My Tech-Ed 2006 has come to an end and now I'm eagerly awaiting my return flight home to Seattle.

Boston is always fun although the weather can be a little too warm/humid for me.  The city has changed a lot since I lived here from June 1993 to June 1998.  There's now a Silver Line on the "T" that goes directly to Logan International Airport.  Back when I lived here, one had to take the Blue Line which included dead-lifting all you baggage at some point since there were no escalators when making the switch from the Orange or Green.  Then there was that dreaded shuttle ride from the train station to the airport terminal that made being late for one's flight hazardous to the rest of one's travel itinerary.  Ah, Boston.  The city will always hold a special place in my heart but I like Seattle and the Pacific Northwest much, much more.  As controversial as it may be, there's really no comparison in my book World Series and all.

Things I will take with me from Tech-Ed 2006:

• Tech-Ed is huge.  Having attended both this year, the logistics for Tech-Ed rival The Super Bowl even with a fraction of the attendance.
• Everyone who sees it in action really, really likes "Atlas" and they all want more information to help get started...and an earlier release date.  Rest assured, we are working aggressively on both.
• WAP (Web Application Projects) is where it's at for users migrating their Web applications from Visual Studio 2002/2003 to Visual Studio 2005.  Those familiar with it love it.  Those seeing it for the first time are immediately smitten.  The Web Development Tools team took a major hit to bring this add-on into existence (in a very short period of time) and the feedback consistently indicates it was a worthwhile endeavor.
• As someone responsible for track content, low session evaluations is no way to start the event.  It really sucks spending the rest of the week climbing out of a hole.  Luckily, we had several veteran and a few newbie speakers that really came through at the middle and end of the week.  With the benefit of hindsight, there are many ways to justify, dissect and explain away our lowest session scores but what's more constructive is understanding what we need to change going forward.  Before moving on, however, I would like to apologize to everyone who sat in a session that experienced technical difficulties.  Those things are just irresponsible and easily avoided in all but the most severe cases.
• Computer nerds (or "geeks" if you prefer) like to party or at least they do a good job faking it.
• Microsoft has the best developer community bar none.  Our MVPs and regional directors are worth their weights in platinum-reinforced titanium.  The community of people who attend these training events are a dedicated, passionate and talented lot all doing some really neat and interesting things.  Over lunch one day, I spoke with a woman from Honda Research who cut the time necessary to build CAD/CAM models on UNIX-based systems from 3 days to 4 hours using 64-bit Windows and some of Microsoft's early High-Performance Computing work.  Not only does the Microsoft solution save her team immense amounts of time, it also cost less money to implement.  Brilliant!
• Microsoft has a lot of products. I always sort of knew this having visited The Microsoft Museum several times with visiting friends and relatives.  It's one thing to see names of products inscribed in Lucite.  It's another to see a convention center floor full of demo stations, signage and trinkets and that is just for developers and IT professionals.

If you were at Tech-Ed this year, send me a note to let me know what you like least and most about our Web presence (ASP.NET, "Atlas", Visual Web Developer, etc.)  What would you like to see more/less of?  How does this year's event compare to previous years?  This information will be extremely valuable and put to good use.

So, as the fiscal year comes to an end, so does my travel frequency (at least for a couple months).  My summer will be spent enjoying the Pacific Northwest while it is in its prime and preparing for what is sure to be a busy late-Q1 and Q2.