TechEd 2014 in Barcelona

I attended TechEd Barcelona with a coworker. The venue was just amazing. TechEd was hosted in the Fira Barcelona. The floor space in the fira is 400000 m2. You really have to walk from session to session. But I think that has very positive influence on the conference experience. Because usually when you are always at the same location you are getting more and more tired (mentally) after each session. With the “long” distance walks between the sessions you grab a coffee or tea on the way and head to the next hall (up to 10 minutes depending on your walking speed). This gives you time to think about what you’ve heard in the sessions and also time to “exercise” your body. Good contrast to the sitting only experience of the sessions.

This is an overview of the sessions I visited:

• Day 1
  • The Keynote (Link)
  • Optimizing Your Datacenter with Windows Server, System Center, and Microsoft Azure (Link)
  • Microsoft IoT Platform: Architecture Overview (Link)
  • Introducing Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Link)
  • Architecting Predictive Algorithms for Machine Learning (Link)
• Day 2
  • The Next Generation of Microsoft .NET (Link)
  • TWC | A Game of Clouds: Black Belt Security for the Microsoft Cloud (Link)
  • Entity Framework Now and Later (Link)
  • Windows PowerShell Unplugged with Jeffrey Snover (Link)
  • Introduction to NoSQL in Azure (Link)
  • Architecting Secure Microsoft .NET Applications (Link)
  • Country Drinks Party 😉
• Day 3
  • The Future of Microsoft .NET on the Server (Link)
  • Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 (Link)
  • Automating Microsoft Azure with the Management Libraries (Link)
  • Lessons from Scale with Mark Russinovich (Link)
• Day 4
  • Building Real-Time Applications with ASP.NET SignalR (Link)
  • Entity Framework Model Partitioning in Domain-Driven Design Bounded Contexts (Link)
  • Telemetry and Data Flow at Hyper-Scale: Azure Event Hub (Link)

Overall I can say about the sessions that it felt like there were not many real level 400 talks which really got you into the depths of the topic. That was a bit disappointing for me. Some of the sessions were really shallow in content. But we took the liberty to move out of the session and sneak into another one when we didn’t like the content being presented. So in the end TechEd turned out to be a good experience. I strongly recommend to visit TechEd landing page on the channel 9 website and take time to watch some of the sessions above or your own prefered sessions. Be sure to point me to the sessions you liked by using the commenting function on this blogpost!

The most exciting part for me about TechEd is the number of people I met and had the chance to talk to. For example I was honored to see Julie Lerman again after I think almost 3 years when she visited Switzerland. Then I had the opportunity to chat with Glenn Block again (we first met at NDC London 2013) and even received a signed version of his book “Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET” and of course I couldn’t resist arguing with him about Domain Driven Design ;). Then I had the chance to talk to Seth Juarez again after we first met at the Basta conference in spring 2014. That guy is a hilarious presenter! I highly recommend his talk about Machine Learning on Day 1. And last but not least I met several awesome people like Brady Gaster, Clemens Vasters, Susan Schären, Hansjörg Scherer, René Hanselmann, people from the CAT (customer advisory) team of Microsoft and more. By the way we stayed at the Hotel Jazz in Barcelona, I can highly recommend it!