Some quick notes from Tech Ed 2007(Not a technical review in any way):
1. Free T-Shirts from the vendors and the Shirts for sale in the Tech Ed store are often way too small. It's no secret that attendees at Tech Ed are often - ahem - overweight. I'm not obese but I am tall and usually the shirts are useless. Also, the chairs in the sessions are too close together. Put 500 fat guys in a room in tiny seats and watch how early people start walking out.
2. For some reason, the snack tables seemed nonexistent until the fourth day. The lunch buffets are handled pretty well but most of the days, all you could get was coffee, water or soda all day. The coffee was better than last time.
3. It seems more crowded. It could be the vast amounts of unused floor space, or it could be the lines in the bathrooms due to the better coffee. Honestly, by the fourth day people were lounging everywhere, and it was hard to find a place to sit or to check email.
4. Some of the sessions could have been shortened to 45 minutes. I know it's hard to preview the talk content in it's entirety, especially for speakers that have spoken so much that they have more leeway, but it really needs to happen. I would like Microsoft to split down some of the sessions into smaller chunks.
5. Just like last time I attended, too many similar sessions were scheduled concurrently. Typical day for me was having to pick from four interesting sessions in the morning and then having huge gaps later in the day where no sessions interested me. I know Microsoft is not going to schedule around my interests, but I'm pretty sure that if one afternoon is all hardware sessions, more of us developers aren't going to attend.Of course, if Microsoft wants to set up the whole conference around my schedule, they should contact me and I will give them a detailed list of what I want to see, where to put the snack tables and what I want for lunch.
6. The exhibit hall is massive. The main hall is about 1500 feet across, and Microsoft puts down all new carpet in the whole place. It's pretty awesome, smells nice, looks nice. But too many sessions are one opposite ends of the hall, up a flight of stairs and down a concourse. It can take literally ten-fifteen minutes to walk from one session to another, and then when you arrive, the session might be canceled. The event planners should try harder to maybe place all developer sessions on one side and hardware on the other.
7. A cool thing is some new 'Interactive Theaters' that microsoft placed in the main exhibit hall. These are small walled off areas with limited seating. The only problem is, some very interesting sessions were held in those theaters and they were far too crowded. There was so much unused space in the hall that these theaters could have easily been bigger, OR of varying size so that more popular sessions would have more rooms.
8. The Hands On Labs were better, with dual screen setups to allow one side for the lab manual and the other for the lab itself. Unfortunately, the lab was on a virtual machine running Vista, and that means it was SLOW. The more I use Vista the more I hate the idea of upgrading.
9. There is one good thing about Vista that I know of, and that's the implementation of Suite B, a new set of Cryptography tools. The current Crypto API is difficult to use, and the new one is easier and more robust. I will be writing more about that in the future.
10. I would suggest Microsoft use the extra exhibit hall space better with more 'plugged-in' sitting areas. There were more than last time, but not enough. Wireless connectivity was better but still spotty at times.
11. My own personal takeaways: More developers are interested in architecture now, the new Visual Studio has one key thing I like: The ability to target specific frameworks. None of the releases are major shifts like SQL Server 2005 or ASP.NET 2.0.
12. It looks like Tech Ed will be in Orlando again next year, which is probably a good idea. Orlando is a great place for a conference, but the content at Tech Ed is getting to the point where I'm only attending to see what the latest releases look like. I might look at PDC if they reschedule it.