TechEd 2008 through one eye

Believe it or not, but on the second day of TechEd I got some infection in my right eye. So all my impressions from the sessions starting the second day are sort of one-sided J.

Anyway, besides the cool keynote by Bill Gates which I have already mentioned, here are my top picks for TechEd Developers 2008:

• "How I became a Team Build muscle man" session by Steven Borg totally rocked (just to draw a part of the picture, the session included foam dispenser and vacuum cleaner as instruments for the code quality improvement)
  
• Two sessions ("Introduction to Mock Objects and Advanced Unit Testing "and "How Not to Write Unit Tests") by Roy Osherove were very well presented and informative. I wanted to attend Roy's presentation for a long while and was not disappointed. You really want to check out his blog (for more information on mock objects and testing in general) and perhaps his recent book on unit tests
  
• Very informative session on "Migrating Extensibility to the Managed Add-In Framework" by Jesse Kaplan. It was an eye-opener to me since managed add-in framework is part of .Net 3.5 that I has completely missed (do you know what is inside of System.AddIn assembly?)
  
• Several sessions on future parallel frameworks (both for managed and native) were very informative. Programming for multiple core processors is something to follow closely (as an example, Stephen Toub presented at his session "Parallelize Your Microsoft Visual C++ Applications with the Concurrency Runtime" performance benchmarks for 24-core Intel processor; in my mind that means that in couple of years you might have that in your Dell workstation). And if you are interested in that topic here are two blogs to follow – Managed Concurrency Framework blog and newly launched Native Concurrency blog
  

And last but not least, TechEd was an awesome place to meet new people (and talk face-to-face with some of the email acquaintances). Overall, the event was excellently organized (just try to set up the conference for six thousand people) and I have enjoyed it very much (though darn that eye thing!).