TechEd is Microsoft’s ultimate technology geek fest for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers looking to explore a broad set of Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms, and services. This year TechEd Australia celebrated 20 years. I felt lucky enough to be able to attend TechEd and watched many top Australian and international speakers. This was my third TechEd and as usual very happy with the outcome.

This year the highlights for me was following,

1. There were some great talks where you learn a lot about the products first hand. Some of my favorite talks were,
   • Adam Cogan and Damian Brady’s session on ALM in Visual Studio 2013
   • Troy Hunt’s Are You Securing Your Rich Client Apps on the Server? An Introduction to Web API Security
   • Paul Glavich’s Using AngularJS in an ASP.Net Application
   • Joseph Albahari’s Becoming a C# Time Lord
   • Kirk Jackson and Andy Prow’s session on Hack-Ed: Wheedling and Cajoling your way to Success
   • Brendan Kowitz’s Real-Time Web Applications with SignalR
2. I was invited to lunch with Scott Guthrie (@scottgu), Corporate VP Microsoft. Microsoft gave us red polo shirts with ScottGu JSON print on it. We have to wear these polo shirts to enter the venue to meet Scott Guthrie. I spoke to Scott about the modern Windows Azure (Skynet in 10 years). After the lunch, Scott did two inspiring talks on Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure Part 1 and Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure Part 2.
   

   Diganta Kumar and Scott Guthrie at TechEd2013

   

   Scott Guthrie lunch polo shirt with JSON print as ticket

3. I met Mads Kristensen (@mkristensenfrom) Program Manager, Visual Studio, Microsoft. I spoke to him about VS2013 new features and how he developed Browser Link feature and added AngularJS IntelliSense support to the IDE. Mads is also the author of Web Essentials which is open source project in GitHub. Mads did two talks on What’s New in Visual Studio for Web Developers and Extending Visual Studio.
4. I met Brady Gaster (@bradygaster) Program Manager, Windows Azure SDK, Microsoft. Brady was the first person from Microsoft I met who like to talk about BDD (Behaviour Driven Development). We got along very well and continued our talk later at the pub. If you are interested in BDD, Brady recommended SpecFor. Check it out! Brady did two talks on SignalR – Why Should Web Pages Have All the Real-time Fun and  Windows Azure Web Sites and On-Premises.
   

   Brady Gaster and Diganta Kumar at TechEd 2013

5. I also met Frank Arrigo (@frankarr), Principal Technical Evangelist, Microsoft. We spoke about my Windows 8 app I developed last year. We also talked about how Windows 8 is not picking up within the government agencies. Maybe, the government agencies will be more keen with Windows 8.1 as it has a start button now. Windows 8.1 is releasing on 18th October 2013.
   

   Frank Arrigo and Diganta Kumar at TechEd 2013

6. On Thursday Microsoft took all TechEd attendees to the Movie World theme park at 6.15pm to 9 pm which was a real break from continuous hammering of my brain with all new products and technologies.

Like every year this year again TechEd provided a nice backpack and a special bottle which makes dolphin sound when you drink water from it.  All attendees also received a free copy of Office 365 Home Premium.

TechEd 2013 Bag, Bottle & Office365