Hands On Lab is one of the most wanted facilities at TechEd SEA. This is not instructor led lab, it’s a do it yourself lab completed with the step by step manual, PC with pre-loaded VPC images that contains the lab files. Ed Quek full filled his promise to provide more computer in the HOL and ILL sessions. It was very good, since I saw the HOL room was always full. There are more lab materials than last year.  

I tried a lab on SharePoint workflow, and stuck. it’s not because the lab was so difficult, but the VPC was running like a turtle. I checked the hardware configuration: good. It’s a premium hardware with 2 GB RAM. I checked the OS, and gotcha . The host PC was Windows Vista. It was a wrong decision since Vista will eat around 1 GB memory for its system itself. TechEd attendees are not end user who want to see WOW features of Vista. They are developers and IT Pros who want to know more about .NET, SQL 2008 and Longhorn. It doesn’t make sense to use Vista just to sit and relax as a host PC. Use Windows XP is better: less resource at the host.

I started irritating to see several attendees asked for help from the proctor because the machine was so slow. Nothing they can do, just wait. These were the case for the server product labs such as SharePoint, MOM, or Exchange. Any labs on Visual Studio would not be an issue.

Just my 2 cent for Ed, please use Windows XP for the host PC next year. Unless the hardware is a Quad Core machine with 4 GB RAM .

One of the new features at TechEd SEA this year is Dotnet University that was held on Sept 11-14, 2007. As I mentioned at my 6 things I love about TechEd, this is an Instructor Led Lab (ILL) that focusing on .Net 3.0. It’s all about Windows Workflow, WPF, WCF, and Cardspace. The response from the attendees were overwhelming. They started to queue since 1 hour before every session. All available sessions are fully packed, even though the organizer managed to provide 5 sessions in a day.

Actually the lab materials were not so deep. It gave an overview about 4 components in .NET 3.0, at level 200 from 500 scale. The public curiosity about this new framework is very high, that’s why the response was terrific. I hope the difficulties level will be improved at the next year since the adoption of .Net 3.0 going to be better.

I delivered the Workflow Foundation session at last class of the 3rd day (17.30 - 19.30). It was also fully packed, so my guess that the attendees prefer to go home was wrong. I did some demo with IF-ELSE branching and Code Activity, using Workflow designer for authoring workflow. Mark Dunn helped me a lot to handle the discussions at the QA session.