Last time at TechEd 2010 in Berlin was a little disappointing. After taking a year off, Microsoft moved this time to Amsterdam.

Ok, I know we're not supposed to be sightseeing, but central Amsterdam is fun and easy to explore on foot. Another incidental but important point: Amsterdam in June is a lot warmer than Berlin in November. The weather was warm and humid under grey skies. The conference air conditioning struggled a little at times, so it was a little uncomfortable.

The venue was a little outside Amsterdam centre, but easily accessible by Metro. Finding rooms was, as always, a bit challenging, but by the middle of the week we had sort of worked it out.

I bet 90% of attendees tried to press the big buttons on the check-in screens. Turns out they weren't touch screens, you had to use the mouse. This at an event promoting Windows 8's touch screen abilities. Even more lame was that Wi-Fi was down for all Tuesday.

The bag was certainly nicer than 2010's. No T-shirt or other swag. This is the week that Google's developer event gave every attendee a new phone, a new tablet, and their new media streamer device. No Surface tablets or Nokia phones here. This is the first place I've seen anyone else with a Windows Phone- there were quite a few around. Three quarters of attendees had iPhones or Androids though. This is about as faithful an audience that Microsoft can get, and Windows Phone is in a minority. That's pretty bad for Microsoft and Nokia.

We'll get TechNet subscriptions, but they don't contain Visual Studio. For developers, who generally feel like second-class citizens at these events, it disappointing. Give us a cheap tablet with Windows 8 RC to play with, and we might be a little less sceptical about Metro. If we can't get enthusiastic about it, no-one will be. Why not DVDs with the RCs of Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 just to save us some bandwidth?

There were competitions to win Lumia 900s in the expo, but otherwise swag was disappointing there too.

Dinners were vast - the scale is always impressive. Good food, too.

The delegate party was at the Amsterdam arena, and that was a pretty good venue. Plenty of beer, cheese, and other nibbles, and huge screens to show the football. The music was way too loud, though (we're old boring gits, not teenagers).

The keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday heavily promoted Windows Server 2012 (Tues) and Windows 8/ metro (Wed). The key message from the 2nd keynote seems to be that Windows 8 scales uniformly up from Phone to tablet to desktop. Which is a different story to Apple, who have a clear distinction between iOS and the OS X versions (and MS's own previous CE/ full Windows split). A few glitches when the Metro gestures didn't work properly, which was amusing and disturbing.

My impression is that while it might work well on a small touchscreen, it's not obvious or easily discoverable for a desktop. The demo applications look nice, but most internal and third party business applications look like crap and there's nothing to make the average developer into a decent UX designer. Even properly designed metro apps use lots of whitespace, and have a low information density. Being chromeless actually makes it more difficult to understand what you can do (the Windows Phone IE has tabs, but I still haven't figured out how to switch between them- I think Windows 8 metro IE is the same). The limited choice of full screen or side-by-side docking is just inadequate for a lot of normal PC users.

There were some good sessions. Honestly I'm not sure I learned a lot new, but it most sessions were a good review and clarification of what's current (see my Azure posting). All the information is already on the internet, so a few sessions turned out to be quite boring. But it can be hard to keep up when searches bring up old blog posts that are way out of date, and the sheer range of things that are going on. Best session was Scott Gu's Azure introduction (some of the following Azure sessions were repeating the same information, and were quite dull as a result). Mads Kristensen from the asp.net team was great too, showing current Visual Studio work that only existed on his computer.

The last one was disappointing because there wasn't any new stuff coming out. This year there is, so overall it was worthwhile (thanks to my company for paying for it!). I wonder if these conferences will still be relevant much longer. I'm not arguing that we should get lots of free swag, but they do have to give a compelling reason to physically attend. apart from all the free beer, of course.

Websites are new in Azure From conversations and talks at Teched:

In conclusion:

Web sites simplify the story for simple web sites. But having no staging is a bit limited.

Web roles are better for more complex sites, with dependencies and/or worker roles.

There is no option to upgrade a website to a web role.

All the above will probably be obsolete is 6 months as the features expand.

What was hot:

Windows Phone 7. The stand where you could try the various handsets was always busy. Several people had their own sets (last year, it was iPhones everywhere). There were adverts all over Berlin too. It won't worry Apple, and Android has reached enough mass to secure second place, but Microsoft should easily beat Symbian and Blackberry especially if they keep up the momentum on updates and new features (HTML 5 browser, apps through private company portals rather than Microsoft's public marketplace).

