Richard Thomason: TechEd - day zero

Yay it's TechEd again, the wheels are on the feet and the TechEd registration card is on the table at the airport car park check-in. No matter, the efficient team at the registration desk have me up and running in minutes, and the only danger is the TechEd TV guy lurking with his camera looking for stories. No heelying until out of sight of him.

This year I haven't had time to do the extensive evaluation of the tracks and topics that happened last year, so at least for today it's a question of looking through the excellent summaries in the conference timetable and chooosing the best one of the moment.

Last year was the big bang for Visual Studio 2008, and so had loads of material and so lots of big wigs. This year is more incremental. SQL Server 2008 is big, managing extra large data sets. The core of the content however is providing detailed under-the hood information on the current hot technologies. One I'm definitely going to is one called LINQ to anything - providing data sets to the LINQ interface. Can't be worse than ODBC and ADO...

Session 1 main choices:

• Microsoft PABX for Windows, due out next year. Interesting technologically.
• F# functional programming language, does simple and powerful asynchronous programming, apparently.
• A couple of architecture astronaut sessions to be avoided (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html)
• Sharepoint overview.

Session 2 has a Sharepoint detail workshop so it might have to be the F# one first.