Navigation for dotNetTips.com - TechEd 2009 - Day 2

Got to the conference center for the second day of TechEd a little after 9am and guess what... breakfast is over already! Come on... not all of us get up early enough to catch the first session or want to go. Breakfast stops at 8:30, way too early. Okay maybe I'm complaining too much but the only place to buy food in the entire Los Angeles conference center is a small Starbucks stand. I walked by and the line was HUGE (30+ minutes)  and it did not seem like they had any real food, only a few pastries. So I had to starve until lunch.

I caught the last of the "A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0" session. Seems WF might actually be useful in the new version and it's changing to be totally based on XMAL... good! It can also be easily be exposed as a WCF service... excellent!

I then went to two pretty bad sessions that I had to walk out on, one on writing applications for Internet Explorer 8 (actually rated one of the lowest sessions at TechEd) and the other on IIS 7. Also went to a WPF session... nothing new here.


I noticed today (since I missed breakfast) that there are no snacks throughout the day this year. In years past there is always food out for the geeks to snack on (junk food and fruit). But the only snacks this year came late in the afternoon and the geeks descended on it like vultures! One attendee told me they stopped doing this last year. Come on Microsoft... geeks need special care and feeding! Oh, lunch actually managed to be worse today than Monday.

Today was my second day working in the C#/VB booth. Very slow which made my 3+ hour shift very long. I do wish that attendees took better advantage of this great opportunity to talk to MVP's and Microsoft employees at these booths.


I took advantage of the booths and walked over and asked someone about an Entity Framework problem a fellow co-worker was having. Got an excellent answer immediately from Alex James at Microsoft. Check out his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/