TechEd India Recap

Last week I spoke at TechEd India and the Visual Studio 2010 launch. It was a great event with over 3,000 attendees, far more than attended the Visual Studio launch in Las Vegas! Senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, S. Somasegar, did an awesome keynote. I did three sessions:

• Building applications with OData
• Building Line of Business Applications with WCF and Silverlight 4.0
• Building Silverlight Business Applications with RIA Services

Something happened to me that never happened before in my 13+ years of being a professional international speaker: I lost my voice! I was in Indonesia the week before and picked up a small bug and had no voice. This was a new challenge for me, and Microsoft offered to cancel my sessions, but I figured why would I let no voice stop me from delivering my sessions!! So I decided to throw away the slides and just code. I had no voice anyway, so I spoke the universal geek language of code.

I think that the sessions went very well, however, since the code was written on the fly, I don’t have full demos available to download. For the RIA services talk, I ripped off Brad Abrams blog here and basically showed items 1-5, and 8-9. For the WCF/Silverlight session, I ripped off myself, you can see a walk through here on my blog (substitute the music data in my blog with IPL cricket teams since that is what I did in India). For the OData session, I have written a ton on data services here on my blog, and check back after TechEd USA and I will post a full demo with Silverlight 4.0 and the new OData client (which shipped yesterday.)

At TechEd, Telerik also had a booth and I tried to help out the best I could with no voice. We were bum-rushed for the free tee-shirts and we gave away about 300 tee shirts in about 1 minute.

Telerik also had a party with the Indian MVPs at the Opus Lounge in Bengaluru and we had some tee shirts for the MVPs. We made them put them on right there. :)

We had some epic karaoke and I continued my tradition of singing with an MVP Lead female songs as Abhishek Kant and I sang “Like a Virgin” to bring down the house. What little I had of my voice was now completely gone!

See you next year TechEd India!