So I won’t be at Tech Ed this year. I just started my job with Rubio’s (www.rubios.com) - home of the world famous fish taco. I accepted a position in the corporate organization and only started last week which makes heading off to a week long convention a little unrealistic. I will be up in LA at Tech Ed today (the day before it actually gets started, Microsoft is hosting a few sessions for MVPs today.)

Fortunately although I won’t be there Microsoft is making a great deal of technical information from Tech Ed available. The current site for Tech Ed is: http://www.msteched.com/online/channels.aspx and as you’ll see by the page I’ve chosen it has online channels with materials related to Tech Ed. I’ll be checking back during the week to catch some of what I’m sure will be Tech Ed highlights and some great technical information.

However, for those attending there are a couple of sessions I truly wish I could attend, of those there is one in particular that if anyone does attend I’d appreciate hearing more about: DTL336 Future Directions for Visual Basic - Wed 5/13 | 8:30 AM-9:45 AM | Room 152. The presenters will be Anders Hejlsberg and VB veteran Jonathan Aneja. The nature of the tech ed site makes linking to the session description difficult, so I’ve copied the description from the session catalog:

In this talk, we discuss the future direction of the Visual Basic language both in the near and long term. Exciting features from the next release are demonstrated and discussed, including extensions to LINQ support, syntax simplifications, and improvements to the IDE. Larger trends that are likely to deeply influence the direction of the language are also covered, including dynamic binding, meta-programming, and scripting. Finally, we discuss how all these tie together into the roadmap for Visual Basic going forward.

If anyone gets to this session please feel free to send me a link if you post a recap, I’ll also be searching but I’ll have to wait for the content to get indexed. Now that the languages team has been merged and Anders is involved in the direction for all of Microsoft’s managed languages – including Visual Basic I’m very interested in his initial public thoughts for the direction for Visual Basic.