Yesterday I had a short lecture about TechEd in Barcelona at NNUG (Norwegian .Net User Group) in Bergen. I hope I managed to describe how cool it is to be at a conference like that and was able to persuade some developers or architects to attend next year. None of the people in the audience had been to TechEd before, so I hope I added some new insight for them.

I really think you get a lot from a conference like TechEd. When I came home I tried to reflect around what gave me the most value. What surprised me was that it was not a specific talk, speaker or happening. It was actually the motivation and the ideas yeu get by listening to great speakers like Anders Heljsberg, Scott Hanselman, Ron Jacobs, Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer to mention a few. When you come back to work after a weak of listening to these great speakers, you’re just filled with new ideas and want to get started on these new things right away. The scary thing though is that you might be over motivated and start implementing new cool features that your software don’t really need, because it’s just so cool that you can’t help it :)

Before I end this post I would just like to recommend two speakers at TechEd which are particularly active on the web:

Scott Hanselman

• http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ - Blog
• http://www.hanselminutes.com/ - Audio talk – PodCast
  

Ron Jacobs

• http://www.ronjacobs.com/ – Blog and more…
• http://www.skyscrapr.net/blogs/arcasts/ - PodCast