TechEd Wrap Up - Better Late Than Never

OK, mea culpa. TechEd 2008 North America has been over for a few weeks now, and I have not yet posted my wrap up. I'll keep it short and sweet, but there are some cool resources I want to point out.

BillG's Keynote

As I previously mentioned, I built one of the keynote demo's for the TechEd 2008 Developers Conference. Brian Harry presented the demo during the keynote, while I ran a mirror setup back stage. The mirror setup is there in case of a hardware failure; the onstage demo'er can swap to the back up machine at any time. While we had the mirror machine, we never had to use it. Brian did an awesome job.

After the keynote I got a chance to meet BillG, who thanked all of us who built the demos for our hard work. We had a group photo, and for one brief second I thought, "hey, I could pick-pocket Bill Gates right now." Then I figured the risk-reward ratio was way off...does he even carry a wallet? Right after that BillG was quickly whisked away.

You can watch the entire keynote here. You can also see my version of the Visual Studio Team System demo here.

TechEd Online Panel Discussions

I arranged two panel discussions to be recorded for TechEd Online (although I didn't participate in either this year). You can now watch both panel discussions online.

Let's Talk Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

In this panel discussion you will hear from several Microsoft MVPs with a wide variety of experience in Application Lifecycle Management. With no fear of sharing their opinions and duking it out when necessary, this group of top-notch consultants and trainers will definitely prove to be informative and entertaining. This is a panel you don't want to miss. With Brian Randell, Jeff Levinson, Richard Hundhausen, Chris Menegay, Mike Azocar, Joel Semeniuk, and Steven Borg.

Watch it now: WMV Low | WMV High

Visual Studio Team System Panel - Meet the Team

In this panel discussion you will have the opportunity to hear directly from the team building Visual Studio Team System, including Brian Harry–Technical Fellow. Come and meet the team, and get all your questions answered. With Brian Harry, Peter Provost, Norman Guadagno, Gert Drapers, Habib Heydarian, Neelesh Kamkolkar.

Watch it now: WMV Low | WMV High

Sessions

I delivered one session twice at TechEd 2008 Developers and one session (only once) at TechEd 2008 IT Pros. If you attended either conference you will receive DVDs with all of the session recordings, including these. If you didn't attended, you can buy the DVDs once they are available (I'll post a link when I find out what it is).

My Dev week session:

Build Better Software: Tips and Tools to Improve Your Applications - Doug Seven

You want to build better software. You want the applications you build to be better, cheaper, and faster to release. One of the most costly stages of software development is finding and fixing bugs. What if you could find the bugs and fix them nearly immediately? In this session, learn tips and tools you can use with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 to determine code complexity, validate the capabilities of the application, and understand the overall quality of the software you are building. If you want to improve the code you write then don’t miss this session.

This session scored an 8.33 (out of 9) with over 200 people who attended it. This was one of the Top 5 sessions in the Developer Tools & Languages track, and one of the Top 20 session at TechEd 2008 Developers.

My IT Pro week session:

End-to-End Application Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System - Doug Seven

Visual Studio Team System is a fully integrated application lifecycle management toolset, enabling teams to work more collaboratively to deliver quality software with fewer obstacles. In this demo intensive session, see how Visual Studio Team System 2008 enables project managers, architects, developers, and testers throughout the application lifecycle. See how Team System enables managing team workflow, system and datacenter modeling, tools to ensure quality from the earliest stages of development, as well as tools to validate applications prior to release.

This session scored an 8.03 (out of 9) with over 80 people who attended it. This was the highest rated session in the Application Development for IT Pros track.

Channel 9

While at TechEd I had a chance to sit down with Dan Fernandez of Channel 9 and spend a few minutes talking about TechEd and Visual Studio Team System codename "Rosario." You can see the interview here.

Doug Seven: Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Rosario

That's it. See you at the next one.