It’s been a week now and I’ve been able to reflect on Tech Ed Africa 2010

This year again Microsoft brought out some of the big local and international names to speak to us about the newest Microsoft innovations & technologies in a variety of breakout sessions. Being my second year at Tech Ed and having attended so many ‘lap around LINQ’ or ‘new features in C# 4.0’ sessions already over the last year, this year’s Tech Ed allowed me to formalise my opinion on development, rather than come and just learn about all the new bells and whistles.

First up I’m still convinced my choice to stick to the Microsoft .NET platform has been a solid one for the next 5 years. There’s lots still happening, lots still to come and a great demand for developers who have a thorough understanding of how the framework works.

In my day to day job I do a lot of work connecting to databases. Tech Ed showed me that while Entity Framework has come a distance since its inception with .NET 3.5SP1 and now with .NET 4, it still has a lot of catching up to do before it can truly compete with guys like NHibernate.

My favourite speaker – Bart de Smet had some great and informative talks. I had been dying to learn more advanced LINQ concepts, such as building providers for LINQ without falling back to IQueryable/IEnumerable.

I had a great time networking with peers. It wasn’t all about sitting in the breakout sessions and sponging. It was cool to meet up with some of the presenters from Devs4Devs as well.

To close I must just say thanks to MTN for their coffee stand at the back corner of the expo… You guys kept us alive for 3 days!