TechEd 2008

Well, it was certainly a challenging time away at TechEd this year. If not for a series of unfortunate events on the home front, I might have been able to form a much more comprehensive post than this. However, as it is I was able to attend the real key sessions that were most important to me.

So what were the highlights? Two names in particular: Scott Hanselman and Trent Mankelow. Scott did a number of sessions encompassing ASP.Net’s new MVC framework, some crystal ball gazing into the next 18 months and a number of different discussions on blogging. Trent is a New Zealand usability expert and gave a great discussion on self-service usability and was also involved in the aforementioned crystal ball gazing.

The main takeaway for me was a warm, fuzzy feeling of hope and promise. IE8′s beta 2 release is finally putting Microsoft on the right path (albeit several years behind the competition) and I genuinely think this is at last the beginning of the end for that evil abomination that is IE6. I can finally look forward to developing my web applications knowing that soon I will not be spending half my time trying to get cross-browser compatibility sorted out. This has been the biggest drain on not just my time, but that of most developers out there.

I’m also quite curious to have a crack at building a site using MVC – just to explore the relative merits and detractors. It feels like a return to the bad old days of Classic ASP in some ways, but actually opens up a whole new array of possibilities at the same time, so we’ll see.

And finally, I’m chomping at the bit to find avenues for encouraging The Bank to adopt a more usability-focussed approach to their application design.

I’ll let you know how things get on.