Posted By: David Guyer, Visual Basic Testing

I’ve just left Tech-Ed after finishing up the last days of booth duty.

Overall, it was a fantastic conference. The intelligence and knowledge of our customers is always very impressive and I learn a lot from them.  I enjoyed meeting so many people who are interested in Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005.  It was very rewarding to be able to help people solve many of their problems or direct them to people who could.

We also met a bunch of folks today at the “Meet the VB Team” session.  People continue to be excited about My., Snippets, Error Correction, and ClickOnce.  Most people are also pretty excited about the Generic Bootstrapper if I get the chance to bring it up.  We have so much new stuff coming into this product that it is hard to talk and share it all. 

By far, the overall reaction is a lot of excitement over the new features coming, and people seem to really think we have picked the best bang for the buck features. 

We also get some great ideas moving forward. For example, maybe it would be a neat idea to have a collaborative feature where I can work on a code file and make it available for someone else to make markups (code changes) and comments just like a Word allows. I could then view and accept, reject, or undo code changes and try them out, as well as read those comments.  Perhaps that feature would be real-time, like IM-based, and the comments and markup appears as the other person enters them.  Talk about adding a feature to the product that enables Agile/Extreme programming and takes it to the next level! I wish it was my idea!

Team Services are also very popular. I got several questions on how the Unit testing compared to NUnit. I think there needs to be documentation, or better yet a tool / VS PowerToy, that takes NUnit tests and converts them for use in Team Services.  (I can take credit for that idea 🙂

San Diego is also a fantastic place to do conferences like this.  THe conference center is first rate, and the logistics of handling the facilities and especially the meal hall were excellent. Having hotels right next to the center was exteremely convenient. Having the whole facility right on the water, right next to Sea Port Village and the GasLamp district was very nice, and having the Navy planes and helicopters flying by once in a while… ahh the sound of freedom!