I’m attending Tech-Ed 2006 somewhat vicariously – unfortunately because I have “a lot on” I didn’t think I would be able to attend the full event, and had kind of ruled out attending. That was until I heard Andrew Coates from DPE was looking for people to fill out some speaking slots for the developer cabana sessions. Unable to resist the lure of talking about WPF to a technical audience I signed up to deliver a few developer cabana sessions.
After going in to work in the morning I spent the afternoon delivering my two sessions, hanging out in the exhibit area, the Dev’Gaarten and the hands-on lab area before heading back in to the office to do some more “real” work. My talks (on XBAP and WPF datatemplates, 20 minutes each) both went OK, but unfortunately not many people showed up to the first one (XBAP). In hindsight I should have probably provided an abstract explaining what XBAP was – I told some fairly geeky people about my talk topics and the XBAP one always drew blank stares. Another issue was the noisiness of the exhibition area – I hope everyone who showed up was able to hear.
Overall it was great to be part of it all, even in a small way and nice to catch up with my friends from Readify (I think I still have some), Microsoft Services and DPE. One thing struck me though - many of the machines on the exhibition floor and in the hands on lab area were XP – surely with Vista around the corner ALL of these should have been showing the flashy Aero Glass?