TechEd Europe was good fun. This was my first time speaking at a conference of this size and its very different from being an attendee. Speakers get some perks (a speakers lounge with free massages) but most of the time is spent polishing your session material or attending 'ask the experts' etc. All good fun but different.

I spoke on ARC309 - Patterns in the enterprise. There were 250 attendees and the feedback scores were good. Some interesting comments (aside from my annoying habit of walking across the stage) included: "Microsoft clearly doesn't get enterprise integration if they are talking about presentation integration as a valid approach". I agree that presentation integration (screen scraping etc.) is not the answer to many ent. int. requirements but it is an approach and it nearly always works ! Another great comment was "the jump from the UML collaboration diagram to the next slide [port and wire] was not an easy jump to make". I agree that there were many gaps between one slide and the next during the final portion of the session, this is deliberate to avoid people adopting what I showed, as some new methodology. A much more detailed discussion can be found in the Microsoft Patterns and Practices guide - Integration patterns.

The Irish party went really well, thanks to eveyone who attended and to Clemens who popped in to say Hi. We'd love to get Clemens back to Ireland later this year so if you'd like to hear him speak please let us know. Marcus has also done a great blog on what he thought of TechEd.