TechEd (Day -1): MCT Day Breakdown

I attended the MCT meetings today. It was nice warm up to the rest of TechEd, although I felt a little out of place as a Developer trainer.....most of the room was IT Pro (MCSE) types, a fun crowd....geeky in a different way.

Anyway, lots of cool things in store for MCT's coming Oct 1 (beginning of the 2005 program). Most of that is at the doghouse.

I got to meet Paul Adare whom for the longest time has been the moderator on the MCT newsgroups. It's funny that I have to fly all the way to San Diego to meet a guy who live about 15 minutes from my house in Oakville. I'm not a big poster in the MCT newsgroups so I was surprised that he knew my name and said he reads this blog. “Hi Paul - say you need a blog so I can point people to it”.

I also had a chance to run over our new “Best Practice“ curriculum with David Lowe who is the Content Development and Delivery Training and Certification Manager at Microsoft. It would seems that we are not the only ones seeing demand from our customers for this new level of training above and beyond the simple how & why, but more of the when & where of how a technology or development practices applies in a developers day.

The final session was with Richard Klees. He does most if not all of the speaker training & coaching for Microsoft employee's and partners speeking at their events. I learned lots of interesting techniques for really maximizing the experience for the audience. I had a nice conversation with him afterwards and he offerred to do a 1-1 review with me later this week. I think I'll settle on trying to get him out to dinner (we share a mexican food grok) to get his thoughts on speaking into your computer/conducting web casts.

All in all, a great warm up to TechEd.