I was on TechEd Europe this year. It was held between 25th and 28th June 2013 in Madrid. So this is a slightly belated retrospective. The conference was not really developer centric, which was a bit of a let down, but still, I managed to pick out some 20 sessions I would be interested to watch. All the videos and material is available on-line on Channel 9.
First of all – Madrid was beautiful even though the weather was scorching. I didn’t mind sun at all 
The venue was nice although ice cream was constantly in short supply, and organization was smooth, and from that point everything was great. Unfortunately, if you ask me whether this was money well spent – even though the company paid for the trip, I would say not. I’ll explain in the rest of the post, but it will end on a positive note, I promise.
Even though I said I picked out 20 sessions, some of them I chose because they were the least unappetising at the time slot, not that I was particularly interested in them. It turned out that those were the ones I remember the most, talking about exceeding expectations when you have none – on the other hand those 300 level and higher tracks rarely met my expectations.
Lets do this in order – Key notes were completely uninspiring in attempts to fire up enthusiasm for Windows 8 and convincing us that Windows 8 is the future. Azure is future of Microsoft – full stop. I like Windows 8, but what the heck is there to inspire me? I need it to work the way I want it and not to get in my way. Aside from cheesiness and slightly offending destruction of electrical equipment, there was very little in the key notes. They mentioned new features coming in SQL 2014 and new Visual Studio and new TFS and new delivery philosophy (this was a rare thing that caught my attention – MS will deliver new versions more often which is highly welcome). To be honest, nothing there really impressed me a bit – the only thing I found interesting was Azure, and in it, how quickly Microsoft is improving and getting traction and for the first time in a long while it appears that they are actually getting it right.
Foundational sessions were just a tiny bit more interesting. I attended one on Big Data and to be honest, it was a good overview of what Microsoft is doing in that area. Again, Azure was for me the main thing – they now have Hadoop on it with HDInsight. Also interesting was an upcoming feature of SQL 2014 – In-Memory OLTP, basically improving throughput via in memory tables.
In other sessions I mostly targeted new async features from C# 5 and Azure. I went on three sessions on async, maybe one would have been enough. Anyway, all three were good sessions, Creating Async Libraries was the best, give it a try. On Azure – it was a bit of a hit and miss, most of the things were known to me, that’s why I only chose 300 level and over, but the level didn’t really meet my expectations. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see how to use Azure Mobile Services, or continuous integration or even Git on TFS. This all enforces my belief that Azure is the future for Microsoft, because they seem to be doing great job and understanding that they are providing a service to their customers, not just another way to slip Windows into their drink. But as far as the session goes – except for the novelty factor (like in Git case), nothing really new or too interesting was there to be seen.
There were two sessions that caught my attention a bit more than the others. One was on Azure Service Bus. I have some interest in messaging systems, and we will most probably use something similar in the future, so this was an interesting session for me. And it was an interesting tour of Azure Service Bus given by the tech lead on the project. It looked really impressive and has great potential. The only thing is, it seems still immature, and the one on Azure will be updated much more often than the offering to be run on-premise. This is not to be confused with ESB and BizTalk – BizTalk uses it for whatever work it is doing, but the service bus is something completely different and Clemens (the presenter) made sure to point that out.
The other session that was slightly out of ordinary was Real Experiences and Architectural DDD Patterns Applied – and the main reason why it caught my attention was different way of thinking and the only one that I saw that wasn’t trying to sell me something from Microsoft It is a session on real world architecture and real world project – so no Contoso Inc or widgets or whatever such. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but it was a refreshing idea and challenges entrenched three/n tier one-size-fits-all architecture. Give it a shot, maybe not the greatest delivery, but for me the whole puzzle was complete by the end of the talk. Disappointingly (while I’m at DDD), I missed Jimmy Nilsson’s session, but I’ll definitely watch it. I opted for the only F# session instead but that sadly wasn’t 300 level session for me. It was good, and if you didn’t come across F# before well worth watching, but I expected something else.
The rest of the sessions were by Mark Russinovich and they were packed since he’s a very entertaining guy, and his sessions are always very interesting. He’s well worth watching. Anyway, not really something related to development. I’ve finished my TechEd with Hacker Tools You Should Know and Worry About – great session to finish off the week. Entertaining and scary how easily networks can be penetrated, and the hacks are nearly automated. Anyway, I watched these purely for pleasure (good God what a geeky statement!) and there was nothing else interesting on the agenda anyway.
All in all, not really worth the time and money compared to, say QCon. TechEd turned out to be lots of fluff and nothing to challenge entrenched views and practices – like everything is roses and no projects fail so why would we do things differently? Very little guidance on how to properly do things – just more sort of a light demoing of their products as we’re used to from Microsoft over the years. If you want to see things from a bit different perspective I really suggest trying something else next year. On a positive note – Azure is really turning out to be a great platform. They support nearly everything – lately I tried some Python web site development on it. This would’ve been a blasphemy a couple of years back, but guys seems to be doing a really good job – good stuff Microsoft.
And in closing – I doubt I’ll go on TechEd next year unless that acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services business turns out to be a killer move and sets development world on fire.
