As I look at my session at TechED SEA 2006, one of the things that hits me is the lack of context of the various sessions for people. The TechED agenda has a series of sessions and its upto the attendees to create a story board so that they can go from one session to the other and make the most of it. Of course, we provide the abstracts so that people can really understand what the session is going to talk about. But does that really help.

Maybe what we need to do is create a storyboard. Something like this :-

If you are developing large scale ASP.NET solutions, you might want to attend the following sessions

i. Introduction to .net 2.0 - Monday 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

ii. Introduction to .net 3.0 - Monday 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM

a. What's new in ASP.NET 2.0 - Monday 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM

b. Making ASP.NET productive with "Atlas" - Monday 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM

c. Data-binding and data interactions in ASP.NET 2.0 - Monday 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM

d. SQL Server performance tuning - Tue 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM

e. Working with VLDBs - Tue 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM :-) (that was my session)

f. Workflow integration into web applications Tue 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM

and so on..... We allow people to randomly go to different sessions, but we also create a story board so that its easy for people to follow a story. This is typically what's done at theme-parks. Other than having various events and shows, a story-board is suggested for people to ensure that they can catch most of the events in a logical order with minimal effort.

The whole planning is no different from planning the schedule for a school. That's again exactly what we do when we draw up a time-table/calendar for a school. Or again, that's what we do when we do multiple trainings. So where ever there is a knowledge transfer that needs to happen, the best way for it to happen is through a story board.

The SQL Session went off very well. I walked the audience through table partitions, basics of backup and partial restores, database snapshots and introduction to DB mirroring. And I stitched a storyboard that related all of the above. I had a few questions after the sessions, but was mobbed outside for about 30 mins after my session got over. I'll know how good the rating were tomorrow - or if the only people who liked it were the few who talked to me later!!! :-)

Ok.. I'm at TechED SEA. I'm resting and preparing for my sessions today. I plan to let go and start enjoying all the exitement from tomorrow. I'm doing 2 sessions here - SQL2005 VLDBs and XPS. I'm a SQL guy - so the SQL session is understandable. XPS!!!

Well XPS is another data storage format. There are some very nice things about teh format. To begin with it zips all the content into a single file. More important is its concepts of parts and relationships. It allows any file to be broken into multiple pieces and be assembled together. This enables endless possibilities -

• A video broken into multiple parts and associated with text and images
• A complex document like a medical record with XRays, notes, prescriptions all integrated into a single document
• An issues tracking note with the entire history built into the same file.
• A PO with internal notes built into the doc.

With Office 2007 based on the new document formats and XPS adding support for document security and rights management, its looks set to be the defacto standard on the Microsoft platform (at the very least). More on my sessions once I'm done with them.