TechEd 2012 – Days 1 and 2
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The first couple of days at TechEd are over. So far the sessions have ranged from so-so to pretty good. I didn’t go into the show thinking I’d focus on SharePoint and Team Foundation Server, but I ended up going to a few of those sessions…
Day One
- Keynote – First half was Windows Server 2012 related stuff. I didn’t understand much of it but the demos seemed pretty cool. They did make fun of the Lumia phones though (said it was the device that everyone had, audience laughed). The great Scott Guthrie (AKA The Gu, who by the way loves Wonder Reader), delivered thedeveloper portion of the keynote. Nothing too exciting, with some failed demos, but there was an awesome moment when he created a site to display live audience comments and someone posted “who farted?”.
- ASP.NET Loves HTML5 - A bit of a recap of a bunch of ASP.NET and Visual Studio improvements for HTML5. Good presentation by Damien Edwards despite almost losing all his voice.
- Developer Collaboration with Team Foundation Server 2012 – Lots of good info on TFS and VS 2012 by Jamie Cool… There are lots of great improvements to pretty much everything. It made me really want to check out more TFS sessions.
- Taking your ALM to the Cloud with Hosted TFS – Good intro to Hosted TFS by Martin Woodward, where he announced that TfsPreview.com is now open to be public. I definitely want to try it out when I get back.
Day Two
- Another Keynote – This one was a waste of time. They pretended like nobody at the show knew anything about Windows 8 and proceeded with the same dog and pony show they had been doing for the past 9 months. This timeslot could’ve been better spent attending a breakout session. Almost everything was super basic and old news. There were a couple of tiny new revelations… They briefly showed Excel 2013 on Windows RT that looks just like 2010. They also showed Hypervisor running on Windows 8 for the first time. They then revealed the multitouch trackpad gestures for Windows 8… Imagine the awesome trackpad gestures on OSX, except not as awesome and only half the functionality.
- Exploring the Power of Page Layouts in SharePoint 2010 WCM Sites – Very basic SharePoint session that required SharePoint Standard, which we don’t yet have.
- Real World Developer Testing with Visual Studio 2012 – Pretty good talk. It’s nice to see what people do in the real world to test their apps.
- Developing and Managing SharePoint Solutions with VS 2012 – This was an okay presentation. It needed a bit of polish.
- All Aboard the TFS Express – This was listed as a 300 level course but was an intro to TFS. Some decent info but nothing much was new.
The first couple of days at TechEd are over. So far the sessions have ranged from so-so to pretty good. I didn’t go into the show thinking I’d focus on SharePoint and Team Foundation Server, but I ended up going to a few of those sessions…
Day One
- Keynote – First half was Windows Server 2012 related stuff. I didn’t understand much of it but the demos seemed pretty cool. They did make fun of the Lumia phones though (said it was the device that everyone had, audience laughed). The great Scott Guthrie (AKA The Gu, who by the way loves Wonder Reader), delivered thedeveloper portion of the keynote. Nothing too exciting, with some failed demos, but there was an awesome moment when he created a site to display live audience comments and someone posted “who farted?”.
- ASP.NET Loves HTML5 - A bit of a recap of a bunch of ASP.NET and Visual Studio improvements for HTML5. Good presentation by Damien Edwards despite almost losing all his voice.
- Developer Collaboration with Team Foundation Server 2012 – Lots of good info on TFS and VS 2012 by Jamie Cool… There are lots of great improvements to pretty much everything. It made me really want to check out more TFS sessions.
- Taking your ALM to the Cloud with Hosted TFS – Good intro to Hosted TFS by Martin Woodward, where he announced that TfsPreview.com is now open to be public. I definitely want to try it out when I get back.
Day Two
- Another Keynote – This one was a waste of time. They pretended like nobody at the show knew anything about Windows 8 and proceeded with the same dog and pony show they had been doing for the past 9 months. This timeslot could’ve been better spent attending a breakout session. Almost everything was super basic and old news. There were a couple of tiny new revelations… They briefly showed Excel 2013 on Windows RT that looks just like 2010. They also showed Hypervisor running on Windows 8 for the first time. They then revealed the multitouch trackpad gestures for Windows 8… Imagine the awesome trackpad gestures on OSX, except not as awesome and only half the functionality.
- Exploring the Power of Page Layouts in SharePoint 2010 WCM Sites – Very basic SharePoint session that required SharePoint Standard, which we don’t yet have.
- Real World Developer Testing with Visual Studio 2012 – Pretty good talk. It’s nice to see what people do in the real world to test their apps.
- Developing and Managing SharePoint Solutions with VS 2012 – This was an okay presentation. It needed a bit of polish.
- All Aboard the TFS Express – This was listed as a 300 level course but was an intro to TFS. Some decent info but nothing much was new.