After Steve Ballmer, Julie Larson-Green took the stage. And I know that it might not be politically correct to say it, but I love that it is a woman stepping on stage doing it. It is good for the industry, and everyone agrees with that, but pointing it out is apparently a problem to some. And the fact that she does it with a confidence that just outshines most of the people doing the TechEd keynotes is just awesome.
Unfortunately, I think she was dealt a somewhat bad hand. The stuff that she was showing off was cool, but very far from game changers unfortunately…
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[Updated: Now with proper spelling…]
I do not get to go to Build this year as I am min Madrid speaking at TechEd Europe, which to be honest, feels pretty great. No, we didn’t get two tablets and a presentation by Steve Ballmer, but TechEd has been at the top of my list of places I wanted to speak at for quite some time. So I’m ok with that…
Instead, I downloaded the keynote from day one, and thought I would reflect a bit on what was said. Starting out with Steve Ballmer’s part
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Ok, so I have just been at my first TechEd keynote on the nothern hemisphere and probably my 50th keynote all in all…and to be honest, it doesn’t get that much better… And by that, I don’t mean that keynotes don’t get better than the one I just saw. I mean that they don’t get better with time… 
In this case, it was pretty uneventful. A lot of IT-Pro stuff, which is to be expected at TechEd, but also a bit of Dev-Div stuff from Scott Gu. So even if most of it was out of my interest zone, there were a few cool things. Such as the announcement of pricing changes on Azure, as well as changes in licensing for using MSDN licenses in Azure for dev/test.
The biggest announcement being that shut down instances in Azure will not be charged in the future, and charging will be done per minute instead of per hour. So this makes for a great dev/test platform that won’t rack up too much cost as one can shut down instances when not in use, without having to delete them and thus cause long startup times…
Ok, that was about all I could get out of the keynote… Sorry if it wasn’t a lot, but at least it was something…
Next up on my personal schedule is to run off to the Microsoft Solution Experience stand and answer questions about Windows 8 development…
I just came back to Stockholm after spending a few days at Oredev in Malmö. Oredev turned out to be a fantastic event. I arrived in Malmö late Tuesday afternoon and checked in to my hotelroom in the center of the city. Later that evening I got in my "costume" aka suit. I very rarely wear a suit and instead stick to baggy jeans and a hoodie... But since the speakers dinner that night was in the Town Hall, I went for a suit. It ended up being a bit overdressed, but hey...I like looking good once in a while...
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