TechED Asia 2005 happened right here in Singapore from the 24th of August to the 26th of August 2005! A great experience for developers and IT professionals here in Singapore and those who came in to join the fun!
There has been a big hype about TechED finally being organized here in Singapore for the first time, (we definitely hope, not for the last time!) for quite long. And I must say - the turn up rate was pretty good compared to the rest of the MSDN meets.
The TechED Asia 2005 was a dream-come-true for many developers and IT professionals in Singapore, who were unable to attend the TechED’s held in other parts of Asia over the past years.
Free passes went off like hot cakes to some lucky ones but the rest did not hesitate to pay for the TechED 3 day passes. Microsoft helped by reducing the prices and providing concessions for members of various User Groups.
Obviously, a lot of attention was paid to the upcoming Microsoft technologies - ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, Windows Vista and .Net 2.0 in general just to name a few. The presenters did a great job of promoting these technologies and injecting the developers with great confidence to use them!
Apart from TechED, Microsoft also helped arrange the User Group Confluence; which was a joint User Group meeting of three of the Singapore’s User Groups (Singapore’s .Net UG, Singapore’s SQL Server UG and Singapore’s Windows UG). This User Group meeting was held during the after hours of TechED. Steve Riley, Rick Samona and Jay Roxe presented in this User Group Confluence.
Microsoft also organized “Meet the experts” and “discussions” sessions where the experts were ready to answer any queries you might have – a brilliant idea indeed. Besides from being the dream of developers, it was definitely a massive help to many of them. After all, how many times do you really get a chance like this?
Event Breakdown:
Day 1:
Day one covered a lot of technical topics from ASP.NET 2.0 to web-services to VS.NET 2005. Undoubtedly, a heavy concentration of .Net was all around! The developers were quite satisfied by the topics and its deliveries. Given this time, when everyone is anticipating SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005, the .Net 2.0 topics really propelled the enthusiasm amidst the audience.
Day 2:
Day two went easier on .Net 2.0 technical presentations and the event changed gear to data tracks. Excellent presentations were lined up on database design and performance tuning.
Day 3:
Now came day three which covered topics like BI and Data Warehouse. But that’s not all; long queues were formed for the Hands-On Labs. Yes, finally time to put everything seen and heard to practice. And of course, who can forget the lunch? Skewed Lamb, fish, sherry chicken, oysters, slurp…
The audience had mixed feelings over the organization. Some felt that the discussions were not in depth enough and that the information provided could easily be found online. But the majority was ok with the depth of topics delivered by the speakers. Quite a few of them also criticized the idea of multiple tracks running parallel which cost them quite a few of the important tracks that they came for, and most importantly – paid for! Well, you gain some, you loose some. But overall, everyone was satisfied with the event organization.
In all, TechED presenters spruced up the interest of the developers regarding the upcoming products like VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, VSTS and the various new tools which are going to be bundled along with them.
Presenters like Steve Riley, Jay Roxe, Jesper Johansson, Rick Samona, William Tay and many others were the main attraction of the event. The audience made sure that they get their money’s worth by bombarding the speakers with questions after every presentation!
At the end of third day, everyone went home with a lot of goodies in their hands and a lot of new ideas zooming through their minds.