TechEd Amsterdam - Day 4
The TechEd Party was last night. OK if you like football, a bit pants if you don't. On the upside, there were two halls setup as cinemas, one showing The Matrix (the first and only decent one). Rounded off the evening in the hotel bar. It seems the Okura's drinks license only runs to 0100 am - now that's seriously pants for a big hotel.
BJ Holtgrewe, PM for VSTO 2005, has a Chalk+Talk this afternoon (1445, Room T) on the Advantages of Smart Clients Built with VSTO. Clashes with Mark's talk on Research Services - and at opposite ends of the conference centre - ho-hum. BJ is really enthusiastic about VSTO, so anyone who fell asleep during my session should definitely head for room T. BJ will really be able to talk to the great benefits you can get by using VSTO, the excellent user experience with VSTO solutions, and all the great new functionality coming up with VSTO 2005.
Thoughts on this year's event? Some good sessions, some not so good - its really hard to pitch it right at TechEd, especially in Europe. For PDC you know that all of your audience is going to be hardcore developers. For TechEd, you anticipate a mix of devs, ops, business, trainers, etc. Plus, in Europe, you must allow for a wide range of first-languages. So you risk going too fast for half the audience, and too slow for the other half.
The Chalk+Talks were a good experiment. Similar to the Cabana sessions in San Diego, but organized differently. In the Cabanas, speakers had decks but the seating was informal. In the C+Ts, decks were only one or two slides but the seating was formal. Some refactoring needed there. On the whole, I thought the Cabanas were better. Some of the C+Ts ended up very much like the BOFs.
The Birds-Of-A-Feather sessions seemed to go down very well. Semi-informal, with a facilitator to keep things on track, but driven by delegates collaboratively instead of individual lead speakers. Maybe BOFs and C+Ts could be combined? Or more cleanly separated?
As requested, I've posted all my demos from my VSTO 2005 session up to the commnet. I've also included a couple of extra demos that I didn't have time to present, plus a demo script. This script doesn't give any contextual explanation, just the steps to get the demo working. If you plan on working through these demos, I recommend you start from scratch and follow the script. My solutions were developed with a pre-beta1 build, so they may have issues if you try to use them in any other build. Anyway, the IDE enhancements are so good that its really no hardship to work through from the beginning - and you can always cut+paste any large blocks of code.