It’s the Sunday after TechEd 2005, and I finally recovered enough to sit down and write up the DonXml TechEd 2005 Hits and Misses.
Hit – The Cabanas. Hands down, my favorite part of TechEd is the cabanas. The sessions are good, but I’d rather sit down with the presenter for 5 minutes and get all the details, then have to spread it out over an hour. But, that is just me, and my way of doing things. Another major bonus for the cabanas, getting time to talk to the other experts that are not presenting.
Miss – Wireless Networking. I think the facility had something to do with this, but the wireless was pretty useless when there was any significant amount of people in the main area.
Hit– Favorite New (to me) Folks who presented. Here’s to Michael Rys, Bob Beauchemin, John Bristowe. I’ve read their blog’s but never meet them in person. I got to hang out a lot with these guys, and had a blast.
Hit – Favorite New (to me) Attendees. I got to meet a lot of bloggers (and other folks) that I hadn’t met previously. If you stopped by and said hi, I’d like to say thanks. There are too many people to actually name here, but you know who you are (and I would probably miss someone and possibly offend them, so I will not even try). If you are shy and didn’t stop by, well I can understand, but you are always welcome to look me up at the next event. And then there are the people that just said hi, and I didn’t get to hang out with them. For those folks, you are always welcomed to hang around. I keep things pretty free form, and don’t really plan out my schedule (well except for the required stuff), so don’t be shy, or afraid to come and go as you please. You will not offend me either way.
Miss – TechEd Bathrooms. This is supposed to be a new conference center? Definitely not up to the Rory Bathroom Test . Good thing Rory wasn’t there.
Miss – Beer in Orlando. I don’t know what the problem is with Orlando and their beer selection, but it out right sucks. Seems like all I saw was Bud, Bud Light and Heineken at the conference events and in the hotels. Occasionally I “lucked out” finding Corona.
Miss – JW Marriott. Although the JW Marriott is a beautiful hotel, it was the wrong choice for TechEd. The pool looked great, but I never got a chance to use it. It was too far from the conference center (comparatively speaking), and the Lounge Bar’s last call was at 11:45PM, way too early. One night we walked over to the Ritz Carlton, and we couldn’t even get the attention of a waitress to serve us. Peabody was the happening hotel (where all the cool kids stayed), and I spent most of my late nights there.
Hit – Tuesday night’s dinner. This was a total accident, but Tuesday night was the highlight of the conference for me. Christoph and I walked from the OCCC to the Peabody to have a couple drinks with some of the Xml guys (we were looking to talk about why we think Object Oriented Programming is the thing we should remove so we don’t have issues with OO-Relational mapping, and XML-OO mapping), and we bumped into Mark Fussell, Sidd Shenoyand, John Bristowe who where looking to get some dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. We sit down for dinner, and a guy comes up to Mark asking if he minds if he has dinner with us. I look up and, boy does he look familiar, but it could be. Yes, it was. It was the father of C#, Anders Hejlsberg. Although Christoph and I were too timid to talk about the discussion we were having before dinner, it was still a great dinner. And with the C# 3.0 stuff that has been rumored, maybe it was a good thing we didn’t talk about OOP, since it looks like 3.0 may be solving some of our issues.
Hit - SqlDiva - Melissa was worried that she wouldn't be able to keep up with all the social stuff (late nights and all), and even though she had to work one night and a couple mornings, she didn't let that get in the way, and got to meet and great lots of people. She had a great time, and got a chance to have some good talks with the OLAP and SQL Server teams.