Grant Holliday

For TechEd 2006 in Sydney there were a number of options available for deciding which sessions to go to. They all source their information from the RSS feed.

• Paul Stovell - WPF
• Bill McCarthy - VB.NET
• Craig Bailey - TechEd Live
• Microsoft’s own CommNet

While I’ve used all of them at various points in time, I kept coming back to CommNet. This is because it was the ‘authoritive store’ on your session selections.

Although nobody stood at the door and told you that you’re not on the list, you can’t come in (…in the convention centre at least) - you didn’t have the visibility of if the session was full through the other apps.

What I would like to see in CommNet / Session Pickers next year

• Get rid of the “Session Full” message and don’t block me from adding it to my calendar.
• Instead of “booking” or locking-in a session, how about registering your “interest”. Then show how many people are also interested in that session so that you can guage the popularity.
• I think the “what are my friends doing?” dimension was missing from CommNet (although it was in TechEd Live). It would be nice to share schedules easily.

All things considered, it was great to see the information (RSS) made available and to watch the community tools flourish. Thanks guys!