Exploration of TechEd Berlin continues

Just finishing up the second day of sessions here at Teched Berlin winding down in the hotel lounge. It's been two intensive and inspiring days with some really interesting sessions and events.

Our Monday started with queuing for the registration. Needless to say we were not alone. Around 7000 geeks are attending TechEd this year and Messe Süd that’s housing the event is HUGE!

Among the sessions we attended were ADO.NET Entity Framework in VS 2010 and .NET 4, VSTS 2010 Developer and Tester Experience and A lap around VS 2010. As a first time TechEd attendee I now get to experience firsthand how hard it is to predict which sessions one should take. Often there is a couple each session slot that looks really interesting. Good

thing most of the break-out sessions will be posted online after the conference.

Last session for the day was the Developer keynote with Said Zahedani – Senior Director of Developer Platform and Strategy Group, Microsoft Germany and Jason Zander General Manager of the Visual Studio. Among other things the acquisition of Teamprise was announced as well as some changes on the Visual Studio pricing and versioning.

After the keynote we went out to join in on the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall. We ended up on Potsdamer Platz, watching the speeches, live performances and finally the fall of a huge row of dominos symbolizing the wall falling. We were not alone there, seems like those that didn’t fit on Bradenburger Tor went to Potsdamer Platz. The rain was pouring down for the main part of the evening, luckily there were Glüwein to be found nearby so we could keep our warmth ;)

Afterwards we met up with an old mate to Christer in the Nansen gang and fled the crowds for a nice beer. A great first day!

Today, our second day we figured that since registration was out of the way we didn’t need as much time to get to our sessions in the morning. Well the trains seem to be a bit like our Swedish ones, never on time when you need it so ofc. Running a bit late our morning sessions were full! But we managed to get some nice lab time in instead, will definitely check out some more of the Hands on Labs.

After lunch I checked out an Interactive session on Bing Maps, Silverlight and SQL Server 2k8. Having no real experience on the subject I hoped to get some nice overview info and examples on implementations. Got some nice info on the features of bing maps using AJAX or the Silverlight Control, and examples on implementing it with Location Intelligence data. The latter part of the session took a deep dive into handling Spatial data and preparing it to be loaded into the map control. Must confess It got my head spinning quite a lot ;)

Our mid afternoon session was with Giorgio Sardo – “Tips and tricks for Building High Performance Web Applications and Sites” interesting stuff, but maybe a bit JavaScript heavy. Even though it can be a huge performance hog for your website I was hoping for a bit more “backend” related performance tips. Still it was a good session and we got some nice tips on tools etc.

Last session of the day was with Stephen Walther on what’s new in MVC 2. I really enjoyed the session and the new Validation functionality and Template support looks very nice. His demo’s was easy to follow and well explained, looking forward to his next session on ASP.NET AJAX on Thursday.

When the sessions were done it was time to check out the welcome reception and have a well deserved beer. Back at the hotel we visited the relax area of the hotel, nothing like a nice Sauna to end the day.