I hope everyone was able to keep up with my flurry of teched posts. In fact, you may have been wondering if I got eaten by Shamu or something. Well, one thing that I grossly underestimated was the time I actually had at teched. Being in the convention center from 7:30 to 10-11 every night doesn't leave alot of time, so I didn't really get a chance to blog.

I have been slowly putting my notes up on the wiki, though. I'd like to get all my notes up by the end of the weekend if possible. I'm also trying to collect links to others experiences in the same sessions. I hope to expand those wiki pages after we get the conference DVD, and I get a chance to go through a few more sessions. You can take a look at my teched notes thus far here. So far Monday is almost done (just need to finish the last session).

Teched was an amazing experience, though, and I really appreciate the chance I had to go. This was the first developer conference I had ever been to, and after reading alot of the pre-teched banter on how it's not worth it, I was a bit skeptical. After going, though, I feel it was definitely worth it. Alot of the material is made public both during, and after the conference, so getting to the materials that are presented is pretty easy. But, being able to take a week and just immerse myself in learning, and talking to others was well worth the time/expense. Being a corporate developer (no billable hours here), it's very difficult to get time to learn. There is no "bench" time. Even when we are in a research cycle (like now), there are fires, and business problems to deal with, which makes immersion pretty much impossible. I'll get 25% through a paper on xsd, and get pulled off for the rest of the day. Not the best way to learn, but effective nonetheless. Being able to focus for a complete week, though, I was able to learn much more then if I tried to grok most of that content on the clock, or even after hours. Plus from my companies perspective, they get a more informed developer, who really appreciates the fact they were willing to send him. Win win in my opinion. I will highly be suggesting we send at least 1 developer next year, which of course I would love to go, but I doubt it will be me next year :)

I've still got more teched stuff to post, but since it's kinda late now, I'll try to keep it at a minimum. Watch the wikipages if your interested in my session notes, and feel free to comment or add new links if there are other notes that I have missed. Now I can return to normal posting :)