Tech Ed Barcelona – Day Two

Tuesday was a very relaxed day, and a bit of a disappointment as well. In the morning I followed the more detailed session on STSDEV by Ted Pattison. The session itself was pretty good, but it left many people wanting. It is often that you use external DLL’s in your SharePoint project (Bamboo, …) and STSDEV doesn’t really support all that. Nevertheless it does help you speed up your SharePoint development and I’ll be doing a short session about it at the office as well. So a bit of a double feeling there. The second session of the day was Creating and Debugging Custom Timer Jobs in WSS 3.0 and that was very interesting. I haven’t coded a timer job myself yet, so I’m definetely going to try that out once I get home. The third session of the day was supposed to be Extreme SharePoint Customization – Understanding SharePoint Custom Fields. Unfortunately it was full when I arrived, so I had to take an alternative and checked out ASPNET MVC. Very nice session, small hickup during the demo but I did learn a lot. Luckily there is a rerun of the Extreme SharePoint Custo session as well so I’ll be able to follow that as wel.

In the afternoon I started with MOSS 2007 as WCM for Internet Facing Websites by Andrew Connell. BIG disappointment. It was the standard presentation of what a MOSS Publishing Site is. So I went to the lab area instead and followed some labs on WCF. Then last, but definetely not least, I took the presentation by Tim Huckaby : Integrating WPF and WCF into your Office Business Applications. And up till now I think that’s the best session I went to. Interesting, well presented and funny. What more do you need to end the day. After a long day of sessions, and the sauna and jacuzzi closing down at 21.00 we decided to do that before going for a bite. As expected, we were exhausted afterwards, went to the big mall right in front of the hotel and had some Burger King. Yes, Burger King, we hardly have those in Belgium so when I’m abroad I try to visit one Only one picture this time, I got a nice SharePoint hat and a U2U T-shirt so it was time for the ultimate nerd pose!

SharePoint Hat and U2U T-Shirt Nerd

Tech Ed EMEA Day One : Keynote and session

And here we are back again, alive and kicking after some good night’s sleep. Today we didn’t do a lot in the morning, we slept till around 10, washed up, had breakfast, finished up some remaing work and posted our previous blog entry. After having it all finished it was time to move to the convention centre for the keynote that kicks off Tech Ed 2008. It was quite interesting as we got to see Visual Studio 2010 and some of the nice and cool features of it, especially the SharePoint Integration. At the end of the keynote it was time to start chosing sessions. I chose a SharePoint track and went for SharePoint : Past, Present and Future in a SaaS world, which spoke exactly about what the title says The session was quite interesting, some Silverlight in combination with Moss 2008 and then a whole lot of information about SharePoint in the cloud. Sadly, it didn’t really bring any new info to me. Iff you follow what is going on from a high level point of view, you would know 99% of what is said during that session. Yanis went for Distributed Embedded Systems – The next big developer opportunity. It gave a nice overview of what can be expected in the future regarding embedded systems and, according to Yanis, a big pile of work is coming our way!

 

Following my SaaS session I had to take a course given by Ted  Pattison (Developing SharePoint Features to create reusable components). It was kind of a disappointment as when you have followed the courses by the Ted Pattison Group you’ll notice that it’s pretty much identical. I hoped for a more indepth course. He did talk about STSDEV though, so that is something nice that I took from that course. Yanis went for Building Data Visualisation Applications with WPF, Silverlight and Surface. It was an ok course where you get an introduction on how to make a rich web tool with little effort. And then was time for a drink! We saw some partners, saw quite a few exhibitants and some interesting tools to help us develop faster and easier.

After the drink we met up with some concolleagues and enjoyed a nice Japanese meal at Cdlc restaurant. This blog is a bit later than usual, as I got ripped off by Telefonica who sold me a 24 hour internet card without mentioning that it is 24 hours in a row and not 24 hours that I can freely choose. See you all tomorrow and enjoy the pictures.

