And so another Tech Ed came to an end, and again it was just awesome. From the word go we had some “refreshments” and prepared our livers for the next 3 days of debauchery. Ok, that sounds a bit harsh, but close to the truth :) As usual, Microsoft knew how to throw a party and the German theme of the opening party just too inviting to hold back! Had plenty of draughts with a bunch of cool people that we only get to see at events like this!!! (The next morning I was very sorry that I saw them again!! ;-))
Eventually I got to meet Julie Lerman - without doubt one of the friendliest geeks around ;) I loved to listen to her and Kate Gregory’s talks, very inspirational to see women up there in front of a mostly male audience with such confidence!!! Give me another 10 years!! Hehe. We went on a tour to a Lion Park which was fun as I haven’t seen lions in quite a long time. It is a pity that we Africans don’t do stuff like that more often, but I guess it is like that everywhere…
No, we did not only party at Tech Ed, apparently Tech Ed is actually about presenting some kind of technology stuff :P Kidding, there were real cool sessions, I loved the Avalon one by Ahmed. I’ve heard about Avalon, but didn’t yet have time to play around with it… Now I’m going to dive into it ASAP.
Some more interesting talks was Armand & Ernst’s talk about LINQ, and Pieter’s about DirectX – all new to me, but now I know what Lambda expressions is and know about the Direct3D pipeline.
The most interesting fact to me after Tech Ed, in good South African tradition:
We ate 6 rugby fields of meat between 1300 people in 3 days!!!! (Excluding boerewors, which was a couple of kilometers!!!) 
So SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are going to be released in November (7th internationally). We South Africans can visit the roadshow on the following dates:
17th November: Johannesburg
22nd November: Durban
24th November: Cape Town