Man, what a day! I had a blast at this conference. I really got something from every session, which was a lot more than I was expecting… especially after reading some of Jason Olson’s comments about TechEd. Anyway, I especially enjoyed the talks by Michael Stuart and Venkat Subramaniam on the new Visual Studio 2005 testing integration. My favorite features of Visual Studio 2005 are too many to list here, but mainly I think that Team Foundation Server is a huge step in the right direction. Microsoft is really paying attention to the community and providing what the developers really want/ (or already use)… but much tighter integration with the IDE. This was a recurring theme throughout the day… that you can do all of these things without leaving Visual Studio. I did think that the free books were a little lame… I mean 90% of the people that were present would not need an “Introduction to…” anything. They are obviously past that point. But I guess I shouldn’t expect much for an entry price of $99. The books they handed out were:
- Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers
- Introducing SQL 2005
- Introducing ASP.NET 2.0