I finally downloaded a copy of all TechEd presentations, demo files and hands-on labs. Because the filenames are very consistent (only the session number) I list the files in Explorer with the "Title", "Subject", "Author" and "Copyright" document properties. It's rather annoying that the authors (or perhaps the editors) didn't enter their document properties correctly. Many files just display "Speaker Name" and "Speaker Title" or "Slide 1", not very informative about the content. But sometimes you even see that speakers used a presentation from another conference (let's say Microsoft Mobility Conference) or that a presentation that was written by someone else (at least, it appears to be).

In brief: always make sure to double check the document properties before making a document public. Not only is this useful (indexing of documents for searching with Index Server or Google, exploring a folder, ...), it also show a slight touch of professionalism. Or am I being too picky?

Yesterday the Belux (Belgian & Luxemburger) attendees had their first party at the beach... It was a big success, and we even held an after-party in a small Spanish "discotheca". No pictures though. (forgot to take my camera)

A customer recently upgraded his outdated iSeries OS to version 5.2. Since then, some queries seem to run far longer than before. This is why they consulted a performance expert of IBM.

After talking for about 30 minutes with this guy, I must admit that I'm still far too prejudiced about the RDBMS (DB2/400) of the iSeries. Appartenly lack of knowledge is one of the major things that cause us to say "this software is worthless", "how is possible that you cannot do this" or similar things . It seems the 'thing' can do more than I expected and works better than I could imagine. But of course, you need to know some basics of the system (which I lack). 

It's really a shame that I didn't think somewhat further. I'm one of those people who like VB. (And yes, I use best practices, I follow naming conventions, create classes (yep, facade, business and data access logic stuff)). But indeed, VB has a bad name. However, if you use the tool in a good way, you can do great things with it in a rather short time...

Only a few months ago I had several discussions with Delphi-adepts (who were trying to do some VB) about this. I countered every statement they made about things they thought that are impossible to do in VB. Never did I leave a change to say to them that you have to learn the platform/tool before trying to make it work. But today, I realized that I made that mistake myself with DB2/400... Yet another lesson learned...

PS. Apparently IBM has some tight release schedules too: they released version 5.2 of OS/400 without a new database engine. The new database engine was released as PTF (similar to a Microsoft Service Pack) later on...

Apparently it's going to be a very busy week... Microsoft Belux is organising 2 parties (Tuesday and Wednesday). On Thursday we have the great 10th Anniversary TechEd party.... Wish I could stay a bit longer in Barcelona to relax a bit and get some sleep. I know, every minute you sleep you are missing some interesting stuff in this world, but hey, I can enjoy sleeping from time to time :).

A few days ago, I also scheduled the sessions that I will attend... Whoohoo, sessions from 8.30 till 18.30 and afterwards parties...