TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona: Day 1

TechEd Developers 2007 got off to a roaring start today, as nearly 3000 attendees and presenters flocked to the Centre Convencions Internacional Barcelona for the event.

Today’s keynote was delivered by S. Somasegar, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Developer Division, who made the following exciting announcements:

· Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 will be available for download from MSDN (subscription required) by the end of November. These products will be formally released in February, 2008

· The first CTP for Popfly Explorer, a tool useful for building internet mashups, is available today (Popfly itself has been in CTP one month and has been downloaded over 100,000 times!)

· The Sync Framework CTP has been released, as have the company’s blueprints for Software plus Services

One other interesting point from Mr. Somasegar’s presentation: the entry-level Express series of tools which I’ve discussed previously in this space have been available for almost exactly two years; during that span there have been 17 million downloads of these tools.

That’s a lot of free code!

After the keynote, it was time for me to make the first of two presentations of my Set-Based Thinking interactive discussion. It could scarcely have gone much better; all of the demos worked and there was sufficient interest in the session that people were turned away (yes, it was a full house). The attendees asked many salient questions (which is what these sessions are designed for); the enthusiastic applause they were kind enough to give me at the presentation’s conclusion was echoed by the compliments several attendees offered me at the meet-and-greet later in the evening.

Before the meet-and-greet, though, there was another session to attend; I selected Database Design Patterns: Architecting the Right Data Model for the Right Application, by Stephen Forte. This presentation provided some good food for thought about schema design across OLTP and OLAP systems, and was quite entertaining to boot.

Tomorrow is the only day this week I don’t have any teaching obligations, so I’m going to spend the daylight hours touring the city. The TechEd day ends far earlier tomorrow than it did today, so I doubt I’ll have anything of technical merit to discuss.

So, tomorrow’s post will be a travelogue, including some offhand observations from an ugly American about things which seem to be different here than back in the States (escalators, potato chips, and labeling of floors in buildings are among the topics I’ll discuss).

Until then..

     -wp