Tech-ed 2004 is my first Tech-ed / Microsoft conference ever, I didn't know what to expect
however it turned out to be really cool. It's Thursday evening now, just before the party starts.
Yesterday I hosted the O/R mapper BoF session and it went really well. At first I had to warm
the audience up a little, most people were waiting for others to answer the questions. What
surprised me was that so little people had actually worked with an O/R mapper, about 15% or so
of the audience of roughly 50-60 people. The number one issue most people seemed to have was
what are the advantages of an O/R mapper over the dataset approach. Related to that was the
discussion about which situations are best for an O/R mapper and which situations are probably
better handled with a more set based approach. The session progressed really well after the
slow start (which I filled with a short lecture about O/R mapping in general) and it turned
out there wasn't enough time to handle all the questions people had. A session worth repeating!
Currently I'm typing this on my laptop in one of the wireless work areas on Tech-ed, and it's
also my first experience with wireless networking, which was kind of a struggle at first, due
to me not having configurated my VPN settings correctly, ah well ;)
The network is very good, a little slow sometimes, but that's fine. At least there aren't any
situations like we had in the old days on demoparties where your computer suddenly switched
off because some person pulled the power plug out of the socket, forgetting that his
powersocket block was powering a whole set of computers next to him. :).
The sessions are nice and there is a truckload of different material to choose from. They
graded the sessions with numbers so you can see if a session is at the level you expect it
to be (so you don't end up in a session where they try to explain what an object is when you
expect some lowlevel CLR hacking info and vice versa). Not always are these levels matching the
real session level but that's ok. Overall there is always something to learn.
In the MVP lounge I met Thomas Tomiczek of EntityBroker and we had some nice discussions about
O/R mapping, C# and .NET. It was great to meet him. I also ran into Lorenzo Barbieri, a fellow
weblogs.asp.net blogger, great to see the faces behind the names you see and discuss with
every day :)
Ok, I'm a little exhausted now so I'll end this little Tech-ed impression by showing a picture
of the main hall where we have our lunch. :)
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