Once again, I was lucky enough to get a spot as a speaker at TechEd USA. This year, I am speaking about the SOLID principles, and about ASP.NET Web API. So far, I have managed to get one talk under my belt, and I personally think it went well!
An interesting, and kind of sucky part about TechEd this year is the fact that it has been sold out, and put in a location where there is not enough even enough room for everyone to attend the keynote sessions. Speakers were asked to not attend it, but instead watch it in one of the “overflow rooms”. Unfortunately, even these seemed to overflow. So I watched the keynote on a big screen TV in the exhibition area.
More...
Ok, so I thought I would upload the code from my TechEd presentation about the SOLID principles here. But before you go and download it, I want to mention that it is a contrived example, and that it might not be “proper” SOLID in all places. However, that is what you get when you have to present an application, and go through all the SOLID principles using it, in 1 hour and 15 minutes… 
Code available here: TechEd.Demo.SolidPrinciples.zip (538.16 kb)
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 have just come back to Wellington after having spent a week travelling around and speaking at TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand...and of course CodeCamp in Auckland before TechEd.
Both TechEds were full of interesting people and interesting sessions. Not that I actually attended that many. But I assume they were interesting…
At both the aussie and kiwi conferences, me and Chris Auld showed off how to build an Azure backed Windows Phone 7 application in 60 minutes. And at both conferences, we promised to put up some blog posts around it. So here is my first one…one that talks about some of the key pieces that were shown. As well as some that weren’t shown…
More...
As some of you might have seen/heard, I am speaking at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia the coming two weeks. This is the reason for my blog being kind of quiet lately, I have just had a bit too much to do.
One of the presentations I am doing, is presented together with Chris Auld and is called "Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes". It is a "double feature presentation" with two projectors, two computers, two presenters and two applications. And at the end of the presentation, the two applications come together to form a Windows Phone 7 application backed by an Azure service.
We have finally got all of it built and up and running, so I thought I would give you a sneak peak of what is to come.
More...