After finishing my first session I filled out the form to provide feedback on the presentation.
After submitting I got this page:
WTF I WON SOMETHING?
So I went to the Registration Desk.
And now I have this little price in my pocket:
(I will be posting now under the Tech·Ed 2008 title, makes it easier.)
This first session takes ADO.NET and LINQ to entities under its wings. It’s kind of the more powerful successor of LINQ to SQL.
At 1500 there was a very big keynote on the future of Microsoft, and development. And after that a person spoke about the new Visual Studio 2010.
We also got a sneak preview on Windows 7 (running on an 8 core machine! )
As promised an update (thank god there is internet access here 
):
I woke up @ 0445, and a friend of my father’s brought me to Zaventem at 0545. A bit early, but there is always a chance of having problems with the traffic.
I arrived at about 0645, which was good.
We met, and went for breakfast, which was good !
There was no problem with the flight, only a slight delay of ~15 minutes. I slept most of the flight, which was a very good time-killer.
After exiting the airport we took off to the center of Barcelona with the bus, and walked to the hotel.
We put the luggage there, and then took the metro to the CCIB. There we got our badge.
Read on in the next post…
I will be leaving tommorow morning @ 0545 to Zaventem to catch my flight to Barcelona!
I’ve got a lot of seminars planned to attend to, and Thursday we are going to kart someplace
Super!
Expect updates! (if there is internet!)
I just got back from Ghent, where I attended the seminar about Silverlight and XNA.
And I was astonished about the power of Silverlight.
The main advantage is: XAML. The designer uses MS Blend for the creation of the pages/windows/controls, and the developer can just use that code, no conversion needed (it just works). He can import the project in Visual Studio 2008 (same structure), attach some eventhandlers, bla bla.
Silverlight has a very rich framework, of course not the whole .NET framework. It’s a subset, containing the most parts that you need for web development, for example there is no need for File Access.
A very interesting feature is Application Storage. A local cache for example when you want to save some settings. It’s quite the same as cookies, but a lot more powerfull.
This session was given by Gill Cleeren.
About the XNA part:
Was a bit boring in the beginning, but as we advanced it got more interesting. Afterwards Peter and I spoke to the speaker, and he gave us some demos about other stuff he made (which was actually the most interesting part about this session).
We learned how a model got constructed, with Meshes and MeshParts, around bones (parents), and collision detection, which was kind of cool.
To use a sphere to check if they collide, to use per pixel detection, or triangle detection: we discussed all the advantages and disadvantages.
I now have a (supercool) mug with the beautiful Silverlight logo
Learned a lot today, really a lot.
I would like to thank my friend Peter for joining me in this trip, it was great mate! 
I will be attending this event this evening:
Launch event about the new Silverlight, and information about XNA.
I will write a little report tommorow.
