Thought I’d moan a bit more about the organization… By registering early, you get given, I quote the guide, ”a reserved seat” at the keynote.

When you check in, you get given a nice wristband supposedly giving you access to those seats. Comes in a nice plastic bag, together with a cap.  But no explanation notice explaining that, in fact, you need to come 30 minutes early to have your seat. So the wristband gives you the right to arrive early when no one else is there to choose a good spot. But it’s not reserved.

Of course, the very heavy booklet provided with the conference bag doesn’t mention those 30 minutes. Neither is any sign in the conference centre. Nor do the ladies giving you the goods in the morning.

So no “reserved” seat for me, because the reserved seat wasn’t really reserved at all. Fair enough.

But then one of the attendants that was managing the event replied, after my questioning:

“- you’re 15 minutes late, it was at half past for early birds
- but no one bothered telling me this
- well it must have been indicated, you should’ve been on time
- but there’s no sign, no documentation, no nothing about being there at half past?
- well we had those three rows over there. Don’t be late next time”

So it’s my fault no one mentioned we had to be there half an hour before? Or that you didn’t print it? Or that the documentation doesn’t show it anywhere?

Add to that there’s no Wifi in the room and not a single twitter mention anywhere, or facebook group, and I have to wonder what happened between last year and this year.

At least we get a nice conference bag, of about the same quality as the one from last year. As that one is nearing the end of its useful life, the new one arrives just on time.

[Update: Indeed, the unannounced stuff was the sharepoint visual studio integration. Paul Andrew just blogged about it.

Introduction from the business guy. I assume the black blocks in front of the stage the presenter keeps looking at is some sort of teleprompter. It’s always very annoying to see any speaker fixed on his slides / script.

Talking about how great it is to do business in Europe. Slides showing partners. Still don’t understand why a developer conference ends up with marketing and business cases. Could they do TechEd decision makers and stop boring me with all this amazing stuff people do with Microsoft software? Or at the very least try and hit my geek soft spot?

Zander is now on stage. No powerpoint, just Visual Studio demos. Thanks god a geek is finally presenting. Will be releasing stuff not talked about at PDC. Good! Wonder if that’s in the bits we got at PDC, need to rerun the VM tonight.

Showing the reflector equivalent that’s built in vs10, which we’ve seen at PDC. Showing assembly dependency analysis, delving into class dependencies. Sequence diagrams (see pdc bits). Gets me worried to see all this UML stuff creeping back in.

Showing off the blackbox replay for testers. Sweet if it comes for free, other tools have provided this for quite a few years now.

So the machine they’re demoing is actually being RDP’d into. Wow. Showing off vista’s graphics capabilities!

More WPF editor goodness. Still no sign of the new windowing promised for vs10. Lot of code visualization stuff. Mentions of MEF (@gblock is gonna be happy :) ).

Trying to debug a session, find the bug… But changes live code without writing a single unit test to confirm the problem. There really is a need for Microsoft to start a cultural change.

In no particular order, saw snippets for xml and javascript, jquery, web deployment and a test-first demo of MVC. There’s still a lack of understanding of the difference between test-driven and test-first, shame the two words are still used interchangeably. Some VB10 goodness.

Xml transformations for config files. So you mean I can solve my config problems with some config solutions? Wow.

Some sharepoint stuff I have no interest in, dozing off.

C++ parallel_for keyword to use 8 cores to do ray rendering of pong in 3d. Some touch support to move the pong cursor (what, you mean with a touch screen i can move stuff around? Wow.)

That part of the keynote has been delivered perfectly, but what was shown was mostly PDC stuff. Not seen that many non-PDC news, but maybe I missed a bit (or was that the Sharepoint thingy?)

[pre-nagging: this post contains jokes about Italians, British, Spanish and French people. If you’re offended by generalization about nationalities on holidays, please skip this post altogether.]

What a joy to travel. Only a few hours after I left home, I am already feeling incontrollable urges to hate 4hundred of people that have been encumbering my travel plans. Let’s review what happened for me to manage to board the plane.

