One of my goals when coming to Microsoft was to get, as much as possible, a high-level view of all Microsoft developer technologies that are interesting to me.\u00a0 My interests are wide \u2013 of course, everything Office\/SharePoint, but also I am also interested in every data access technology, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Web technologies, graphics design, and on and on.<\/p>\n
The other day, a friend of mine at Microsoft asked me what I do to get a broad overview of Microsoft developer technologies, and here is what I told him:<\/p>\n
\u201cI listen to every single developer presentation<\/strong> from TechEd, PDC, and MIX.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, I listen to a number of overview and IT Pro sessions also.\u00a0 I also make sure I listen to the keynotes \u2013 they are interesting not because of technology, but because they give clues into what Microsoft senior management is promoting these days. \u00a0Every presentation is available online for download.\u00a0 This is an incredibly valuable resource.<\/p>\n Note that I said \u2018listen\u2019, not watch.\u00a0 I download the sessions, put them on my Zune, and then start working my way through them.\u00a0 If I\u2019m doing the dishes, or in my car, or wherever I have dead time, I put on the headphones and continue where I left off.\u00a0 I listen in the sauna \u2013 I can\u2019t believe my old 30GB Zune still works after a hundred trips into the sauna.\u00a0 Good hardware.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been doing this for\u00a0a couple of\u00a0years, and have listened to many hundreds of sessions.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t necessarily need to examine every line of code in the presentation \u2013 I am more interested in listening \u2018over the top\u2019 and understanding capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and overall architecture.\u00a0 Of course, there are some sessions that are so important that I go back to my PC and watch in high resolution so I can read the code on the screen or see the demos.\u00a0 And there are others, where the technology is less interesting to me, or the technical content isn\u2019t there, where I quit watching early and move on to the next video.<\/p>\n Which brings me to the point of this post: I\u2019ll be tweeting good sessions<\/strong> as I come across them, with a few words about why I liked them.\u00a0 Granted, tweeting about sessions presented six months ago is not news, however, twitter is the best forum for these.\u00a0 They don\u2019t warrant a blog post sometimes, particularly a post that is so very far off topic to what I blog about (Open XML \/ Office \/ SharePoint \/ Functional Programming), but sometimes the information is just too cool to not share.\u00a0 I\u2019m just letting you know what I found interesting, and why.<\/p>\n