So I'm sitting at SYD airport on my way home. It's been a pretty full on 10 days of Tech Ed madness. Here's my recap and thoughts.

1. Last Saturday (seems so long ago) we had the New Zealand Microsoft community leaders day and then the Dot Net User Group AGM. This was a great day and really good to be able to put faces to names. I stepped down as the President of the NZ Dot Net Users Group and my focus for the next 12 months is going to be around presenting on topics- probably mainly on cloud services and Oslo.
2. Sunday was Code Camp but I spent most of the time Camped in my room working on my decks and demos for the week. I knew I had a session every day of the week so was pacing myself. Hit up the speakers dinner on the Sunday night which was great. Spent the evening chatting with Dr Neil, Steve Riley, Ivan T, Angus Logan, JamesNK and Reed Shafner (wow how good am I remembering all those names!)
   I also popped into the hands on Labs on Sunday afternoon and they were cranking... more on these later.
3. Monday saw TechEd kick off in earnest. I actually quite liked the politicos presenting... but then I am a political animal. Others were not so happy with it. I had my first session before lunch focusing on Cloud Services. I could have said it was about BizTalk services but then no one would have turned up so I fibbed a little. The session went really well with good audience interaction and good evals. I decided afterwards that my demos were kinda arse. I was showing off some stuff we had built at Intergen* but because parts of the app we built have yet to be announced I couldn't show the whole thing. Based on this I resolved to re-do my demos for Sydney.
   I attended the VIP/Sponsors drinks on Monday night and passed on both the Bloggers Dinner and Architects Dinner as I was just too exhausted.
4. I ran the Web Futures panel session on Tuesday. This went really well with both the audience and the panel enjoying it I think? On the panel were Jorke from MS Aus, Nigel Parker, Scott Hanselmann, Harry Pierson, Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability and Jonas Foles. There was a great turnout of Intergenites in the crowd and we even got to give some mad yellow props when Trent said the best colors for links were Yellow on Black!
   Tuesday night was the party night. I got a special VIP invite as I was in the top 20 on the Veek of the Week competition- this was a comp run by the MSNZ marketing guys around Virtualization. The VIP area was nice with killer cocktails, but, it needed a few more people. I did a video interview about the way we've used Virtualization in the Intergen Data Center to provide MedRecruit with high end hosting at a reasonable price point.
   I was in bed by about 9pm as I was presenting again on Wednesday.
5. Wednesday I presented my session on Microsoft Oslo. Again, this went really well given that I had so little to show off. Because Oslo is still so far off it was really a case of going through the 50k foot view. Ran into some great folks from some big NZ business^ who are keen to follow up around Oslo when I'm able to talk in more detail. i.e. Post PDC in early November. Enjoyed catching up with people at the leaving drinks and kinda gorged myself on the mini duck spring rolls....
   After the drinks I grabbed some food and hit the hay.
6. Thursday morning I was out on the 7am flight to Sydney. Got a lift to the airport with Scott Cate who I've heard does a killer Javascript demo. Spent most of the flight catching up on email but managed 1/2 an hour of FreezeTV (Skiing stuff) on the all new touch screen AirNZ entertainment system. Someone needs to boot their User eXperience people up the bum as it's still pretty below par, though much better than their older system.
   Scott and I caught a cab into the hotel and then headed over to the Darling Harbour conference center.
   I presented my Cloud Services session that afternoon and to be honest I thought I really NAILED it (i.e. best session of the week). The evals were only so so though :-( It drives me a bit insane when people comment "room too small, room too cold, good session though" and then tick 6's for everything. Or come along to a 200 level session on stuff that's barely been announced and grumble that I didn't dive deep enough.... grumble grumble....
   I spent a bunch of time patrolling the exhibition pavilion. Sharepoint is huge in Aus at the moment with and I also had a chat with some people about some RFID demos that I'm keen to do soon. This was much bigger than the last Aus TechEd I went to in Brisbane.
   The party for Aus TechEd was Thursday night but I bailed and went back to catch up on some sleep.... trying hard to stay on Kiwi time which meant up at 5am at the latest!!!
7. Friday I ran the Web Futures panel again with a slightly different bunch of people. This included Shane Morris who is a UX evangelist for MSFT and ex Optimal Experience. He made a really good point in the session about branded intranets and how they can become a real rallying point for staff. I think our own Intranet at Intergen, the Kernel, really is a great example of this. The audience was much more active in Australia and while I got through ALL my pre-canned questions in NZ I only managed a couple in Aus,
   My Oslo session was the last session of the day on Friday. Tough gig again I guess. I was up against Steve Riley and this thing called the Mobile Smackdown which seems to have some history in Aus and is reputed to 'sell out' very early. I still got a pretty full room and a lot of interest and 'probing' questions. Some of which I could answer, some of which I knew the answer but couldn't say and some of which I was just like.... where on earth did that come from.

And that's it. Another solid year of Tech Ed.

The highlights for me this year was the kick ass Intergen Hands on Labs setup in Auckland (If I do say so myself!). I think we really nailed it this year. It looked great, we had the infrastructure and labs down pretty well and didn't have too many labs we had to pull. Well done to the team- I got a lot of positive commentary from both within MSFT NZ and other attendees.
Other highlights were getting over to Aus again. It's always interesting to see what's going on over here.