In re-reading my last post, I think it sounded a little bit too negative. I've got to say, the people in Barcelona are great. I'm still amazed that almost all of the locals I've met have done their best to talk to me in English. I don't know if it has to do with the fact that I'm staying in the tourist area, or that in Barcelona they speak their own dialect of Spanish. I had 3 years of high school French, and I can definitely hear some French and even what sounds like some Italian in the local dialect. But, as easy it is to figure out the metro, there are still some quirks with switching between the metro (the subway) and the tram (the lightrail system). The way it is supposed to work is that if you get on the metro or tram, you can switch to the other one without having to pay again. Sometimes this seems to work, and sometimes it doesn't, and I haven't figured out what the pattern is. Besides having to pay again, another problem is that most of the stops have only ticket machines, and they do not take paper money, only coins ( there are 1 and 2 Euro coins), so you have to make sure that you have change with you when riding the metro, just in case.
As for the actual conference, it is definitely not TechEd USA. At about 4,000 people, it is a lot smaller (in part because they split the conference into developers this week and ITPros next week). The vendor and Microsoft areas are a lot smaller than in the US (which makes sense considering the size of the audience), which means the Ask The Experts areas are a lot smaller (and lack the small auditoriums that we had at the last couple TechEd US). The Architecture ATE seemed to be one of the busiest (but maybe I'm bias), and I had some great conversations. The SQL Team was stationed near the Arch group, and in a lull they educated me on SQL Compact Edition. It seems it isn't just for mobile devices, and they are pitching it as a lighter version of SQL Express. Well, that isn't 100% correct, but, if you are looking for a smaller footprint and install, and would like it to run in the application's process space, you may want to check out SQL Compact Edition. I think it is suppose to go RTM in a couple weeks. I'm going to have to play with it and see where it fits into the big picture of enterprise development.
I finallly bumped into Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, and Stephen Forte at lunch yesterday, and they asked what brought me to TechEd Europe. I started to go into the whole Visual Studio Extensibility contest, and Richard stopped me midstream, and decide to record it for .Net Rocks. So, there is a chance that I might be on the TechEd Europe .Net Rocks show. Looking back at the conversation, it wasn't as fluid as I'd like. I don't know what it is, but when they record me, it nevers sounds as good as when we just have a regular conversation. It is probably something on my side, but I've got to work on it. While at the Heartland Developers Conference, Jeff and John caught up with me and recorded a show for their PodcastStudios on XPathmania and LINQ, but they haven't released it yet.
Oh, I also got to spend some time with the Sharepoint folks, and got to *** at them about their ugly webservices! I also asked about any plans for releasing an updated version that will use WCF, but it doesn't sound like it would happen before the next version of Sharepoint (but we all know that can change). So, it looks like if I really want a WCF version of the Sharepoint Web Services I'll have to find a couple friends and create either an open source one, or just make it a commerical vernture.