Last week I once again attended Microsoft's TechEd conference - which for the second time was held in Berlin, Germany.This year, the developer tracks at the conference had two main topics - Windows Phone 7 (WP7) and "cloud computing".

I drove to Berlin in my own car, so I also got to see a bit of Hamburg, some German countryside, and a whole lot of autobahn. As a prelude to the conference, practically every billboard along the way had advertisements for WP7. Microsoft is obviously quite aggressive about marketing WP7 in Germany.

As I spend much of my time programming in .NET, the WP7 platform is very interesting indeed (all apps for WP7 are .NET/Silverlight based) and the conference did inspire me enough to want to at least have a closer look.
WP7 hasn't gone on sale in Denmark yet, so in order to be able to develop and test apps, I tried to buy a WP7 phone in Berlin. This turned out to be a lot harder than you would think (considering all the billboards). I guess the other 5000 TechEd attendees had the same idea :-). I finally did manage to get the very last "HTC 7 Mozart" phone at the Saturn store on Potsdamer Platz.

I went to a lot of interesting conference sessions, and got to meet of lot of great folks from Microsoft and other companies.
I especially enjoyed meeting Lucian Wischik, the "Spec Lead" for Visual Basic (my favorite programming language), and talking with him about his great new Visual Studio Async CTP. I will be using this framework a LOT in the upcoming version of Simple Failover.

Great conference!

This year I stayed in Berlin a few days before and after the conference and got to see a bit more of this wonderful city.