Today is the final day of TechEd and I woke up hurting all over… my feet, my head, my back and the rest of my body. Also today is the first day of the entire conference that I made it to the first session of the day (9 a.m.). The rest of the time I could not bring myself to get up that early and drive down to the convention center. Here are the final sessions that I went to:

• .Net Security In The Real World - Examples From Corporate America
• Visual Studio: Deploying .NET Applications with Ease
• Defending Against Layer 8: How to Recognize and Combat Social Engineering
• IIS Data Mining with Log Parser

I attended my first “cabana” session today. These were small open areas in the Sail Pavilion that had seats for about 20 people. I kind of liked it because the speakers were more laid back. The problem was because the light came from the sun, it was near impossible to see the plasma screen they used. If it weren’t cloudy, it would have been impossible!

The speaker for “Defending Against Layer 8” (Steve Riley) was hands down the best speaker of the entire conference. He kept the lights on and did not stand on the podium at all. Instead he walked around the huge room and really engaged the audience. He was so energetic and had a great attitude even though his talk was next to the last of the conference. He also seemed to have the largest audience of the day and got the most applause at the end of his talk than any other session I attended the entire conference. One thing Steve mentioned was that he never uses the computers in the Commnet area to check his e-mail because someone could put a keyboard sniffer on them. Well he is completely correct… I use to work for the company that did Commnet (located in Carlsbad) for TechEd last year and they found keyboard sniffers on some of the computers. So attendees beware!

Is it just me or did some of you notice too that the presenters had a lot of programs running in their taskbar? One presenter today had 11 and another had 13! Okay, maybe I’m the only one around that is minimalist and keeps as few things running the in the taskbar as possible for performance reasons?

It’s been 1.5 years since I have been at a conference, but I still see that the number of women engineers does not seem to be growing at all. Also I noticed that the number of engineers with long hair have decreased (I only spotted two others). Maybe I should finally cut mine… not!

After the sessions were over, I meet up with my friend Stan and my new friend Ambrose and we hit the Gaslamp area. We went to The Field for food, played pool at San Diego Billiards, hit Dick’s Last Resort and back to the W for a few drinks.

Summary
To sum up, I think TechEd was great. I would say it was the best conference I’ve been to. I was very impressed on how Microsoft ran the conference. I wished there were less Microsoft speakers and more “real world” speakers. I also wished the talks were more technical and less “50,000 foot level”. Some people told me that the PDC is more technical, but I figured with “tech” in the name of the conference, it would be more technical than it was. I hope TechEd comes back to San Diego soon!

Business Card Count = 3

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