This was my second year at TechEd, and I was really looking forward to it. There were a lot of great sessions from folks I’d heard from last year – Steve Riley, Neil Roodyn, and Joel Pobar, amongst many others.

This year’s event was held at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre – taking up hall 5, plus both the Parkside and Bayside conference centre. A truly huge area with something like fifteen concurrent ‘main-line’ sessions, a big hands-on-labs area that saw heavy use, a well utilised Exhibitor hall with another two smaller presentation areas and another two ‘open area’ chalk and talk short presentation areas.

At times I was torn between two or even three events – and I only got to do one of the ten or so hands-on-labs events that I’d wanted to do.

In terms of technical content, Andrew Coates and the rest of the team that went into organising speakers and the presentations deserve a medal.  Seriously great stuff there.

The only thing that I’d like to see changed in future TechEd events is to have shorter talks – Say 45-50 minutes. The current 1h 15 minute format is incredibly difficult for all but the absolute best speakers to fill in a useful manner. But even still, sitting on those seats for that length of time gets really uncomfortable. 

I’d like to also like to thank Michael Kordahi for restructuring the Ask the Experts night – the public Q&A thing was a good icebreaker.

Unfortunately, a series of things combined to make me really disappointed with the event this year. Whilst they’re not the technical education side of things, they were supporting the event as a whole.

My first gripe is about the absolute outright failure of the internet access for the vast majority of the event. At a major event like TechEd, people have come to expect internet access. It’s not cheap to do this, but when you are sponsored by companies like HP and Cisco – you’d expect them to be showcasing some latest and greatest networking products here.  For some reason something went wrong, and despite having solid wifi signal in most of the conference centre – I just could                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          n’t get a DHCP lease.

Sure, internet access didn’t kill the event – but it meant it was harder to keep in contact with friends and colleagues who were also at the event, and also meant I couldn’t get the information the presenters talked about and begin playing with it immediately.

The second gripe sounds like I’m a spoilt brat, but I’m going to say it anyway: The catering this year left a lot to be desired.  Whilst last year’s gourmet catering was fantastic, this year’s was pretty abysmal. Especially so when you realise it’s about 500 meters from Haymarket/China Town where there’s amazing food for what I’m fairly sure is probably equivalent in cost at commercial scales.

The catering issues extended to having no vegetarian option for all practical purposes, with the exception of lunch on the last day. Drinks were, as far as I know, entirely non-existent on Thursday – with even  the water fountains in some locations going without being refilled (at least part of the day).  Pity those who forgot, or didn’t have a water bottle to fill.

My third, and final gripe is about the Closing Party. At a technical conference, people tend to have backpacks. It’s not unreasonable to expect that they might fill these backpacks with things like laptops and cameras.  You could also read this as ‘thousands of dollars of equipment’.

This is especially true of technical conferences where you happen to be giving everyone at the conference a backpack when signing up.  So when I’m told that I must hand my backpack over to someone, or else I can’t go in – my first reaction is to question the sanity of the person responsible for coming up with that decision.

My second reaction is a well known Cartman saying – Screw you guys, I’m going home. There is no way that I’ll hand over my laptop and camera gear to a bunch of people whom, whilst I’m sure are well meaning and nice people, have all care but no responsibility over what happens to said equipment from that point on.

As for what was on *in* the closing party? I’ve only heard second hand reports from others – so I’ll leave that for them to comment on.