16 August 2007 in Events | Comments enabled

Another TechEd is now complete and I had a great time, as I’m sure most people did.

This year I managed to get a slot doing some speaking which meant I ended up staying in the Sky City Grand which is a very nice hotel that I’d only stayed at once before, I’d highly recommend it as a place to stay for anyone taking a trip to Auckland. This year my focus was more on mingling and keeping in touch with some of the geeks that live a little further afar than Wellington.

The Sunday night involved a speakers dinner which was great – really top notch dinner and wine with some great conversation. Enjoyed the opportunity to talk more with Craig Walker from Xero. After that it was off to the Casino for a short time with Andrew and JB.

I did manage to attend some sessions and certainly found Alex’s discussion on LINQ interesting. Not so much from the technicalities about LINQ but more the coverage of what elements of the framework were added to make LINQ possible. I did find myself agreeing with his view of using standard language constructs rather than LINQ directly at times – it just seems more readable to me.

The ask the experts evening was interesting – I certainly felt a bit uncomfortable wearing a hat that just states “EXPERT” on it. I’ll certainly be holding onto mine to put on whenever I get into an argument with somebody, “Oh no, you see, I’m an expert!”. I haven’t seen anybody look quite as happy as James Newton-King when Darryl gave him an Expert hat after he had been complaining that he wanted on. I think I even saw him wearing it in the street the next day

My session was a lunch time talk about BackgroundMotion and how to get up and running while also highlighting some of the goodies that are baked into the solution. If you attended the talk and want to grab the source code you can check it would at www.codeplex.com/backgroundmotion.

Casino losses were much higher compared to Remix, hitting $100 on the first night, at which point I decided to call it quits for this event. I felt much better enjoying the Rum + Cokes in the Sky City Grand lobby than I did losing my money at the casino so I made sure that I spent more time doing that than gambling.

All up, I think it was a great event and I’d certainly love to speak again next year and would recommend to anybody that has not attended to do so – you won’t regret it.

– JD