Kent

YAMT is to provide a trip report when coming back from a conference or other road trip. This does two things -- it informs those who didn't go just how much fun conferences are, and secondly, it tells everyone what you remember from the conference between alcoholic fogs. This year, my gracious grand-manager has said that we can blog our trip reports, saving me from having to cross-post, cleanse and otherwise write stuff twice.

Unlike many others, my trip to TechEd was delightfully painless. I was there to work the Visual Studio 2003 booth and the DEV cabana. I've also included a few infrastructure items as well.

Visual Studio 2003 Booth

• There were primarily four questions on the minds of those visiting the lonely VS2003 .NET booth:
1. When will Visual Studio 2005 ship?
2. Can I run 2003 and 2005 on the same machine?
3. What swag do you have? (sadly none, until Dan ran over to the C# booth and grabbed a few baseball caps)
4. How can I report a bug in Visual Studio 2005?
• In general, a lot of people were hitting the booths. Most were looking for the Windows/IT booths (as one might expect at TechEd), but many came saying, "The developers back at the office have sent me to ask you a few things."
• One moderately amusing (for me) episode was when a VB PM (name withheld to protect my story) decided to download the Northwind database to use for his demos. After more than a few attempts at using MSDN's search to find the download (including this query), he switched to some other search engine, finding it fairly quickly. Another data point for all of us.

DEV cabana

• My time at the cabana was a little uncomfortable (for me) as I didn't feel like grabbing a "Ask me about <foo>" button, nor sitting at a table populated by the "<Foo> team". Still, spoke with a few customers and "humanized" Microsoft for them.
• A few people said that the layout of the cabanas was better in San Diego (TechEd 2004). People felt that the cabanas this year were, "Just more sessions and less informal". This was highlighted to me when, after sitting with Chris & I for at least 15 minutes, one attendee asked, "So, I can just go up to that table and ask the team a question?"

Infrastructure

• Wireless was horrid. While I was able to get an IP address occasionally while at the cabana, it lead nowhere. GPRS was my friend, I shall not want.
• Apparently enough people complained after the first day's breakfast that they even had to add a note to the commnet home page that, "Hot food will now be provided with all meals." I heard a few people complain, and one kind woman who spoke with Chris & I at the cabana also added that she wanted more, "healthy food". Of course, she added that she had been supplementing the food by going across the street to Denny's, so I'm not entirely sure what would have qualified as "healthy food".
• We needed a stool, or something at the booth. Standing for four hours was more than a little draining for an old, out of shape, wannabe dev like myself. Even the young, peppy, bright Program Managers were rubbing their legs after a session at the booth
• Blackberries are popular!