Every paid TechEd delegate received an awesome package from Microsoft and HP:

Now I have a little carry-around-meetings netbook, HP Mini 2140. Despite being a bit too sluggish for development in Visual Studio 2010 and not having Bluetooth it is a really nice machine which has proven itself for the job.

Back to the conference. There were quite a few interesting sessions. Here is my top 5:

• Chris Auld from Intergen, NZ presenting on Azure platform. Great overview and comparison of all cloud platforms (Session ARC201).
• Jim Webber, Thoughtworks’ Global Head of Architecture, presenting on architecturing REST-based systems and hypermedia. Jim is a fantastic and passionate presenter, I enjoyed both of his sessions (SOA321 and ARC305) immensely.
• Joel Pobar presenting on F# and its application in applications. It was a very interesting session (DEV450) indeed, one of those sessions that any developer should love -  playing with new cool stuff  with new technology. I’ll be catching up with Joel during his upcoming Sydney visit to talk more about F#.
• Nick Randolph on interconnectivity between clients (including mobile) and Azure services, queues, etc. Full of practical stuff on Azure (Session SOA341).
• Rob Farley from LobsterPot Solutions presenting a hands-on session on SQL Azure (Session SQL305).

And, as usual, TechEd is a place where you meet interesting people and get inspiring ideas. It was great to catch up with ex-colleagues from ediCargoWise who now run their own company, EnvoyAT.

Looking forward to TechEd 2010, it’s going to be great to spend few full on technical days at Gold Coast this time next year.

Building such a thing from the ground up was quite an experience from professional point of view; it was a long project too (started prototype in August 2007, started development in September 2007, pilot in April 2008, went live for public in June 2008).

Two weeks after launch – no major issues, which is even a better feeling.

…now I just need a holiday before starting to work on a new assignment…