1. International
   I was ready to leave the house on time, until I realized that for some Murphy’s law reason, my travel pass *and* my Gatwick express pass didn’t actually print, and Vista just silently failed on me. 5 minutes delay.
2. British
   The cab then shows up 5 minutes late, getting me to the Gatwick express at 15:03. And *then* do I realize that, for maintenance work, said service leaves every 30 minutes instead of every 15. 35 minutes delay.
3. More British!
   Well, you didn’t really expect the Gatwick express to arrive on time did you? 50 minutes delay.
4. Italian
   As it happens, a big Italian contingency was sharing the same train as I. Having been raised with Italians, I’m fairly used to them being slow and unorganized (and nearly as rude as the French). But when there’s only one elevator for the already overcrowded train, things just add-up. Wait for 15 minutes to get an elevator, 65 minutes delay.
5. British more and more, and some Italians
   Thanks to BAA, once I finally arrived at the airport level, and only one floor from checking in, a BAA representative barks at me that my luggage is too big to take the escalator. Bless the spotty face and the arrogance of the yellow-wearing Gatwick idiots.  At that point, I’m lower on the food chain and have to accommodate with the 2 out of 4 functioning elevators to get to departure. Wait for another 10 minutes, 75 minutes delay.
6. British Airways
   Well, by that point, even though I was checked-in, the whole masquerade of pretending to call the controller about late-checking of luggage is unfolding, me knowing that under no circumstance do you try to get in touch with the guys handling the luggage by phone. Ever. You need a radio. But the masquerade to protect the attendants from telling me to fuck off unfolds, adding another 10 minutes. At that point we reach 85 minutes of delay.
7. British Airways again
   Wait to get ticket changed at Customer Service. 15 minutes wait. Get told that I should queue (again) in the ticket buying queue. another 15 minutes. The fact that I have a business ticket seems to have no importance on how fast you get treated when you have a problem. People may wear smile well, but the customer service still painfully sucks. I stop counting.
8. Easyjet
   Last flight to leave for Barcelona is Easyjet, from which I buy a cattle-class ticket for £139. I never travelled with them until now, and I know why. Gate checking an hour late, hundred of people just trying to walk on each-others and a waiting room that is probably not dissimilar to the corridor leading you to the fatal injection room in some Texas prisons. None of the staff has shown a single smile by now.
9. Spanish
   Well, considering the destination, I have to moan about those a bit. While the lady next to me has been very polite and adorable, the (overweight) guy in front of me has insisted on reclining on his seat. Either that or said seat is reclining under the weight. In either case, the 17” laptop keeps on pressing uncomfortably against my stomach, making me regret the minute I thought getting the laptop out would be a good idea.
10. Spanish on the other side…
    So of course, with the lack of space and strong sense of agoraphobia growing on me, not tamed in the slightest by the double bloody-Mary I inflicted upon myself, I politely ask the Andalusian woman behind me if she wouldn't mind too much if I reclined my seat. Of course, I did check that the only thing on her table was one of those miniature overly-salted overly-aromatized overly-fat overly-disgusting and overly-non-bio  Pringle pack. If you’ve never had the delicious pleasure of enduring airline snacks, the cylinder measures roughly 3 inches. But of course, said brunette, either not understanding my desperate attempts at sign language, or just being an annoying bitch (my preferred explanation so far), refuses with an arrogant no. Not the polite one you would expect, being apologetic for denying your freedom to ensure theirs. No no no. The aggressive “are you kidding me” refusal. Thought about slapping her face, or worse, just reclining the seat anyway. Give up, tuck in and put the laptop in my belly.
11. German
    At last a smile from one of the flight attendants. I wondered for a long time why traditional airlines attendants always looked middle-aged, and where the young ones were. Now I know, they’re all trying to make a living working for easyjet.
12. British
    Uh. Yeah, you guessed it. The plane is *very* late.
13. American
    My iphone battery dies before I manage to connect to any network.
14. Spanish
    Finally make my way out of the plane and try to accommodate my smell to the lack of locker-room scent that I had to suffer for the last two hours. Of course, TechEd buses are not running anymore, and the (4) guys waiting with a TechEd sign have no will to help you get to your hotel, pointing you to a cab. Sweet.
15. Spanish
    Get in cab that has a big logo specifying they accept credit cards. Of course the guy refuses to take my card at all, so it’s off to the cash point, at a total interest of nearly 7% + £2 of transaction fee. Silly me I leave him a tip. Should’ve let him rot in hell. His teeth seem to enjoy the place.
16. Hilton Diagonal Mar
    So you’d think with such an insane trip, with a booking made in June, Hilton would at the very least solve my problems. Nope, non-smoking room and no way to get a smoking room. At that point I’m exhausted and will just flaunt the non-smoking status until I get a room of equivalent size or more in *smoking* environment. Otherwise they’ll have to rebrand my room. Or charge me. But as there’s no mention of such a charge anywhere…
    Speaking of which, don’t even get me started with the quality of the internet, that I have the privilege of paying a freakin 100€ per 7 days for. Or the fact that their book where you supposed to have all the information for your stay, including the room service, is still unordered and missing entries. Second year in a row.

Oh, and in the process I just realized I forgot my TechEd card at home!

Follow Sebastien’s adventures tomorrow as he tries to get the room he booked and get registered at the convention center. *orders another beer and pops a prozac*.

[Update: after feeling bad and going down to smoke outside the hotel, I managed to get my room changed tomorrow. There’s some light at the end of the tunnel.]

[Update 2: On the up, hotel room changed. On the down, breakfast eggs made me sick this morning. At the conf center, hopefully everything will be a smooth ride from now.]