday, 6/6)

As I sit here and type this evening, I'm a little disappointed. We were supposed to be at MGM Studios, but the rain has just been pouring down in buckets for the last almost 5 hours. The park is open until 1:00 AM, so we're still planning to give it a try later. Here's a shot I took of the weather earlier today when the rain first started. We even had some good thunder and lightning.


On to TechEd.... My guess of french toast for breakfast this morning actually turned out to be correct. The TechEd meals (breakfast and lunch) have been excellent thus far. It's amazing that they can achieve the level of quality they do for so many people, but I guess that's how the catering company makes its money. I also managed to pick up 1 more hat and a few more shirts bringing my total to 3 hats and 14 shirts. Not quite as much as the guy I noted in a previous post, but respectable. A couple of the vendors I spoke with today actually had some good ideas when it came to Sharepoint and UI controls. I've got quite a bit of stuff to give away as quiz prizes at work including a copy of Crackdown for the XBox 360, pens, random blinky things, and some of the shirts and hats.

Microsoft has finally made the slides available in advance of the sessions. They must be reading my blog! :) Probably not, but I can pretend. It's just such a better way to take notes as I previously mentioned. On a side note, I was getting 2.5MB per second downloading the slides over the wireless g network at the convention hall. That's pretty impressive for wireless and the MS server hosting the files.

The sessions I attended today covered hidden gems in ASP.NET 2.0, unit testing and test-driven development, combining Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) with standard Windows forms applications, and JavaScript performance. The most enjoyable session was given, again, by Jeff Prosise and covered hidden gems in ASP.NET 2.0. I had already heard most of the subject matter covered from Fritz Onion, but Jeff did a great presentation. It's nice when the speaker can actually get the audience laughing and interacting a little. However, the presentation with the most interesting content was given by Cyra Richardson of Microsoft and covered JavaScript performance. I can honestly say that I've never given the subject that much thought, but she pointed out a bunch of easy things that can be done to optimize your JavaScript. You just need to be careful because many were geared towards IE. I also find it funny that her site doesn't work at all in Firefox.:)

Well, I think we're going to head over for a couple of wet hours at MGM. Gotta give Todd a call. More tomorrow. I didn't get many pictures today, but I'll try to get a bunch from the attendee party at Universal Studios tomorrow night if it's not raining too much.