Well that’s my first TechEd down as both a speaker and a delegate and what better place to have it than in my home town of the Gold Coast. For international readers, think of it as having all the best bits of what you know of Australia (beaches, good weather, scantily clad [insert preference here]) whilst all the bad bits you know of cities (pollution, bad traffic, angry people) get left behind in Melbourne and Sydney. Clearly this is an entirely unbiased view.
You never quite know what to expect at a new conference in terms of the general feel of the place, particularly when it comes to the levels of formality versus humour versus ad lib by the presenters. I was expecting more formality than I ended up seeing – and that’s a very good thing. There were some great presentations before mine that set a really fun, interactive tone with a very involved audience; Adam Cogan and Damian Brady’s session on ALM in Visual Studio 2013, for example, and particularly Erdal Ozkaya’s Dark Side of Social Networking (absolutely hilarious and very insightful).
I was very happy with how my session went, particularly based on the interactivity and reactions from the audience. I’m particularly happy with how I wrapped it up – an audience in stitches over something equal parts hilarious and disturbing in terms of security risks is a very fine result indeed :)
Check out the Microsoft Channel 9 website for the full overview of the session and a download link for the slides and video if you want to save them offline.