Now that day 1 of TechEd: Developers is behind us it's time to have a look at the high- and lowlights of this first day at the conference.

The day after the highly appreciated pre-conference on ASP.NET AJAX by Jeff Prosise kicked off with the traditional keynote. Simon Brown, , and went through some pretty big announcement and showed off some of the cool new stuff. Though I'm personally not a big fan of keynotes, I think this one gave a good teaser for the topics to be covered in more depth during the rest of the conference. has posted some pictures of the keynote .

 The breakout and whiteboard sessions in the web development track ran - with a single exception - as expected. Especially the overview talk of ASP.NET AJAX and the talk about the new Web Development features in Visual Studio "Orcas" were appreciated. I know it's very unfortunate that some people weren't allowed to get in the room as some sessions were full even a quarter before the sessions started. But that's the policy: full is full. Don't blame me ... I wasn't able to get it neither :-(.

Tomorrow we have 9 (!) new web development related sessions scheduled:

  • DEV349 - ASP.NET: Developing Data-Driven Web Applications with .NET Language Integrated Query (DLINQ)
  • DEV210 - Windows Live Developer Platform
  • DEV344 - ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Unleashed: Creating Rich Client-Side Controls and Components
  • DEV002 - DEMO: 10 Undiscovered Features of ASP.NET 2.0
  • DEV235 - Internet Explorer (IE) 7: What's New for Developers?
  • DEV348 - Extending ASP.NET 2.0 with Custom Providers
  • DEVWD16 - Using Visual Studio Team System to Design, Develop and Test Enterprise ASP.NET Web Applications
  • DEVWD28 - Exploring New Functionality in Internet Explorer (IE) 7
  • DEVWD23 - AJAX, ASP.NET and You: All About Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX

As you can see the content varies from client to server and tools. I hope you all will enjoy.

Oh and tomorrow evening there are the country drinks. If you plan to attend the French, Luxemburg or Belgian one: see you there!