Last week I was busy with TechEd Australia and while it would have made more sense to blog about the event in real-time, there simply wasn’t enough time. I have decided to try something a little unorthodox and blog about things a week later. Why not? 🙂

So the first two days before the official TechEd start were spent delivering a pre conference event entitled “Building quality .NET 3.5 applications using Visual Studio Team System 2008”. While the title was rather long and unwieldy, it was an accurate and descriptive title so I went with it. The Microsoft Readiness team set the capacity for this event at 40 people and it was fully booked out a few weeks before the event which is a good sign. My good friend and fellow MVP, Boon Tiong Lim made the trip over from Singapore to be my lab assistant as 40 people is a bit much to handle on your own.

The level of interest from class was fantastic and this interest led to many questions over the two days. As an instructor it was difficult to balance the number of questions with the amount of content I was planning on delivering over the two days. I kept asking myself if answering everyone’s questions offered better value than making sure I covered as much of the material as I could. In the end I chose to answer as many of the questions as I could and adjust the amount of content accordingly.

Based on the evaluations at the end of the event, the majority of people found the two days to be very valuable. We had a few issues such as catering and a hot room on day one but these were fixed on the second day.

Thanks to everyone who attended and I hope you’re all using new features and techniques you learnt on the course back at your workplace.

Here’s a photo of the group that Boon Tiong took on the second day.

(Click photo to enlarge)