TechEd 2008 just finished.  It was a blast!  I enjoyed it a lot.  Microsoft did a great job throwing a fairly smooth event, given the number of attendees, and pampering of the attendees, including a night at the Universal Studio.  See my picture with the Simpsons there:

Look.  They even provided bean bags for us to sleep on when we are exhausted from the conference:

The sessions themselves were about 1/3 bad, 1/3 good, and 1/3 excellent.  I have to give MS credit for trying to get feedback; I heard from one of the speakers that they have a monitor that constantly shows the bottom rated speakers who probably won't be invited back next year.  I also noticed a pattern of the MS speakers there: they are all PM's rather than developers.  Hmm...  Even most of the staff manning the product booths were PM's.  I asked one of them why there's no developers; he said that they'd rather work and finish the product.  Do you believe that?  :).

The excellent sessions I attended were (in case you want to view their videos online): "Asynchronous ASP.NET", "Silverlight Tips", and "ASP.NET AJAX Extensions Deep Dive" by Jeff Prosise, "ASP.NET Performance Black Belt" by Steven Smith, and "SEO for Developers" by Nathan Buggia.  I only went to the sessions based on the topic, and Jeff's sessions always overflowed.  Apparantly a lot of people went to sessions based on the speaker :).

These sessions are also good to check out: "IIS 7 Security and Tuning" by Ruslan Yakushev, "Silverlight Controls" by Karen Corby, "REST web services using WCF" by Jon Flanders, and "Optimizing Javascript and IE" by Cyra Richardson. 

At the conference, I was really impressed by Silverlight's capabilities and felt that it's really going to disrupt the web space.  I attended a BofF session (i.e., a peer discussion among TechEd attendees w/o MS) on Silverlight vs AJAX, and as people started listing out the pro's and con's of AJAX and Silverlight, it became clear that RIA like Silverlight is the superior solution and the next step of evolution in web development; AJAX is really an intermediate stage towards richer content/easier development (Google is solving ease of development with GWT, but there are just things you can't do with AJAX that you can do with Silverlight/plugin-type of model).  The one major drawback is searchability (Plugin model is still a black box that search engines can't crawl), but like Nathan said, it's something that all search engines are trying to crack and find a solution of. 

With all the talk about Silverlight, I also felt a bit deja vu.  In my college years Java applet was all the hype of the day, and, except more advanced graphics and a declarative model, it pretty much has everything Silverlight has (including a bridge with Javascript/Browser DOM).  Java applets didn't take off for some reason (non-ubiquitous broadband?).  It seems like we're going back full circle to a plugin-model of web development like Flex/Flash and Silverlight. 

I also saw an interesting book at the conference store and couldn't resist buying it:

I've skimed through it and think it's a pretty candid assessment of Microsoft today; it's written by a well-know Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley.  Check it out!

Overall it was a great experience for my 1st time at a Microsoft conference.  The MS people were friendly technical enthusiasts who seem genuinely passionate about technology, and I felt right at home talking to them :).