Let's take a quick overview of my sessions at Tuesday. I started out with part two of Omars session - nothing new, as expected. Afterwards I joined a WF session by Paul Andrew instead of Lucas's LINQ talk. It was definitely the best WF session I've seen so far so now I actually want to find a project where I can use it :-) In the lunch break I heard David Platt's talk Why Software Sucks. David is indeed a funny and bright guy, so if you ever get the chance to listen to his words - dot it :-) My last real session was Next Generation Networking in Windows Vista by Rafal Lukawiecki. I think there was a little too much IPv6 in the talk but Rafal did a very good job in explaining a lot of cool features in Vista networking. This is the 10th year Rafal speaks at TechEd - pretty cool!

Unfortunately I had to skip my last two sessions, as all MSP's had to meet :-( We heard a lot about the MSP program in general and got the opportunity to ask questions to some of the speakers here at TechEd, including Rafal and David. Later we played bowling with the other MSP's, got some tapas and a lot of beers :-)

After the last beer:

Besides the keynote, only two sessions were held Monday. In the first session Omar Khan talked about some of all the new features in Visual Studio 2008. So nothing new there for me, as I've used it for development in both beta 1 (when it was called Orcas) and now I'm using beta 2. I could see that Omar was using a newer version than beta 2, as the Add method on the tables in LINQ to SQL was not called Add but InsertOnSubmit - which is the name of the method post beta 2. The first session for me today, is part two of that session. So I don't expect to see much new there either - but who knows, maybe there are one or more features I've overseen :-)

The last session was Luca Bolognese talking about LINQ in general. As expected the content was exactly the same as at the JAOO conference. So nothing new here either :-( Actually even the jokes were the same, but I still laughed at his "so now I've got ravioli in my XML"-joke. My second session today is Luca talking about LINQ to SQL - but I think I will skip that one, if I can find something new to hear about instead.

After the sessions we took a quick walk around in the exhibition hall. Approximately 4.000 other people were there too, so it was a bit crowded. So instead of getting run down by all these people, we went to a tapas restaurant with Henrik Westergaard Hansen (our former ADE - Academic Software Evangelist), Martin (our new ADE) and a few others. Afterwards we went to a bar... the rest of the evening is pretty easy to guess ;-)

I know the order of my posts may be weird... but that's life too :-) It's just funny how much Henrik W. Hansen can eat... here we are at lunch

After lunch we got some coffee

And only 1½ hours after lunch, Henrik was eating again just before the keynote

Cool, now you can extend World of Warcraft directly from Visual Studio... funny :-)

You probably already knew it - but now it's official. In his keynote Soma Somasegar announced, that Visual Studio 2008 will be available before the end of November - great! :-)

Yesterday Claus, his girlfriend Julia and I arrived to Barcelona. After check-in at the hotel, Claus and I got registered at TechEd (just a few hundred meters from the hotel) - so now we are ready to hear a lot of interesting (new) stuff from Microsoft :-)

We met with Julia's brother, his girlfriend and their daughter who all lives in Barcelona. After seeing their apartment, we went around the city. At the hospital I took 8 pictures, which combined into one in Windows Live Photo Gallery gives this huge photo (I must remember to take more of the sky next time):

After walking around the city we got a little hungry. So at a restaurant I took this picture:

Finally back at the hotel, we went to the bar which was a little boring, as we were the only people down there (probably because of the classical music the bartender loved so much :-( ):

Now I look forward to the first day at TechEd :-)