TechEd 2009: We’re #2 (And #3, and #4)

We’re all finally home!  Jeff Levinson, Shad Timm, and I spent last week speaking, listening, learning and playing at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.  Those who’ve been to TechEd, know the fire hose of information unleashed at the attendees coving developer topics from designing Azure cloud based application to Visual Studio Team System, not to mention all the infrastructure talks!

I won’t regale you with stories of the parties or the in-hall discussions, but I do want to highlight three talks, and our role at TechEd.
With all the votes counted, Northwest Cadence did well.  In addition to speaking to great audiences, interacting with really smart people and meeting some new clients, our sessions apparently hit the mark and were rated highly by the attendees!  Three of our talks deserve special mention:

• Branching and Merging for Parallel Development, a talk by Jeff Levinson on the benefits and pitfalls or various branching strategies took 3rd place in the Developer Tools, Languages and Frameworks track.
• Practical Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management, my talk on using Team System to help software development teams achieve regulatory compliance (as well as manage risk) took 2nd place in the Developer Practices track.
• Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement, my talk on metrics took 4th place in the Developer Practices track.

Finally, we spoke at the preconference.  (Can I say “finally”, when it preceded all the other talks?)  Of the 15 preconferences, our talk titled Improve Your Software Development: Real World Solutions with Team System 2008 ranked 2nd just behind the excellent talk on SharePoint planning and governance.

For anyone interested in hearing or seeing these sessions, shoot me an email or leave a comment!  I’d love to share them with you!  We’re representing several of these sessions at our TechTalk: VSTS Firestarter event on the Microsoft Campus this Thursday, and we’ll be recording them.

A special thanks to those customers who generously allowed us to use your stories, and especially to those who went so far as to provide us with their data warehouse and cube.  You guys rock!  Thank you!