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 ;)