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

At work today I was doing some searching in a C# file to find strings that we haven’t translated. E.g. messages to the user and so forth. I thought using RegExp to do this would be a good idea. That made me think of a joke I heard from Scott Hanselman at TechEd this year:

“You have a problem and find out you have to solve it with RegExp. Now you have two problems…”.

Anyway, I did a search and found the syntax I was looking for at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2k3te2cs%28VS.80%29.aspx. To solve my problem I used :q, which gave me hits like “some string”. I guess I could have gone even further and made it even more specific for my search, but this was sufficient for me. I’ve used quite a bit of RegExp before and it’s really powerful, once you get used to it. And that is probably the biggest problem with RegExp, it’s hard! When you finally have memorized some syntax, a week later it’s gone. And also that it vary a lot from implementation to implementation. Like RegExp in Find is not the same as RegExp in C#.

Just got the message from MSDN Subscriptions that Windows Vista is now available at MSDN Subscriber Downloads. The download is very slow though…

TechEd last for 4 days and in addition to that you can attend a pre conference one day before the main event. This year a thought this would be a good idea, and went to An Introduction to Software Architecture by Ron Jacobs and Scott Hanselman.

Ron Jacobs was first out with his talk about The Architect and Architecture, and to my disappointment I had seen it before. You can to if you go to http://www.ronjacobs.com/Noodle/default.htm. Actually the same thing was for his second and last talk for the day which was about Architecture Analysis, which you can se at the same link. I understand that speakers only have so much to say and it takes time to develop new talks and find subjects, but I was expecting something new at TechEd. Saying that, I would like to give credit to Ron Jacobs for putting his material online for everyone to see and I’m the first to admit that he’s a great speaker! If you ever get the chance to see one of his talks you will have great fun. If you want to know more about Ron Jacobs, go to his site http://www.ronjacobs.com/where you will find his blog, the ARCast show that he host and much more.

So then it was time for Scott Hanselman. First I didn’t recognize his name, but I knew I had seen it before. And when I saw him it came to me. He’s the guy (or one of the guys) behind DasBlog (the opensource blog). Of course he’s known for much more than that, but that’s what I recognized him for. Later I actually found out that he has a great web site called Hansel Minutes where he has weekly audio talks. Check it out at http://www.hanselminutes.com/. Also check out his blog at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/.

Scott’s talks where great. He really knows how to talk to an audience and I learned quite a bit. By the way, he was nice enough to help me out with a problem I had with hosting DasBlog on Vista. See previous post. So soon I’ll have to get back on that project.

Later I will do a post about the lectures I attended during the week, but right now there is just too much to see and not enough time for blogging.

We have arrived! Me and my colleague Øystein arrived in Barcelona yesterday and are now sitting (completely by our self) at the top floor of the conference center (CCIS). It’s our first time to TechEd in Barcelona and it’s huge. I was at TechEd in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and I’m really excited to be here in Barcelona this year. It is 20 degrees and lovely weather. Nice change from the cold climate up north in Norway. I’ll keep you updated during the conference and to my colleagues back in Bergen; maybe it’s your turn next year ;)

Really looking forward to meet up with other tech geeks, especially from NNUG in Norway and listening to some great speakers from around the world. And as an extra bonus to our self, we are going to watch Barcelona – Badalone in the Spanish Cup at one of the greatest and biggest stadiums in the world, The Camp Nou!