Ahmed Salijee

What is happening with Teched Africa?

It occurred to me that I have not blogged much about TechED. Firstly my role - I am no longer the primary owner of the developer tracks at TechED. Eben is. I am, however, the secondary owner, and very much involved with the process of selecting sessions and recruiting speakers. This posting is a bit long, but I wanted to share some information on where we are - and why!

A little background

TechED has always been held at Sun City. This has resulted, due to capacity limitations, that we could only have around 1600 attendees and approximately 100 sessions. From a developer perspective, around 30% of the audience was made up of developers and around 35% of the content was dev focused. Now 35 sessions might seem much, but by the time you look at the technology stack, you quickly realize that you can only have 1 or 2 sessions per technology. This use to be a huge problem in terms of determining what sessions we decide to do. Some of the factors

1. Technology Focus - Do you focus on new/emerging technologies or more of the existing stuff? Is the focus 50/50 or something else?
2. Audience Profiling - How much does your audience know? How many of them know what etc -  truly critical
3. Depth of content - How deep do you go. This is related to (2). I can remember doing an advanced TFS session a few years ago. Within 5 minutes I figured out that at least 80% of the audience was lot. It would have been a better idea to do an intro BUT... there comes the problem. How do I cater for the other 20%. They were probably quite happy with the session. We find this scenario very often - that the majority of the audience might not even have seen/worked with the technology. Now when you have limited sessions, we are usually inclined to go with the sessions that appeals to a broader audience.
4. If we have around 400 developers present, it is sometimes difficult to convince MS international speakers to come down. In a breakout they might have 100 attendees, and they want a better return on the trip.

The overall feedback we get (via eval forms) is very positive. We generally rate around 80% satisfied/very satisfied. This equates to an average rating of around 7.4 on a 9 point scale. Very few sessions get rated below a 7 (typically around 5%).

BUT..BUT... We get anecdotal evidence - probably from someone like you reading this - that TechED does not provide enough value. This is not from everyone from certainly from some segment. We get feedback like:

1. It is too expensive.
2. TechED is a party.
3. The speakers (some) are not great.
4. The content is not deep enough.
5. The event is more marketing.
6. You can let me know what else by commenting in the blog.

TechED 2008

TechED is moving to Durbs so we can have more attendees and more sessions. We now have around 70 dev focused sessions in total (across all tracks).Some of the decisions Eben and I took was that:

1. We would have more depth sessions.
2. We would try and recruit good international speakers - and make them do the depth sessions where possible
3. We still need to take into account the factors above.

With that in mind, below is a list of speakers we are currently trying to get to South Africa. This is not a promise that all these will come as there are many factors that influence who will ultimately come. We reckon at least 60% of these guys will be here. I will not put down their profiles here but would be interested in your comments.

• Bart De Smet
• Brad Abrams
• Brian Randell
• Chris Menegay
• Daniel Moth
• Doug Seven (SVTS PM)
• Gert Drapers
• Goksin Bakir
• Kate Gregory
• Lisa Feigenbaum (VB PM)
• Rafal Lukawiecki (truly brilliant)
• Ron Jacobs
• Roy Osherove
• Shyam Pather (Entity Framework PM)

What does the draft session list look like. Again we would be keen on your feedback (in some case the session is a placeholder - so you do not see the final title). This list is not final but expect to see 80% of the sessions.

·         Next-Generation Manageability with Windows PowerShell 2.0 and MMC 3.0

·         IIS7 Extensibility

·         Custom LINQ Providers

·         C# 3.0 and LINQ Inside Out

·         Team Foundation Server: Team Build

·         Understanding Branching and Merging in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server

·         A Developer's Life with Team Suite

·         Realistic Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System

·         From Gleam to Grave: Managing the Complete Lifecycle of a Software System

·         Sharing Assets between the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and the Microsoft .NET Framework

·         Beyond Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0: Windows Vista and the Managed Developer

·         Developing Solutions with Parallel Extensions

·         Five Cool Things to Know and Use for Smart Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

·         What's new in Team Foundation Server 2008

·         Introduction to VSTS Database Professional

·         VSTS Database Professional Advanced

·         Developing Applications with WCF and XOML Powered WF

·         S+S , Saas, Web2.0.? What, when, how?

·         Creating Rich Content with Windows Presentation Foundation

·         Developing Solutions using Expression Web

·         Developing Solutions using Expression Blend

·         Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices

·         Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks

·         Introduction to Patterns and Practices

·         Patterns and Practices: Desktop Applications

·         Cryptography for Developers

·         .NET 3.5 Security

·         Choosing Communication Styles: SOAP/WS-* vs. REST

·         Getting Workflows Running and Talking in Your Applications

·         What Is the Context of This Conversation? Enabling Long Running Conversations in Workflow Services

·         The Road to “Oslo”: The Microsoft Services and Modeling Platform

·         Introduction to Regular Expressions in .NET

·         Understanding Reflection

·         Designing for Testability: Bridging the Gap between Design and Testing in Object-Oriented Software (Repeated from 6/4)

·         Introduction to Mock Objects and Advanced Unit Testing

·         Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Data Access Guidance

·         Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework

·         XML LINQ: Linking in the real world

·         ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project “Astoria”)

·         OBA End to End

·         Light Up Your SharePoint Web Site with Microsoft Silverlight and AJAX

·         Language Integrated Query Technical Overview

·         LINQ to SQL

·         Introduction to the Sync Framework

·         Overview of .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements

·         Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation

·         Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation

·         Patterns and Practices: Web Services

·         Windows Live for developers

·         CRM for Devs

·         General Security Strategies

·         Advanced/Best practices ADO.NET

·         Advanced SQL Compact Edition

·         Introduction: SQL Server 2008 for Developers

·         What's new in Visual Studio 2008 for Windows Forms

·         Virtualization for developers

·         Advanced AJAX development

·         Introduction to AJAX development

·         Introduction to MVC Web Development

·         Performance and Scalability in ASP.NET development

·         What's new in Visual Studio 2008 for ASP.NET developers

·         What's new for developers in Internet Explorer 8

·         Advanced Silverlight Development

·         Introduction to Silverlight 2

·         What's new for developers in Windows Mobile 6

·         Vista App Compat

·         What's new for developers in Windows Server 2008

Finally FEEDBACK, FEEDBACK

Tell us what you think. Are you going to TechED. If not - why not? We want to make TechED better for developers. We need the developers to come!