Hi All,

As Expected, it's taken me a while to get down my thoughts on the final day of Tech-Ed.  The day started like all the others with a long hike to breakfast followed by an equally long hike back to the Hands on Lab area.

Amazingly, this was my first opportunity to have some time to visit the HOL's, which by past experience are always a good place to follow up on the sessions that you have attended as they tend to give you the chance to put into practise and see for yourself what has been said in the session.  I spent an hour or two familiarizing myself with the Visual Studio Test Manager product which I intend to start pushing the team towards for our next release.

Following on from the HOL, it was time to write up Day 3's exploits which can be found strangely enough in the Day 3 summary post!

Beyond that, it was an opportunity to finally hit the expo hall and SWAG up.  Never have i been at TechEd for so long and had so little SWAG. That was soon put right as Molk and I cruised the floor looking for the goods and also taking the chance to chat to a number of vendors who had products of interest, I had a task to fulfill from the office to go and have a chat with the guys at DoubleTake to establish a solution for our geographically dispersed database continuity of service conundrum.

After a late lunch, we headed back towards the Microsoft Learning booth to mingle some more with the attendees, unfortunately, on the way we noticed that the Guitar Hero and Kinect setup was available to "evaluate" so we spent a little time learning all about the capabilities of the XBox Kinect technology and how it interprets your body movements into game play!!!

Finally, after spending some time at the booth, with weary legs we said our farewells to the great folks from Microsoft Learning and headed back to the Hotel, riding Marta for one last time, to ready ourselves for the closing party.  

Being a TechEd veteran, I was a little unsure what we were going to get, was it going to be a high like the Orlando Universal Studios party, or a low like the LA in the conference centre one.  In the end, it was in between.  The Georgia Aquarium and Coke World area of Atlanta was our venue for the evening and it proved to be entertaining enough. The food was excellent, the drink as expected and the opportunity to visit these attractions FOC was great. Probably a 7.5/10 as parties go.

11pm came around soon enough and we made our way back to the hotel for a nightcap, or two, or three.....  The barman had seen enough of us and kicked us out early complaining that he had been working late every night! so we headed up to Bojan's abode for the family brew - Raikia.  Words cannot describe how potent that stuff was.

With the hours of first departures growing ever nearer it was time to say our goodbyes to those who had the early flights. For those who did not, we enjoyed breakfast and a day of leisure on the Friday as we left a few at a time to finally leave the Molk as he started, alone in Atlanta.

I cannot put into words how much fun I had at TechEd this year, "Work hard, Play Hard" has always been my motto when attending these events and I have to say that this one blew all the previous ones out of the water.  I hope that the rest of the cast enjoyed the experience as much as I did, and a big shout out to Microsoft Learning for making it all possible.

That's all from me on TechEd, I will probably have one final post up next week primarily to wrap things up and thank everyone involved in making Career Factor happen.

We have one final pair of Tweet Chats scheduled for Wednesday 1st June 9am PDT and Thursday 2nd June 6pm PDT, if you have any questions to ask us, be sure to join in.

Finally, Microsoft Learning are giving you the chance to win your own Career Factor Experience, see here

Until then, Thanks for reading and so long everyone.

/SiD