The cloud. Lots of focus on aspects of Azure, including the announcement of private clouds (Hyper V Cloud) with hosting available. On the developer track, I was pretty interested to learn about the future of distributed LINQ, based on the Microsoft Research DryadLinq project. That project allows you to run distributed (Map/Reduce) queries over an HPC cluster. The future goal is to run it on Azure nodes. Just like in PLINQ where you can append "AsParallel" to a linq statement, you will be able to add "AsDistributed" and the linq statement will be broken up into computation units and run on different nodes (your app.config will also have configuration to help the create the job graph).

Kinect. The graphics are simple and Wii-like, but the demo stand was very popular.

Silverlight. There were quite a few technical Silverlight sessions. From talking to people, it seems Silverlight has taken off for line of business apps within intranets, at least in Microsoft environments where Windows Forms or WPF would have been used before. On the public web, it hasn't dented Flash and Flex, and the only public success is Netflix. But for .Net based IT departments it seems the obvious choice for RIA. The risk from the recent publicity is that managers won't want to invest in it because they think it's dead. Based on the number of sessions here, it's still key to Microsoft.

Berlin. It was cold and grey, and you could only get out after dark, but it's an interesting city to explore. Transport was easy too.

What was not:

Developers. There isn't a lot new this year for developers. We have no new Visual Studio/.Net version.

Although I complained earlier about the heavy "IT Pro" bias, I heard that some infrastructure guys were also disappointed by the content- too much simple introductions and marketing and not enough meat.

Internet connectivity (at the start of the week). Wireless was terrible on the first day, but it did improve - it was excellent on Thursday and Friday. There seemed to be many more power and wired connections this year. Okay, perhaps this point should also be in the "hot" category!

Crowds, It was very busy, and the huge space and confusing layout of the Messe made navigating to sessions a little tricky at times.

Loot. Crap. A stupid little swim-bag, and lots of T-shirts. The organizers and exhibitors have a major lack of imagination and, obviously, money. Where were the USB sticks and other useful give-aways from previous years?

Where's HTML 5?

There were a couple of HTML 5 sessions showing off IE 9, and pretty impressive it is too. There was a pleasing acknowledgement that other browsers exist and also target HTML 5, and IE 9 is just catching up. But there is no tooling, or apparently any due dates. In MVC you can just write the HTML and reference Modenizr etc to trigger down-level support, but there is no intellisense or code colouring yet, let alone HtmlHelpers. It wouldn't be difficult to traditional ASP.Net webcontrols for key HTML 5 tags. It's not just <video>; what I'd like is <input type="date" with an browser datepicker (and down-level detection to add jQuery UI). iPhone and Android (but not Windows Phone 7 yet) have strong HTML 5 features which we want to use. Oh, and the next version of Windows Phone needs to have HTML 5 capabilities to match the desktop IE9. Maybe longer term could Silverlight XAML be converted to SVG?

Where's Alt.Net?

As traditional, this was a Microsoft-only conference. Several presenters used Resharper,  and there was the odd passing mention of NHibernate. But when you talk to other attendees, NHibernate, log4Net and other testing frameworks such as NUnit and MbUnit are in widespread use - my impression is that Entity Framework is some way behind. With Oracle doing it's best to alienate Java developers, Microsoft could start showing a friendlier face with a few sessions for Mono, IoC, mocking, BDD, NoSQL etc.

Future

I enjoyed TechEd, but I think the moral of this year is, only go to a TechEd Europe when Microsoft are launching a new Visual Studio or other major developer tool.

I'm back in Berlin for the Microsoft TechEd conference. It's huge- thousands of people, and even though the exhibition halls are like aircraft hangars they are packed with people, desperate to get free croissants, T-shirts and other baubles.

There's a lot of "IT pro" (windows admins) content, in the exhibitors and session schedule, and developers like me have thinner pickings (unless you just want croissants and T shirts, which evidently most do).

The only new stuff for developers is Windows Phone 7. The demo stand with various windows phones to try was always packed, and yes, they do look nice. Some cloud stuff, which is clearly a key target for Microsoft. Otherwise it's a rehash of the Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 introductory stuff from last year, which was fine last year when it was new but it's a little tired now. Very thin pickings on ASP, a single (introductory) session on MVC, a little on parallel. There is quite a bit on Silverlight, but everyone outside this audience now thinks Microsoft have killed it.

The goody bag is just a simple sports sack (I'm still carrying the rather nice laptop bag from last year). No free Windows 7 Ultimate disc this year (well, you do get a TechNet subscription so that's 5 licenses there, but still.) The free stuff from the vendors in the exhibition hall is showing signs of the economic downturn too. Lots of competitions though.

Only 3 more days of crowds, food, beer, and T-shirt collecting to go.