04:48 Canberra: -1c, iBurst Coverage: 90%, TechEd Session List

My alarm went off at 4am this morning. Actually, should I say the phone rang AND my alarm went off. I set a Telstra wake-up call just to be doubly sure. My phone failed wake me up on Tuesday this week so I wasn’t in a very trusting mood.

When you set the alarm for that early in the morning it seems like a good idea, but you typically want to kick yourself when you wake up, especially when you remember that the doors to the airport don’t actually open until 5am and it only takes fifteen minutes to get there.

This is the first leg of my trip to TechEd 2005 on the Gold Coast, although I am going to fly into Brisbane to spend some time with my folks before heading to the convention centre.

While I am waiting for the plane I thought I would post up the sessions that I _hope_ to catch while I am at TechEd.

• Indigo Architecture Overview (Ari Bixhorn)
• Cabana Session: VSTS and Windows Vista Licensing
• Programming Indigo (Ari Bixhorn)
• Building Secure Reliable Services with Indigo (I was debating whether to go to my session or not)
• What’s new in Visual Basic .NET for 2005 (Jay Roxe)
• Longhorn Fundamentals (Amy Stephan)
• Cabana Session: Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects: Developing Service Oriented Systems (Michael Leworthy)
• Web Platform of the Future : An IIS 7.0 Overview (Ken Shaefer)
• Database Discussion with Ron Talmage, Greg Low, Greg Linwood and Mark Morton.
• Cabana Session: User Groups – How to start (hosted by Nick Randolph, Jeff Alexander and Andrew Coates)
• Blogging with Betsy and Frank Arrigo
• When/where/why: Smart Client versus Web: Smart Client Architecture (Troy Magennis)
• Visual Basic Tips/Tricks and Other Advanced Topics (Nick Randolph and Bill McCarthy) wouldn’t miss this one for the word!
• Introducing System.Transactions and New Features (Nigel Watson)
• Visual C# Under the Covers: An in-depth look at C# 2.0 (definately going to this one)
• Too many good ones to choose from – but how can I go to any of them when I will need to go and pick up my car!

My TechEd 2005 Journey

Frank and his crew (I really wanted to say hommies but it just doesn’t sound right) look like they have already had a heap of fun leading up to TechEd. While I’ve been slowly preparing for TechEd over the past couple of months I find that the weekend before is where ‘da business really starts.

Today I am tidying up some code for a client then I head home to pack my bags for a 6am flight to Queensland tomorrow morning (ouch!). Last year I also presented in New Zealand but that won’t be required this year, instead I’m going to spend the weekend at my home town Caboolture (Sunshine Coast) before heading south again to the Gold Coast.

My plan for this weekend is to run through my two presentations a couple of times to make sure that the order of content makes sense. Once I am happy with that I’m going to spend some time polishing up on my zingers and burns to ward off the Visual Basics that are sure to invade my C# 2.0 session. I think they may need extra security in the room . . .