Keynote	On our way to the restaurant	Group Picture
Tajin Morocco	Prawn Shrimps	Waiting for the tram to take us home

Tech Ed EMEA Barcelona D-Day -1

What happened on Dday -1? We arrived at 11.30 am at the AC Barcelona hotel. Where “we” stands for two zombies who drove for 12 hours in a row from Geraardsbergen to Barcelona. And the truth needs to be told, Yanis drove most of it. I already drove 4 hours before I arrived at Yanis’ place, so he took part of most of the driving towards Barcelona. And we had quite some fun driving to Barcelona, that is on the sparse moments where we were both awake. It all started well. The car was freshly washed, we had plenty of energy drinks ready and there was this exciting buzz of “WE ARE GOING ON A ROAD TRIP”. Our enthousiasms was great, especially for the first 15 minutes. Then we got our first flash of driving too fast on the highway (110 km/h). But we weren’t. Two minutes later we were flashed again as was the car before us. This time we were flashed at 65 km/h and we had no clue what was going on. So yes, quite the mistery. But it’ll be cleared out soon when Yanis receives the speeding tickets in his mailbox

It was quite the journey after that, we had the good music, there was almost no one on the road and I slept for four hours During that time Yanis drove 500km and I slept. Then it was about 4am and I took over. As I was still sleepy we started putting on some classics songs to sing along to stay awake (see picture of radio). And with the voice I got, staying awake wasn’t a problem at all. I drove 300 km while singing and dancing around in the car trying to stay awake. Yanis, to my utter surprise, slept and made some weird noises during  is sleep. Turning up the volume of the radio made them disappear. After 300 km I was exhausted and Yanis took over again. The next time I woke up we were driving in some mountaints which Yanis claimed that they were the Pyrenees. Our first discussion of the day surfaced as I stated it couldn’t be the Pyrenees yet. You can understand my joy and happyness when 3 hours later we were greeted by a sign which stated : Pyrenees. At around 10 o’clock we stopped at a gas station for fuel and Yanis was hoping for his first cup of coffee. But poor directions at the gas station made him pass the cafeteria and with a little push of yours truely we went straight up the highway again (I claimed it would be better to drink coffee in Barcelona, which we still haven’t btw ). Our second discussion arose when the GPS said left, and Yanis said right. And sadly, Yanis was right. We arrived at the hotel a few minutes later.

The hotel itself (AC Barcelona) lies right next to the conference hall, so that is nice We got a small but decent room with seaview on the 9th floor. The hotel houses some jacuzzi’s, some sauna’s and some turkish sauna’s and a fitness room on the 13th floor, with view over the city(see pictures). All very nice. After depositing all our stuff in our room and registering at Tech Ed we took the public transportation direction Villa Olympica. There we were greeted by the famous Shoko restaurant/lounge bar and we took a stroll down the beach.

We enjoyed (at least Yanis did, I thought it tasted horrible and I usually love it) some Sangria and went eating at a restaurant called “the Peru restaurant”. We both chose a menu and a bottle of white whine. Yanis took some cream soup, I went for some marinaded moussles and as main course we both received the typical spanish paella. It all tasted great, but the effects of our long journey started to affect us. We went back to the hotel, enjoyed some sauna and jacuzzy and went straight to bed. The end of an exhausting day. And man, did I sleep well!

Starting the trip	Me, With Sombrero	Yanis, ready to drive
Yanis is done driving	Me Driving	Classical Singalongs
Pyrenees??	Done driving	AC Barcelona
Sea View	Two seperate beds as requested	Pool on Roof
Tech Ed Entrance	Subway Trip	Shoko
Some Creamy Soup	Marinated Mussles	Postin the blog

Tech Ed Barcelona : Dday – 2 (Road Trip)

As promised to my colleagues and friends I’ll be blogging about my road trip to Barcelona Tech Ed with my colleague Yanis Duwyn. This post is currently made from Yanis’ catacombs of his house. The car is ready, the tank is filled up, the laptops are ready and there is a big case of Red Bull in the trunk. I kissed my kid and girlfriend goodbye and got the typical concerned parent phonecall, which is always nice :) Wish me good luck, I’m driving with Camicaze Yanis for 16 hours, and I’m supposed to sleep while he is driving