Tech-ed 2004 impressions.

Tech-ed 2004 is my first Tech-ed / Microsoft conference ever, I didn't know what to expect however it turned out to be really cool. It's Thursday evening now, just before the party starts. Yesterday I hosted the O/R mapper BoF session and it went really well. At first I had to warm the audience up a little, most people were waiting for others to answer the questions. What surprised me was that so little people had actually worked with an O/R mapper, about 15% or so of the audience of roughly 50-60 people. The number one issue most people seemed to have was what are the advantages of an O/R mapper over the dataset approach. Related to that was the discussion about which situations are best for an O/R mapper and which situations are probably better handled with a more set based approach. The session progressed really well after the slow start (which I filled with a short lecture about O/R mapping in general) and it turned out there wasn't enough time to handle all the questions people had. A session worth repeating!

Currently I'm typing this on my laptop in one of the wireless work areas on Tech-ed, and it's also my first experience with wireless networking, which was kind of a struggle at first, due to me not having configurated my VPN settings correctly, ah well ;)

The network is very good, a little slow sometimes, but that's fine. At least there aren't any situations like we had in the old days on demoparties where your computer suddenly switched off because some person pulled the power plug out of the socket, forgetting that his powersocket block was powering a whole set of computers next to him. :).

The sessions are nice and there is a truckload of different material to choose from. They graded the sessions with numbers so you can see if a session is at the level you expect it to be (so you don't end up in a session where they try to explain what an object is when you expect some lowlevel CLR hacking info and vice versa). Not always are these levels matching the real session level but that's ok. Overall there is always something to learn.

In the MVP lounge I met Thomas Tomiczek of EntityBroker and we had some nice discussions about O/R mapping, C# and .NET. It was great to meet him. I also ran into Lorenzo Barbieri, a fellow weblogs.asp.net blogger, great to see the faces behind the names you see and discuss with every day :)

Ok, I'm a little exhausted now so I'll end this little Tech-ed impression by showing a picture of the main hall where we have our lunch. :)

lunch hall

6 Comments

  • Hi Frans! Sorry I missed your BoF session. Couldn't make it because of some other priorities. I'm really glad it went so well for you.

    I was at TechEd today and should be there tomorrow. Although I did intend/promise to meet up with two "pupils" of mine (trainer-wise), I thought it might be nice to have lunch together and finally meet (if you don't mind the company of the two other guys).

    If you wish to contact me by phone, you should be able to find my mobile phone number at the contact section of www.killer-apps.nl.

    Hope to hear from you.

  • That's an awesome photograph... Looks much nicer than the "Warehouse" which served as the Teched San Diego mess hall..

  • Every day I'm even more sorry I couldn't come! Man do I wish I had signed up after all...



    Mostly the power went down because people kept on plugging in powersockets more and more and more and more and... pooooof! about 50 to 100 computers without power.



    Funny thing was, people didn't know they had to turn off their computers, so when the power went back up, suddenly so many computers instantly started up, consuming so much power again, that even more blocks were failing! Until everyone turned off their computers and they could power up again! ;)



    Anyway, such events truly are fantastic to meet people like Thomas! Should've been great to see two people that are so "open into expressing themselves" together! ;)

  • Thanks for the feedback, Patrick! :)

  • Can we go on and discuss the things said overthere ? Or is there a better place ? I would like to discuss some futher pratical situations and how to deal with it when you use OR mapping. During the session I raised some questions about reports and transactions, but I think I have some more questions :).

  • Sure, go ahead :) I'll try to answer the questions in a future blogposting.

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