TechEd EMEA 2008 - First Impressions

05 Nov 2008 in Community on Teched emea 2008

After experiencing some initial troubles with Internet access from my hotel room, I might be able to start posting some pieces from Tech∙Ed here in Barcelona. Some of these might be out of chronological order, but first up here’s a general odds and ends from my first few days here:

• Barcelona is a fascinating city, but my Spanish needs some work (lots of work in fact)
• Monday night was the exhibitors drinks and mingle time - there was lots of beer, finger food and Xbox (I had to have a crack at The Force Unleashed on the Xbox - it’s exactly the same as on the PS3, but I much prefer the Xbox controllers;
• The HTC Touch Diamond and Pro are everywhere, I’m sure I’m seeing more of those than iPhones;
• The Microsoft Education guys were giving out stubbie coolers. Unless you’re from Australia, you probably won’t get how great that is, but I’ve finally got one to take back to London with me to keep by beer cold;
• I got a chance to catch up with Sander Berkouwer from dirteam.com and Patick Lownds from the Microsoft Virtualisation User Group UK (yes that’s virtualisation with an s)
• The MSI Wind is not really the laptop for taking notes at a convention like this. There’s not quite enough power points around to plug into so I keep running out of power, but Windows 7 does run on this machine quite well.
• On Windows 7, there are several different builds being used by presenters here, with build 6938 being the latest I’ve seen. Not everyone has had the superbar enabled in the post M3 builds.

There’s more to come on the sessions I’ve attended as soon as I can clean up my notes and post them.