Highlights of TechEd 2009
Posted by Brian FinnertyWe’ve just spent a full week at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, meeting and greeting a host of customers, partners, and attendees yet to be enlightened about InnerWorkings! Microsoft’s banner conference went on a crash diet this year, with only 7,000 people in attendance. In these lean times, there’s no doubt that restricted travel budgets and nixed conference requests had an impact on the overall vitality of the show, but it was still a huge conference teeming with developers, software managers,
and IT professionals.
Our hand-cranked, eco-friendly flashlight giveaway turned out to be a runaway success — so much so that we ran out of “schwag” after the first full day — folks obviously thought it would be very handy when the next big earthquake hits the region and the power grid fails!
In terms of booth conversations with attendees, we got many requests for SharePoint training and strong interest in Microsoft’s developer certifications (see our certification press release live from the floor at TechEd). I also encountered a number of requests from developers and team leads looking to build skills in ASP.NET MVC, a framework that enables developers to easily build web applications using a model-view-controller pattern.
The highlight for me was a VSIP party on Wednesday night in the Walt Disney Concert Hall — it’s always nice to catch up with Joe Marini and the VSIP team, but it was an added bonus to visit such an iconic building that lords it over the towering skyline of downtown LA. The wood panel interior is almost as spectacular as the brushed steel exterior; a late night concert performance would have topped it off!
In terms of show announcements, booth duty meant that I missed the keynotes but caught much of the news from trusted journalists covering the show. There were many highlights, but the biggest takeaway for me was the slew of new products that Microsoft will be releasing over the coming year.
Check out the following Windows IT Pro article that summarizes the upcoming releases. We can expect to see lots of activity from Redmond in the year ahead, including the following product releases: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010 CTP, and Visual Studio 2010. Busy times in the Microsoft ant colony these days…
