Microsoft Connect 05 (aka the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 release, and BizTalk server 2006 pre-release) was on Tuesday. It was setup to look and feel like a mini Tech-Ed, minus the backpack.
I always seem to get value from these sorts of events, but not neccesarily value directly related to the subject of the event. This time, there were a few interesting points about Project Management which made me smile. They were mentioned during the Team System presentation and had a lot of relevance to projects I've been involved in. They basically introduced the concept of a Project Tracker, which is a Project Manager who doesn't actually manage anything - they just track what has happened in the past, and generate reports. Actual management requires a much more hands on approach - well, it requires actually _managing_ people. Anyhow, they were talking about this to show how Visual Studio Team System can make it easier to manage projects, but I love the term "Project Tracker" - it defines so many Project Managers I know so well!
The VS TS demos were all done on a Virtual Machine, which had the image located on a USB drive - which died half way through the session, meaning no demos for the latter half. It's one thing to do these things on Virtual Machines, but Virtual Machines located on USB devices? Not exactly a great plan when the product you're demonstrating is kind of large, and is prone to being a wee bit slow at the best of times.. but oh well..
A few of the other sessions weren't really that interesting. A lot of the content was duplicated from TechEd sessions, which I guess makes sense in a way, but it's not too hot if you actually went to those sessions.
The Web Development session had some similar content, but it was still very worthwhile. It was mostly demos rather than talking and slides, and they expanded on enough stuff to make it pretty interesting. The speaker was good too, which always makes a hell of a difference.
All in all I got a lot of value out of the day, even though some of the sessions were less than rewarding. Getting handed DVD copies of the latest releases it kind of handy too.