TechEd Europe T-21 Days!

TechEd Europe commences in three weeks from today! As of this morning, we've finally finished locking down the sessions and speakers, which is a major milestone in the planning process. We've taken some of the feedback from TechEd US on board and made some minor adjustments here and there; I'm pretty happy with the resulting session listing. A good conference in my view is one where there are three places you want to be at once, and I think we're close to achieving that.

To whet your appetite, here are a few of the conference highlights from a developer perspective:

• DEV301/2/3: Prashant Sridharan is delivering a three session tour de force on the recently announced Visual Studio Team System: including code coverage, unit testing, work item tracking, source code control and class design.
• CTS308: Clemens Vasters has built Proseware: a sophisticated service-orientated distributed application, designed with best-practice architectural principles and taking advantage of WSE 2.0 to show how real world systems can be built with these technologies.
• WIN499: Mark Russinovich has an incredible session planned in which he makes a no holds barred, side-by-side comparison of the Linux and Windows kernels and identifies some of the architectural differences, strengths and weaknesses. This session will no doubt be both controversial and educational.
• ARC230: The Nerd, The Suit and the Fortune Teller. Clemens Vasters, Rafal Lukawiecki and Pat Helland on the convergence of service-based architectures. A Powerpoint-free session!
• DAT307: The future of MSDE in Yukon is at last revealed by Corey Thomas.
• DAT385: Jim Gray, Distinguished Engineer and ACM Turing Award recipient, on building large-scale spatial databases using SQL Server 2005.
• PRE007: David LeBlanc, co-author of Writing Secure Code, presents a one-day pre-conference highlighting security lessons learned in the Microsoft "trenches".
• GNLARC: Metropolis - Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise. Pat Helland's legendary blue-sky talk on the enterprise of a decade's time.

With another 286 sessions, 42 chalk-and-talks, 60 hands-on labs, panel discussions, birds-of-a-feather, CommsNet, the exhibition and Microsoft pavilion, and ask-the-experts areas, there will hopefully be plenty to hold your interest! I'll be running around a little bit but hope to meet up with some of you there. I'm also delivering DAT318, a session on CLR integration into the SQL Server 2005 engine; I've delivered variations of this talk for a number of months to partners in the UK but am looking forward to showing off many of the enhancements made since Beta 1 with some refreshed demos.

If you're a blogger attending TechEd Europe, be sure to register your blog at techedbloggers.net. The guys did a fantastic job of covering the thousands of blog entries from delegates at TechEd US, and this site will be the top place to visit if you want up-to-date information on what's going down there.