TechEd 2008 Developers Recap

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I'm home from TechEd Developer 2008 (for a few days anyway.) I have to admin, I've been on the road more than every other week since early March and I'm feeling very burned out.

I arrived at TechEd a bit less enthusiastic than I usually do, but it ended up being a great trip.

I arrived Monday afternoon and headed down to the convention center where I immediately started running into old teammates, partners, and friends.

The conference sessions started Tuesday morning with a keynote by non other than Bill Gates (his last as a full time  Microsoft employee.)

Check out the BillG's last day video HERE.

Then Soma joined him to show off the latest from DevDiv !

John Galloway has an interesting summary of the Keynote HERE.

Though I spent much of the week meeting with partners and various DevDiv team members, I did get to see some GREAT talks.

David Chappell did a session entitled  - Choosing Communication Styles: SOAP/WS-* vs. REST

I've seen David present many times over the years and he is absolutely one of the best speakers in Technology. His talks are not only full of facts and useful opinions as well as very entertaining, but he's the kinds of speaker that you hear and then spend days brain storming about what you heard.

Read more about David HERE.

Jeff Prosise did great talks on ASP.NET Asynchronous Programming and ASP.NET AJAX internals. (Though after seeing his talk I had to come up with new demos for my AJAX talk :( 

Tom Gallagher (co-author of the super Developer Security Book, Hunting Security Bugs [ Click HERE ] ) gave an awesome talk - Making Security Testing Part of Everyday Development.

All I can say is - keep this guy away from your network :)

On Thursday I gave a talk on developing applications with the Microsoft AJAX stack. I had 360 attendees, which was great since Jeff did his MS AJAX talk earlier in the same day, and many folks stayed around for over an hour of Q&A after the talk.

On Friday I did a FishBowl session on Developer Security with Georgeo Pulikkathara (it will be available on line is a week or so and I'll post the link on SecureDeveloper.com)

Later Friday I did a talk on PHP on the Windows / IIS 7 Platform !

I arrived home EXHAUSTED - home for a week and then off to South Africa for Re-Mix in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

THEN - I'm home to CODE FOR THE SUMMER !