As I mentioned in my first post Hege and I spent the weekend in Barcelona which was great. We went and saw the Barcelona - Real Batis game. What an experience! Ronaldinio scored two amazing free kick goals, Real Batis didn't stand a chance. Anyway, TechEd is halfway through and so far the event have been great. The keynote didn't have too many big announcements, but at least we know that VS2008 will ship (online) by the end of this month, so it's really really close guys! The coolest part of the key note demo was Dan Fernandez showing how they've used the Visual Studio Shell to build a custom IDE to create World of Warcraft plugins, with a custom UI designer and full intellisense for the WOW script language.  Awesome stuff! I also attended Dan's talk on Popfly which also was really enjoyable.

I've been dropping in on various sessions related to the things I'll cover in my Web 2.0 event in Oslo November 20, and in 20min I'm going to the "WCF and the Web: AJAX, REST and Syndication Services in Web 2.0 with .NET 3.5" session. This is exactly some of the things I'll cover in my talk in Oslo, so figured I'd drop by to see if I can pick up some tricks to show you…

The "Silverlight, ASP.NET and Web Services in IronPython and IronRuby" was another really interesting sessions. It's amazing how far the IronPython project have come, and I really hope I can apply dynamic programming in a work related project in a not to far distant future. Dynamic languages on top of the CLR enables some really powerful scenarios, and I also think that these new sets of languages are going to attract new developers to the platform…

Edgar Stokka, a colleague from Capgemini Stavanger, have created a dedicated TechEd 2007 blog over at http://techedgar.blogspot.com where he have posted about his impressions of the event, and a bunch of pictures. So for more impressions of TechEd Barcelona head over to his site.

Just a quick blog post before jumping to bed. Heading off to TechEd Developers in Barcelona tomorrow morning. Spending the weekend in Barcelona with my girl friend before the conference kicks off Monday morning. I'm really looking forward to this years TechEd, with all the cool Microsoft technologies releasing really soon… I'll try to write a couple of posts on my impressions on the announcements, presentations and key note of this years TechEd. I had a great time last year when we represented the students at the Imagine Cup booth. This year I'm going to be at the IIS 7 Ask the Experts stand a few hours through out the week. If you're at TechEd and read this blog it would be cool if you drop buy and say hi.

Another highlight of TechEd is the Norwegian party at Hard Rock Cafe. Last year was a blast, and I'm in no doubt that this year is going to be just as great!

When I'm back from Barcelona next Friday it's full focus on the Web 2.0 I'm doing together with Microsoft Norway. It's a three hour show where I build a typical Web 2.0 site from the ground up showing how you can use VS2008 and Microsoft technology to realize typical Web 2.0 scenarios. You can read more about the even over at the Silverlight landing page Hege made. The last couple of days more than 300 people signed up, and it's almost full booked already! That's just amazing! Rune Grothaug from MS Norway said that he'll try to find a larger place to host the event if more people want to sign up… Just keep an eye on the Norwegian MSDN site for information.

If you've signed up for the event, please drop me a comment with your expectations and things you'd like to see.

See you in Barcelona!

Yesterday I had my Channel9 debut. During TechEd in Barcelona Hans Olav and I did an interview with Charles from Channel9, and now the video is finally up. We talk about our Imagine Cup experience and demo our application. Head over to Channel9 and check out the video and post a comment!

It's Monday night and I'm safely back home in Trondheim. I've spent the weekend recovering from a really exiting but still tiresome TechEd week in Barcelona.

Wednesday was all about interviews and demos. Early Wednesday Simon Brown and Arfa (that 11 year old Pakistan girl from the key note) dropped by our stand and asked for an Imagine Cup demo. Arfa was really interested in the project, but most of all she wanted to compete in the Imagine Cup her self, even tough she have to wait four more years till she turns 16…

During the day we gave three video interviews, one with Virtual TechEd, one with my mate Dave McMahon and finally a Channel9 interview. I'll post links as soon as the interviews are available online. Just after the Channel9 interview Anders Hejlsberg dropped by the Imagine Cup stand to check out our and the Italian project. Me and Hans Olav got a chance to give him the demo, and talk to him about technologies used to implement the project, Anders sessions at TechEd and LINQ. It was great to get a chance to meet Anders and chat with him.

Wednesday evening was all about the infamous, annual Norwegian TechEd party at the Hard Rock Cafe. More than 200 Norwegian delegates where attending TechEd this year, and the Norwegian party is know for being the best TechEd party, so quite a few speakers dropped by as well. As you can imagine, the place was quite crowded and the atmosphere was great!

