TechEd 2004 Delhi, India
The event itself was great, got to look at a lot of cool technology coming out of Redmond. Here is a day by day summary.
Day 1
We started out with a keynote address that was basically Microsoft's vision for the next 5 years. The slides that we saw in the keynote were to be standard in all sessions. Strangely there was not much talk about Longhorn, but more about Whidbey and SQL Server 2005.
The first session was about Visual Studio Team System, the whitehorse designers totally blew me away, If it is implemented as well as it is visualized this could be a killer. The class designer with complete round trip engineering support was cool. Debug Visualizers are a great addition. Also the project properties can now be used to configure a lot more stuff like security and deployment via ClickOnce (more on that later).
The next session was on the new features in the CLR by Tarun Anand. 
The SQL-CLR integration is a great new feature. I will be exploring that in the coming days and hopefully should be able to post some info on that. Other than that Tarun also talked about generics.
The SQL-CLR integration is a great new feature. I will be exploring that in the coming days and hopefully should be able to post some info on that. Other than that Tarun also talked about generics. Next up we had a session in which the new WSE 2.0 features were discussed, there is some really good stuff coming out of redmond in this field. I was especially impressed with WS-Transactions, if that gets implemented it's going to be absolutely great.
For the next session, i switched from the developer track and attened the DBA track on SQL-CLR integration. Mahesh Prakriya was such a wonderful speaker and gave some very good insights into why some things are implemented in a paticular way inside SQL-CLR. One intresting thing to note is that currently to host the CLR in your app, you need to implement 4 COM interfaces, in CLR 2.0 there are about 50 interfaces available to runtime hosts to minutely control the behaviour of the CLR!
Day 2 The day started out with a session on BizTalk server 2004. BizTalk is one helluva good product and i am looking forward to working on it.
Next up was Tarun again with ClickOnce, which is basically an attempt to give smart clients the ability to automatically update themselves. Well there is nothing radically new in the implementation, i will be writing more about this technology in a different post. But one thing that struck me was the inability to do incremental updates, which IMHO is a very serious disadvantage. Also some initial inspections showed that the app was getting installed not in 'Program Files' but in 'Documents and Settings' Folder.
Next Deepak Gulati (Developer Evangelist, Microsoft India) gave a nice talk on mobile app development with VS 2005. The unified control architecture for mobile controls is a good idea and will help in reducing development headaches across various mobile platforms. The demos for this session were among the best at TechEd 2004, illustrating the concept and ease of the technology very well. Hats off to Deepak.
The last session fo the Day was ASP.Net data controls by Vinod Unny, the new controls that ship with ASP.Net 2.0 are so cool. Easy to use, easy to configure, consistent architecture. This is what makes it such a joy to develop with MS technologies. Unfortunately VS.Net simply refused to work and we were unable to see some of the demos, nonetheless a great session.
Day 3
Day 3 was the hands - on lab, i had registered for the VSTS lab and got to work for 3 hours on the new VS 2005 class designers and whitehorse. I must say the product was surprsingly stable for a Beta 1, although some bugs were encountered.
In general my feeling about TechEd was that it was too much marketing. I mean this is supposed to be meant for developers, not for managers who have to sell this technology to their bosses. My eyes start to glaze over after going through 3-4 ppt slides, have more demos please, code speaks volumes more than a ppt can. If anyone from MS is reading this, please have more demos, don't show us abstract ppt's show us concrete code.
Well we got SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, VS.Net 2005 Beta 1 and ISA 2004 Beta 2, RC1. I have already installed whidbey on my Virtual PC 2004, looking forward to exploring the new technologies. Also i was unable to install SQL Server on my VPC, the error message indicated that SQL Server and VPS were not compatible, so i installed SQL Server Express edition instead.