TechEd 2008 Barcelona: So long and thanks for all the fish... 

Well that about wraps it up. I am now only killing time before the plane leaves, so time to catch some missed R&R. The experience was very mixed this time. Maybe because there are no groundbraking current releases of technology. A lot of the new stuff is still pretty castles in the clouds or in 2010. On the other hand, if beta's are the only thing you can really have in your hands, I start having dreams of a jukebox app in the Aviva Solutions office that you can login to with your Windows Live account. All this by a chained federated identity with Geneva STS Services to get you to have a token with claim from the company AD to start requesting music. Of course the jukebox needs to be rewritten to MVC with the AJAX Client template controls.

Actually, the last part is the most realistic, I have seen some pretty impressive stuff being done on stage with the AJAX helpers for MVC. All beta 1 of course.At the end of this all I am required to make a presentation for the rest of the guys and gals at Aviva. I think it will be the Search Server 2008 features for MOSS 2007. That simply seems to be the way to go for any customer using MOSS 2007 search.

For me visiting Barcelona itself was a like a dream again, Berlin will have to come op with something pretty devastating next year. I think everyone who has really looked around in the city will  agree too that. For the moment things look really grim next year. Rumour has it that not only Berlin promises to be cold around november, the PDC event will be very close, so that means more competition and people choosing between the two. We will see.

Finally, some statistics I gathered for this year: Around 3200 visitors in total. Of those, 230 people from The Netherlands, making it the second largest country presence after the UK. Of all visitors eventually only about 3% female, even though there was a record count of female speakers. The SharePoint group was the most active ad hoc community on the event, so discounting previously already existing and well established user groups. So just you know....