Thursday was the "Microsoft Student Partner Program" day. 120 students from around the EMEA region was invited to attend TechEd during the day. Henrik, the Danish academic evangelist, was also in Barcelona, so it was fun seeing him again. Thursday after noon Caroline Phillips officially announced the Microsoft Student Partner Program at the first EMEA MSP meeting. During the meeting we gave a 25 minute presentation talking about our Imagine Cup project and most importantly the experience in India during the world finals.

After the meeting all 120 MSP, all the ADE's and a couple of other Microsoft people went over to "Lasermon" which has Barcelona's largest laser gun arena. We played laser death match, had all kinds of Spanish food and plenty of drinks. It was great to meet students from around the EMEA region and talk about how they run their local student community user groups.

During the party I also got a chance to catch up with Rob Burke from Microsoft Ireland. He's a really great guy, and has a really god blog up at http://blogs.msdn.com/robburke, and is allso a frequent Flickr poster.

Our flight back to Norway left Friday after noon, so we didn't have time to attend TechEd Friday. It was nice to get home Friday afternoon and have the weekend to recover  after TechEd.

As you can imagine after reading the posts TechEd this year was really busy for us. I didn't get a chance to attend as many sessions as I wanted, but then again we will be receiving the TechEd post conference DVD with all the sessions. You can cream all the great content into one DVD, but you cant capture the true atmosphere and all the people you meet at TechEd into one DVD. You'll have to be there your self.

Finally, a big shout out to everyone I meet during the TechEd week, and special thanks to Caroline for inviting us.

Oh, by the way, Hege and Caroline have uploaded a bunch of pictures on their Flickr sites. Be sure to check them out.

PS. I installed Office 2007 RTM today. Worked like a charm! Some really cool new features in OneNote 2007 I'll blog about later.

PPS: I have lots of great ideas after TechEd, just need time to put them in motion. One of the things I'm currently playing with involves IQueriable<T>… More to come on this one…

I'm currently attending the Microsoft TechEd Developers in Barcelona. Me and Hege arrived Friday at noon, so we speed the weekend as tourists Barcelona with Gøran and Astrid, who arrived Thursday noon. During the weekend we've visited some of Gaudis famous buildings, such as Sagrada Familia and Casa Milà. We spend Saturday trawling the shops down town in the Larabla street. Lots of fun for the girls, horrible for my feet…

We spent Sunday checking out the Zoo, which was tons of fun, even though the famous albino gorilla Snowflake passed away a few years ago. We saw all kinds of crazy animals and Hege took a ton of pictures that probably will be available on Flickr once we get back to Trondheim. On the evening we visited the Aquarium where they had a 70m under water tunnel with sharks and all kinds of other big fishes.

Monday was the first day of TechEd. Well, actually Monday it's the pre-conference day. I attended the first two parts of the architecture track held by Ron Jacobs and Scott Hanselman. I had to leave before they got really deep into the material, but Ron gave some interesting "stories" about the different role of an architect. As an explorer, designer and advocate. Scott gave some concrete tips on how to measure and plan for security, scalability, performance and availability. Interesting in deed.

I had to leave after the two first parts of the pre-conference track for the RD meeting. Great to finally meat many of my fellow RDs in person. During the meeting the winners of the photo contest where announced. And guess what; I won! Big thanks to the photographer Hege. The first price was an Xbox 360 and a Zune Player (once available). So that was tons of fun. After the meeting we had an RD party down town Barcelona. The food was excellent, and I had squid fish for the first time!

Today, Tuesday, was the real opening day of TechEd. During the morning key note the Norwegian team and our project was mentioned, in front of approx 3500 developers. Awesome! The key note was pretty much what you can expect from an key note like this. Some cool end to end scenarios on how to use .NET 3.0, Windows Vista and Office 2007 to build new business solutions. Anders Hejlsberg did his LINQ magic, which continues to blow me away by it's power and elegance. This is definitely something I'll explore further and blog more about.

We've also been busy at the Imagine Cup stand, where we've been demoing MediWatch for press, developers and other interested people. I also took part in a "press round table" discussing "young developers of the future". The theme for the discussion was some of the challenges for young developers, which part universities should play in providing the students with the skill set needed in the "real world", and how universities and companies could encourage more young students to learn information technology and go on to become entrepreneurs them self.

All in all the first half of my Barcelona stay has been a blast, and there is so much more to come. Lots of great sessions to attend, and fun parties to be at. Tomorrow is the Norwegian party at Hard rock cafe, and Thursday is the student partner evening.

I'll be back with more. This is Jonas, reporting live from TechEd ;)