First Impressions from TechReady7 (Seattle, WA)

Hello from chilly Seattle,

Yes, chilly, as in “a bit cold”. I talked with my wife earlier and she told me how hot it is right now in Israel while I’m wearing a coat over here (which I had to buy upon arrival since usually the weather here is just fine in July and I didn’t think about bringing anything warm…).

So, most of Israel MCS (12 people!) are here in Seattle for the week and beside excessive meat and alcohol consumption we’re learning quite a few new things!

TechReady is a pretty big internal event for technical Microsoft FTEs (Full Time Employees). It happens twice a year in Seattle, WA. The main advantages of this event are:

1.       All of the presenters are members of the different product teams. Most of them are members of the dev teams.

2.       The scale is huge (5 days, ~7000 attendees, ~1200 sessions, hundreds of hands-on-labs).

3.       Great networking opportunities – both with peers from other countries and the dev teams. This is how we maintain our great relationships with the dev teams and leverage these relationships for the benefit of our customers.

4.       The nature of the content is “unfiltered”. We get the essence of the content directly from the source – good, bad and ugly.

5.       It’s fun :-). On top of the party, the networking, the pubs, the live shows (Seattle, the cradle of Grunge still maintains its coolness!) there’s the gaming night. Playing Halo against a few hundreds of people in a huge hall is quite an experience…

Up until now, I had the pleasure of attending some very interesting sessions delivered by Ray Ozzie, David Chappell and many others. We get technical updates and interesting overviews on various current and future trends, technologies, architecture concepts and methodologies.

For me, personally, the most interesting subjects presented until now were around our Application Platform roadmap, Software + Services concepts, Agile implementation in P&P, Virtualization vision and strategy, Enterprise Library 4.0 and Composite WPF.

We still have 3 days to go and the amount of content is overwhelming. I still hope to learn more about Office 14, VSTS futures, SQL Server 2008, Windows 7, more S+S (this is The next big thing). I have at least 3 sessions scheduled for each time slot and choosing which one I should go to every time is pretty hard…

Over the next few days expect to see more posts from my peers laying out their insights and perspectives on the content we’re absorbing over here. Almost all of what we learn here is still confidential (sorry for not sharing L) and will be publically revealed only around PDC but still there’s a lot we can already talk about now. And we will…